WE LAST SPOKE with Kristopher Adams in his capacity as director of the Northwest Arkansas Tech Summit, which he ran for the past couple of years. Then last month came news of an exciting new program called ARise—short for Arkansas Innovators, Startups, and Entrepreneurs—with Kris Adams as Program Manager. Billed as a “fresh and expanded iteration of the…program formerly known as Innovate Arkansas,” ARise is funded by the Arkansas Economic Development Commission and led by Fayetteville-based Startup Junkie, and the goal is to “propel tech and tech-enabled companies in Arkansas to new heights of innovation and economic vitality.” We asked Kris Adams to tell us all about it.
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Nice to talk with you again. So tell me, how’d you find your way from the NWA Tech Summit to ARise?
I loved working with the Bentonville Chamber and running the Northwest Arkansas Tech Summit, which is a great event. But it’s geographically focused on Northwest Arkansas, and it only happens for a few days once a year. So when I saw that Startup Junkie had won the contract with the AEDC to lead a new statewide technology program, I was like, “Oh, that sounds too good to be true.” Because that’s exactly what I want to do—to take tech programming and do it statewide and year round.
I had known the Startup Junkie crew from my years running the Tech Summit. They’re a wonderful team. Startup Junkie has Startup Junkie Consulting; they have the Startup Junkie Foundation; they have Conductor, a DBA of Startup Junkie, which is in Conway and is a public-private partnership with the University of Central Arkansas; and they have the Fuel Accelerator that runs up here in Northwest Arkansas and the 10X Accelerator that runs out of Conway. So there are a lot of different arms of Startup Junkie throughout the state, and ARise is going to be the newest one.
As for how I got involved, there was a job post, and I put in for it and reached out to them, and the rest is kind of history. I just met with the few people that I hadn’t met before, like the Central Arkansas team from Conway. So I got to interview with them, and it went well.
How will all these different entities work together?
The AEDC is the group that’s funding the initiative, and they’re the ones who really have created what this program is. It’s known on the books as the Arkansas Statewide Technology Commercialization Center, which is way too much of a youthful, and that’s why we rebranded the program as ARise. Anyway, the AEDC team provides the leadership and direction for us, and we help work toward their end goal, which is to create high-wage, high-demand jobs here in Arkansas. The best way to do that is through investing in tech and tech-enabled companies. Those are the companies that are going to produce better employment across the state.
Startup Junkie and Conductor operate in two different geographic areas, Northwest Arkansas and Central Arkansas, where they serve entrepreneurs of all stripes, from small-business mom-and-pop shops to tech startups. But now this ARise program is going to be a very narrow subset that pulls out all of the tech and tech-enabled companies that are Arkansas-based and scalable, and they’re now going to be served through ARise. We’ll also serve tech and tech-enabled companies statewide. We’re building out subject-matter experts from across Arkansas, and we’re picking up some part-time outreach leads in the areas where we don’t have a working presence. So we’ll be fully statewide before too long.
What are your goals for ARise in the next year or so?
In year one, our goal is to get the word out about this program so we can pull in entrepreneurs from places like Jonesboro, Paragould, Pine Bluff, Texarkana, El Dorado—all the areas of Arkansas where Startup Junkie hasn’t historically had a physical presence.
Step one is building enrollment. We’re pushing things like the press release about our launch, even in small local papers across the state. I mentioned hiring outreach leads. One of the things we hope to do is what we jokingly call our “going-on-tour” events. We’ll be showing up in some of these communities doing things similar to what we did with the smaller-scale events leading up to the Tech Summit last year—doing tech talks, highlighting programs for entrepreneurs, and getting our face out there and meeting people and making key connections.
Within the first week after our press release, we had enrolled eight companies in the program. My short-term goal is to enroll 100 companies as quickly as possible.
Also, this year we’ll be working with our enrolled companies to develop some baselines. We want to get everyone onboarded and then do some of these needs assessments—what do these companies need, where are the gaps, what are the pain points that seem to be recurring for entrepreneurs across Arkansas?
Then over years two, three, and four, we want to continue to flesh out and grow the program to ensure that it’s tailored individually to each entrepreneur. When we see trends and patterns, we want to be nimble enough to build the program around what specific entrepreneurs need rather than just build something generic that stays the same.
You’ve had experience working with lots of tech startups. What do you think are the big challenges to budding tech entrepreneurs here in this state?
I think in Arkansas what’s tough, especially for entrepreneurs, is getting connected to the right people who can assist them on their journey. As I mentioned, one of the big portions of the program that we’re building out is a subject-matter-expert network. So when entrepreneurs come to us with any question under the sun, we’ll have someone who can lend a hand.
We’ll have two different wells of experts, if you will—generalists and serial entrepreneurs on one side, people with experience growing their own ventures and who have business acumen in HR, in marketing, and sales. Then we’ll have a second well of deep tech experts—A.I., biotech, cybersecurity, etc. Entrepreneurs need support systems like that to bounce ideas off of. For a lot of these startups, they’re either a one-person show or a team of fewer than five or 10. And so for us to be able to put them together with people who’ve been in the same place, people who’ve worked in the same field, it just helps fill in some of the gaps in their knowledge and their expertise. And in the end, it helps them be that much more successful.
Another vital thing that we’re going to provide for these entrepreneurs is how to navigate accessing capital across Arkansas. There are lots of different ways to fund ventures, whether it’s venture capital, or non-dilutive funding through federal and state programs, or angel investing. A lot of entrepreneurs come into a startup kind of blind about the whole funding aspect.
And then another thing entrepreneurs need, and this is Startup Junkie’s bread and butter, is startup coaching and consulting. It’s great to be able to have people who understand an entrepreneur’s struggles and who can say, “Hey, we’re here with you. Have you thought about this? Have you looked at it from this angle?” And then these same people who work alongside them as coaches also are there to celebrate their victories with them. That’s what we want to do with this program, to lift up Arkansas entrepreneurs, to champion their stories, to show the surrounding states and the coasts that tech already lives and breathes here in Arkansas in a really great way.
Are you finding, in the few enrolled entrepreneurs that you’ve spoken with so far, that they’re leaning more toward A.I. these days?
We’ve seen a really interesting mix already. What’s unique about the ARise program is that the door is open to tech or tech-enabled startups, and tech-enabled turns out to be almost like the Pandora’s box of possibilities in a really cool way. We’ve met with a company named Cureate that does food sourcing, which you wouldn’t imagine as being a deep-tech enterprise. But they’ve built their own proprietary platform that helps companies like the Baltimore Convention Center and other places source food locally through Cureate’s platform. So it’s been interesting to see how people are utilizing tech in ways that maybe we haven’t thought of before.
Having talked with you prior to the Tech Summit the last couple of years, I have to ask if you’re enjoying your summer a little bit more without the pressure of the Summit hanging over you.
It’s definitely a different pace. The Tech Summit was a long haul, but it was a sprint toward the end. This program is going to be more like a marathon, more long-term, a steadier pace. We wanted to get some speed out of the gate, but now it’s trying to find ways to bring people on, get them served, and then keep pushing the mission, the vision, the publicity, and the promotion.
The longevity is what’s really appealing to me because what we’re looking to do is year-over-year measure and track the growth of these companies and their successes. ARise has a year-to-year renewal, but we’ve been approved so we don’t have to go back to the legislative process for another seven years. I keep thinking that it would be incredible to see a startup come onboard early, grow over the next seven years so that maybe there’s an acquisition, or maybe a founder exits. Things like that, that could happen all in the next seven years, because that’s the goal for these scalable companies—to move quickly and grow quickly. We could really see some incredible things happen here.
In closing, I’d like your readers to know that we’d love for them to get enrolled as soon as possible so we can begin serving them. Our enrollment is a two-step process. You complete an initial onboarding form at www.arisearkansas.org. Then we schedule an initial call where we talk about your company, your venture, your needs, and then we get you plugged into the network with all the different things that we have to offer. The beauty of the process is, you keep coming back as needs arise, and we keep reaching out to see how we can help. It’s meant to be a churning that continues on and on and on.
The other thing I want to say is that we’re going to be doing some targeted events around the state, so keep your eyes open for what may be coming your way in the fall, and throughout the year. Expect to see ARise pop up in your neck of the woods and plan to join us for something, whether it’s a tech talk or an opportunity for entrepreneurs to share what they’re working on.
We’re going to be all across Arkansas, and that’s really exciting for me to get to see the beauty of the Natural State and to meet the technologists who create fascinating things here.
