Iowa entrepreneurs and supporters use Substack to showcase the state
Nine writers, each writing about entrepreneurship from different angles, came together to launch the Iowa Start-up Collective.
Business Record published an article last week about a group of Central Iowa entrepreneurs, funders, and advocates who are trying to reframe entrepreneurship as a legitimate career path by creating an inspirational hub of conversation via Substack, an online writing platform.
Known as the Iowa Start-up Collective, it is a group of nine writers, each writing about entrepreneurship from different angles. As we reviewed it, we could not help but reflect back to January 2012 when teknovation.biz was birthed by PYA with a singular purpose: to tell the stories of entrepreneurs pursuing their passions.
One of the members of the Iowa group is Tej Dhawan, who started as an entrepreneur and is now Managing Director of Plains Angels. His Substack aims to create a cultural record of Central Iowa technology start-ups and founders who have sacrificed to build and have inspired others in the process.
A perception still exists that entrepreneurs don’t have a real job, Dhawan said.
“The reason is there’s a false belief that we haven’t had sufficient successes for new entrants to fall back on and say, ‘Hey, if I do it, I can succeed like they did,’” he adds. “So my Substack was to say, not only have successes happened in the last decade or two decades, but really since debt started to make its inroads in Iowa in the ’60s. We’ve had multiple successful businesses who have gone on to create more.”
One goal of this effort to tell more stories about entrepreneurship in Iowa is to encourage more people to take the leap and found a start-up in a state that has a low rate of new entrepreneurs nationally.
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