On any given day in the glimmering glass-plated Ledger building in downtown Bentonville, you can probably find plucky entrepreneurs looking to network. But last week, the volume of investors and the money on offer in that building ballooned.
Nathaniel Harding is the managing partner of Cortado Ventures, a venture capital investing firm based in Oklahoma City.
“The amount of investable capital represented is by our estimate $1.5 trillion with a T,” Harding said. Cortado Ventures is the force behind this event, the MidCon VC Summit. That's VC, as in venture capital.
“The MidCon VC Summit is really a way to highlight the opportunities here both for investors and founders,” Harding said. “We've observed now for the past few years, there's been an explosion in innovation, but also investment and tech companies. And that's a really it's a way to bring together both builders and backers. It's good for business, it's good for capital and talent. And we're happy to be able to host this today.”
That name “MidCon” stands for middle of the continent. Harding said it's sometimes used to describe a business region outside of the coast — think Arkansas, Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Colorado.
“So, truly, it's not the Midwest,” Harding said. “It's not the South it's not the Rocky Mountains. But it's a specific region that really just had a lot of legacy industrie — think of aerospace, energy, logistics, supply chain. But, also a budding biotech and health science, life sciences sectors as well. And we also believe that it's been overlooked by coastal VC, but yet you see a tremendous amount of talent and this new wave of innovation where digital meets physical world, and that's really what we underwrite as investors and where we see a lot of the talent for starting companies.”
Harding believes Bentonville could possibly be the epicenter of that hub. And that's likely due to the work and family of today's keynote speaker, Steuart Walton.
“The way I think about Bentonville and our position today in the country, at least,”said Walton, “I think of us as like a triple A rated startup.”
Dressed casually in a blue button down and jeans, the heir to the billionaire Walton family was there to talk about the future of Bentonville and more importantly, to convince the crowd that their money has a future in Bentonville.
“We also think that the upside investing here is more exciting than some other potential options,” Walton said. “And that actually leads to a pretty strong geographic interest for Tom [Walton] and I in terms of our day to day work on where we actually want to invest. So, we focus heavily — and almost kind of with a fair bit of discipline, not always but a fair bit of discipline — on companies and projects, real estate, and businesses that are located here in Northwest Arkansas and really in Bentonville Bella vista specifically.”
In fact, just that morning, it was announced that Steuart and his brother Tom Walton’s real estate company, Blue Crane had just purchased 2700 acres of land and development rights in Bella Vista. And Harding said this type of growth and huge investment in the region is exciting to people, especially these investors.
“Steuart Walton explained it really well in terms of the investment that's happening,” Harding said, “the fact that Bentonville has more cranes than even in Manhattan — and that’s absolute number, not per — in the country. It really shows that there's a lot of investment in quality of life, and building up the communities which attracts talent attracts capital, and also, a lot of the companies and established corporations in Bentonville represent this retail value chain that we think it makes sense that it's happening here and you see a lot of tech companies now moving into that space, which really embodies an important part of how we invest in the mid continent.”
Anita Ly is managing director for Generator, a startup accelerator program based out of Oklahoma City that helps entrepreneurs develop their business and find funders. She said the attention on Bentonville is good for the entire region.
“It's really great to be here in Bentonville because we are always trying to expand our networks and we've done a really great job of embracing and collaborating within Oklahoma,” Ly said. “There's just such a similarity of growth patterns here in Arkansas. They focus on different industries than Oklahoma does. So that also expands the type of resources available as well as kind of the startup founder ecosystem.
And while Ly said this area has often been overlooked, the industry is starting to look away from the coast for a different opportunity.
“I actually grew up in the Bay Area,” Ly said, “which is like the heart of all early-stage startups. And I would say the biggest difference I've seen is, the Coast seems to be very cutthroat. There's such a saturation of talent in startups. And at times, it feels like there's kind of a lack of capital. Whereas here, I think there's more collaborative efforts. Everyone knows that in order for one founder to succeed or one firm to be successful, all of them have to collaborate together and co-invest and share resources.”
According to numbers reported by media outlet Axios, over the past two years venture capital investors have pumped more than $300 million dollars into businesses in Northwest Arkansas. For Harding, that's reason enough to bring these 370 participants from 30 states to this event.
“It's an amazing blend of builders and backers, check-writers and check-cashers, that make everything possible.”
Harding said next year's summit will be held in Tulsa.
