Matthew Moore: Wednesday evening, Fuel Accelerator will be hosting its showcase day to celebrate the eight members of their cohort from across the globe. The event will be held at The Record in Bentonville from 6 to 8 p.m. and will feature pitches from the eight startups. Grace Gill is director of Fuel Accelerator and Caleb Talley is executive director of Startup Junkie Foundation. They joined me last week in the Bruce Nan Applegate News Studio to discuss the event and the cohort. Grace says this group has a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning, and that these startups have a different approach to AI than, say, ChatGPT.
Grace Gill: These are not rudimentary founders. These are experienced folks that have lived in these enterprise environments and have found the problems in retail and CPG and supply chain and have decided that, you know, they see an opportunity to use AI technology. So not just to build AI for AI sake, but really to use it to really optimize and make lives better in a position that they were in at one point.
Moore: Caleb, for you, as we talked about, you know, these companies are coming from outside of Arkansas to spend time here. As someone who’s born and raised in Arkansas you know, is fully ingrained in what it means to be an Arkansan, what does it mean to you to bring in these sorts of companies and startups to take part in what we’re doing here?
Caleb Talley: Honestly, that’s probably my favorite part, is the opportunity to host these founders from all over the country and all over the world sometimes. Because obviously I’m biased. Born and bred Arkansan, um, I am the biggest cheerleader for what we’re doing here and our corner of the state in terms of, in all facets of life and economy, but especially in entrepreneurship and innovation. Um, so I’m biased and so I’m excited to be able to host these founders here. And that’s one of the reasons why the program, in comparison to potentially other accelerator programs or or incubator programs that you might see in other ecosystems, it’s completely offline. They have to physically be here in northwest Arkansas for this program.
They can’t phone it in. And part of that is, you know, because there is such a relationship element to, you know, building bridges within the ecosystem, but to just to showcase what this place is all about, you know, we’ve had conversations with prospective participants in the past where they’re not entirely familiar with the northwest Arkansas and landscape. It is so, so what’s in it for me? What business is there for me? And, um, and so we obviously have that script ready to go, but, um, but the quality of life piece, I think is what often surprises them the most. And like, you can get not just the access to enterprise and potential business better than most places and just the concentration of that in a small, smallish town in comparison, but the similar quality of life that you could in these metro areas, and ultimately that’s one of our goals, is to really showcase the region with the hope that, you know, they might want to make northwest Arkansas or Arkansas in general the new location home for their business and grow it here.
Moore: Grace, you talked a little bit about how this isn’t a competition. This is a collaboration. Almost. Can you talk about how you’re seeing that manifest in the work of the different companies?”
Gill: Right. Absolutely. As we, um, you know, start working together as a cohort. It’s really exciting to see them, um, start to work together. And so as much as we bring in super qualified subject matter experts and mentors and leaders to help guide them through the processes of trying to sell to enterprise, you know, we also see the cohort start to give each other advice and they start to solve problems together. You build this camaraderie where then there’s trust and you see people starting to cross-sell, build collaborations together. Um, so we have a couple of different cohort companies right now that are working on a joint venture that will hopefully continue to expand both of their businesses.
But then even more, I think important than that is they start sharing their networks and the things that worked for them, the mentors that helped them. They start advocating for each other. So, you know, as they meet with people and they say, ‘Okay, hey, you know, maybe this isn’t this wasn’t for us, but you should really meet X, Y, Z. You should meet this guy over here because he has something that can, can, can actually solve your problem.’ So it’s a compounding effect. We see that continue. Then after they finish the program as people, um, we have it’s a mix, sometimes we have some local companies. We always have a couple companies, at least one, uh, relocate from each cohort too. So it builds those bridges for the whole group to continue doing business in Arkansas, and continue doing business with each other. And we’ve seen that be super fun on top of the fact that it makes a summer camp feel, so as we’re getting close to the end here, we see a lot of the folks that are sad to to go and go back to their real life and not go out to hub trivia on Wednesday nights or go out to lunch, um, after session altogether.
Moore: Wednesday, October 29 is the showcase event. What can people expect if they want to come?
Gill: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it is free and open to the public, so we would love to see a lot of people out. This is our capstone event for the program. So the cohort that I’ve been mentioning, the eight companies have been, uh, here for the past ten weeks. Um, and it will wrap up next Wednesday. Um, what you can expect is some really exciting presentations from emerging technologies. Um, so we’ve been doing this since 2019, like I mentioned. And every cohort, we have a whole new batch of really exciting things that are cutting edge and changing the landscape, especially as the landscape continues to change faster and faster. So you’ll see really polished, really exciting presentations from our cohort companies that have been working on this for the past ten weeks. There will be a keynote speaker to bring insights on, you know, why AI and innovation is important and working here in northwest Arkansas. Then you can expect a really fun atmosphere where we’re going to have, um, good food, drinks. We have some signature cocktails to offer. As after we wrap up that programming, we plan to open up the event into a cocktail after party celebration.
Moore: Grace Gill, director of Fuel Accelerator. Caleb Talley, executive director of Startup Junkie Foundation. You can find more details about Wednesday’s event at the link on our website.
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