From startup city to exit city

This column was named Startup City by Brennan Nardi in 2016 when she was a Madison Magazine editor. It was a nod to a book with a similar name, as well as feature stories she’d written while tracking local founders who were trying to build a startup ecosystem in Madison. Epic spunoffs, the University Research Park, and Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation-backed biotech businesses were all born out of having a world-class research-and-development university right in our backyard. But we believed that the only place for big-thinking and bootstrapping startups founders was in Silicon Valley. Capital Entrepreneurs was formed in 2009 by a few people and Forward Fest was started in 2010. Then came StartingBlock Madison, Doyenne Group and gener8tor, all of which became tenants (along with AmFam’s Institute for Corporate and Social Impact and DreamBank) inside Spark, the glassy, eight-story building that AmFam built on East Washington Avenue in 2018. This year, gener8tor — an accelerator program founded by Troy Vosseller and Joe Kirgues in 2012 — celebrated 10 years of astounding growth and change.

“When we started, we were working with founders who weren’t in venture hubs, because Madison wasn’t yet a venture hub. So we were dealing with people who were not ‘in the room’ historically, based on place,” says Kirgues, who recalls scribbling ideas on a napkin with Vosseller at Starbucks on Capitol Square before launching gener8tor. Kirgues says that the Square is now a hub for venture capital. He can name several portfolio companies funded by ventures in the Hovde Building alone. “gener8tor today is one of the largest accelerators in the world,” adds Vosseller, “and we take a lot of pride being based in Madison.”

In just ten short years gener8tor has grown rapidly from two founding cohorts of 13 startups in Madison, Wisconsin to a venture firm employing 140 people with 104 programs for startup accelerators in 41 communities. In 22 states, 938 startups graduated so far. 34 companies were acquired. They have raised more than $1.2 million in funding. Madison has seen two successful exits: Cultured Decadence in 2015 and Curate in 2020. Curate is a data intelligence company that FiscalNote acquired in 2021.

“I never even thought about entrepreneurship at all,” says Curate co-founder Taralinda Willis, who quit her full-time job as an Overture Center events planner after she and her computer scientist husband, Dale, were accepted into gener8tor’s 2016 cohort. Five years after building the company, Willis earned the gener8tor gold T-shirt given to those who exit — but thanks to the pandemic and then a printing snafu, she had to wait until the 10th anniversary celebration in August 2022 for her big moment. “When I stood up and got that T-shirt, I was incredibly proud to announce to everybody, ‘We conceptualized this business in Madison, we grew this business in Madison and we sold this business in Madison,’ ” Willis says. “I think there’s more of this to come. I’m certainly not the first. I know I won’t be the last.”

Particularly as a woman who never envisioned herself as a startup founder and “fought for her revenue, fought for her business model,” Willis exemplifies a “wonderful version of what gener8tor can be,” Kirgues says. Ironically, it was because of his and Vosseller’s outsider status as founders who weren’t in coastal tech hubs that they began to relate to others who’d been historically overlooked or denied seats at the table for other reasons. Investing across “race, place and gender” became a guiding mission as gener8tor’s programming also expanded to include musicians, artists and social impact-focused founders. Today, 40% gener8tor companies are founded by women and 43% of them have at the least one black founder. As a company, more than half of gener8tor’s 140 full-time employees are women and 32% are people of color.

It seems fitting, then, as we close out the year and look back on 10 years of gener8tor, to take stock of the ways in which Madison’s entrepreneurial ecosystem continues to evolve. Because our definition of startup founders has expanded, the Startup City column no longer exists. We also have success stories that are covered in every section, from arts to food. While not all entrepreneurs are startup founders (and not all companies define success as a company that exits), they all contribute to the city’s appeal to investors and residents alike. Efforts like gener8tor play just one role in a larger community, helping take Madison from Startup City to Exit City — but that doesn’t mean that we’ve arrived.

“I think as a community we can’t take our eye off the ball. We can’t rest on our laurels and the success that has happened,” Vosseller says. “We still have a long way to go in terms of getting people off the sidelines — institutions, corporations and investors — because if we are not as enthusiastic and excited about investing in our own, it’s a fool’s errand to believe that others will be more excited than us. … We need passion around what we call ‘locals investing in locals.’ ”

A Decade of Noteable Starts

2013 UpStart is WARF’s free entrepreneurship program for women and people of color

2013 100State is an innovative coworking space for entrepreneurs and innovators.

2013 Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce’s Gold Suitcase competition takes place at Forward Fest’s Pressure Chamber

The 2014 Madworks Seed accelerator program offers grants and support for early-stage companies

2014 UW–Madison’s Discovery 2 Product brings campus entrepreneurship to the broader marketplace

2017 Collaboration for Good’s Social Good Madison is an accelerator program

2020 Rock County JumpStart offers a wealth of resources for Latino and Black entrepreneurs

2020 Kiva Madison is an microlender for small minority-owned or women-owned businesses

2022 Progress Center for Black Women startsan incubator program

SOON Urban League of Greater Madison’s Black Business Hub and accelerator is in the works

Madison Magazine senior editor Maggie Ginsberg