Iowa Startups, Entrepreneurship, and more...

A conversation with Diana Wright and Tej Dhawan.

Jan 23, 2026

I’ve been fascinated recently by reading columns about startups and entrepreneurs in Iowa by Diana Wright and Tej Dhawan. They are giving us stories that we seldom see elsewhere, well-told. Diana and Tej work with startups, entrepreneurs, and investors every day. Both have extensive resumes that you can read at their LinkedIn pages linked above, but I am most familiar with Diana’s work at the Des Moines Partnership and Tej’s at Plains Angels.

Diana has two Substacks: Start Up Iowa Hot List and the Iowa Startup Collective. Tej offers A Cultural Record of Iowa’s Technologies.

Their stories are interesting, detailed, comprehensive, and some have plot twists worthy of a novel. Others offer examples and best practices for startup entrepreneurs and investors. I wanted to learn more about what they do, how they tell their stories so well, and to highlight their important work.

Below is a video of our conversation, followed by a lightly edited transcript.

Me: I’m here with Diana Wright and Tej Dhawan. They’re both members of the Iowa Writers Collaborative, and they do different kinds of things than a lot of us other writers do, and they really focus on technology and startups. And I’m really interested in what they have to say, what they have to share with us this morning. And Diana, can you just give us an overview of what you and Tej, and the other writers are trying to do in the Startup Collaborative?

Diana: Yeah, I’m happy to be here, and thank you for having us on. So, I have been trying to do storytelling for quite a while as it relates to startups, and if you think about when you’re starting a business, who’s the first one that talks about it? And eventually, the media kind of comes in, and then someone writes about a new startup. And that really kind of legitimizes what it is that person’s doing, the entrepreneur.

It’s even something they can share back to their family members to say, “hey I’m not just unemployed.” So, that’s something that early on I’ve been focusing on how can we interview more startups, how can people be more aware of the startups that are getting built here in Iowa. And then really trying to showcase a lot of different storytelling and different aspects of that, whether it’s learning more about, like, what does it look like to be a startup? What does it look like to even invest in a startup?

And so essentially maybe three or four years ago I started on Substack, and it was really just kind of that—it was to create a digest where people could understand who are the startups in Iowa that are raising capital, who are companies that they should watch, and also like what are all the events that you can plug into to be part of this community. So that’s a substack that I launched called Startup Iowa Hot List.

And it does just that monthly, and then about early this year, I think in February, we actually then launched the Iowa Startup Collective. So this is like a hat tip to Julie (Gammack) because I remember calling her, trying to understand what she was doing with the Iowa Writers Collaborative. She had invited me to be a writer.

And I was now trying to figure out how do we start to build a coalition of writers that are writing on entrepreneurship in business, just because that is something that we recently had experienced a gap in that coverage. So, that’s a little bit about what it is we’re doing on Substack. So, the Iowa Startup Collective, that is a publication.It goes out twice a month, and right now we have 10 different writers all across Iowa that are writing in any which way that they want to talk about entrepreneurship. And so that’s just kind of briefly what it is, and you can then subscribe to the Startup Collective just as you do to the Iowa Writers Collaborative, and start to see, like, what are those stories coming out twice a month?

So that’s a nutshell of what’s been started.

Me: Well, great, well, thank you. And can you give us like a minute on your professional background?

Diana: Yeah, happy to. My background, I guess you could say, started when I was a kid, both my parents are entrepreneurs, and so I’ve been working in business for a long time, but really seeing through their businesses, what it looks like. And I grew up in Clear Lake, so Clear Lake, Iowa, is where I’m from. And then ever since, because of that exposure to my parents’ businesses, small business owners, I’ve always kind of had an interest in problem-solving and entrepreneurship. So went to Iowa State.

I worked at a startup shortly after Iowa State that was becoming kind of pretty well covered in the Des Moines startup community called Dwolla. And after that experience, I got actually invited back to work at Iowa State and to help growing a lot of their entrepreneurship programs that they have today across campus.

So now my hat is at the Greater Des Moines Partnership, still very similar in what I’ve been doing for probably the last 10 years, which is working with startups and entrepreneurs, trying to make sure our community has the right ingredients to be successful and growing. more entrepreneurs, that hopefully, then can kind of continue that cycle of contribution back to the community and like the legacies that we see that happen across the state. So, that’s a little bit about me.

Tej: Yeah. I can give a little background as well. Came to the US in 1987 as an undergraduate at Central College in Pella. Entered the CompSci and math program and just loved the whole growth of small business. My parents were not, but my grandparents were entrepreneurs. Grandpa at first, and he used to build rattan chairs. He was a blind man himself.

So the only work he could do was at that point weave chairs and sell them. And he realized that he could hire other blind people to do the same. So he ended up with a crew of blind individuals who would weave chairs and, during downtime, pour wax candles. So I saw him create a livelihood in just post-independence India when he would have been a ward of the state otherwise.

And I realized that you could do something for yourself and build a life the way you wanted it. So as I right after college, shortly after college, once I had my green card in the US, I started a company, started building computers and selling them, just hardware and selling hardware. Over time, that morphed into writing software and ended up co-owning a company with a business partner.

And we created software for the prison industry, first in Iowa, then to multiple states, and ultimately the federal prison system. Ran that through 2010, at which point I had the opportunity to sell my part of the company and become independent again, once again.

And what I did at that point was to become a volunteer in the central Iowa, mostly Des Moines community, to help other others who were in the technology space build their companies to grow. So, in that realm, I ran into a whole cohort of people. And so, I’ve been a proud volunteer in the group in the community now for 15 years.

We do everything from mentor young companies to find ways to invest in them, help find investors for them, all a fee-free service, just to grow Iowa entrepreneurship because it is done here. It has been done here, and it can continue to be done right here. We don’t have to go to the coast or other places to build good companies.

Me: Well, fantastic. What a great story about your grandfather.

Tej: I’m pretty proud of him.

Me: Yeah. Well, and you write A Cultural Record of Iowa Technology. Tell us about that.

Tej: So I’m married to an anthropologist. She likes the people part of conversations. She’s going into genealogy. So our conversations tend to focus less on the business, more on the people who built them. So, as I was thinking about the ideas behind this Substack, the persona of the people kept rising to the top. And it was just an off meeting with Jeff Fleming, who had just retired as a director of the Des Moines Arts Center.

And as he and I were talking, I asked him, what drew him to the Arts Center? And he said, every community needs its cultural record preserved. And if you don’t tell that cultural record and if you don’t preserve it, it is lost very quickly to time. And suddenly he gave a name to the column, and I instantly asked Jeff if I could use it because I’ve been searching for the name to write under, and he agreed.

So, the cultural record is about the people who did all of this really meaningful work. There is a misnomer around the world emanating from Silicon Valley that true technology companies can only be built between San Francisco, Mountain View and Palo Alto, and such, and everything else is a hallucination. I used to respectfully, but I no longer. I just disagree.

There are some amazing companies that have been built here. I thought I would get 12 stories, but as I have dug deeper, sitting at almost 50 stories, some of them are opinion, but almost 50 stories of meaningful action that started from here. Multi-hundred-million-dollar companies that were started in rural Iowa and became global national brands. So I just want to capture that record and find ways to preserve it.

Me: Well, I remember, I should’ve looked it up, but I remember one story that you, you know, you wove the tale of the history of several intertwined companies in Des Moines, and it just, like they used to say in the old days, knocked my socks off. I had no idea that had happened here. And there was so many, you know, bright, hard-working people working together created fantastic things. So, your title of Cultural Record of Iowa Technology, I just I felt I was getting, something that was truly, really important to be preserved-- that record. And not only important to preserve, important for us to know that that’s part of who we are as Iowans that I just really recognize the significance of it immediately because there’s so much history that is just lost.

Tej: It is. It is. We, you know so true. So, Diana and I were having coffee with a member of Iowa’s investment technology community, Gregg Barcus, and we were kind of digging into his past as to what does he remember from supporting young startups in the 80s and 90s. And he... memory gets lost after 40 years of government meetings, and he directed us to look at Iowa Economic Development’s records. Digging in a little bit further, we ended up at the State Historical Society. Now, this is around the time when the State Historical Society records that the University of Iowa were going to be decommissioned. So, sometime early summer, I think. And so, I felt a sense of urgency to go and see where we can find them.

Luckily, the curator at the Des Moines building was able to find those records, six boxes of them. And as I sat down in that research library, page after page, the company names that were popping out, I had forgotten in the last 30 years. And so, you know, I’m just sitting there fervently taking pictures of these pages, hoping that they don’t get lost.

And as I’m taking those pictures, I’m saying, okay, this is a story idea, this is a story idea, this is a story idea. I have struggled to find some of those stories and some of those people because they’ve been long gone. So, even in the 30 short years since those minutes of those meetings were recorded, history is lost.

And if the state budget and so on does indeed impact the State Historical Society, the way we think it might, we have a different sense of urgency to get at those records and capture as much as possible. There were cassette tapes in those boxes that I couldn’t play anymore. The cassette tapes lose their charge. So there is a sense of urgency to digitize some of this record and maintain it for the future, for our future.

Me: Well, one of the things I like about your work, both of you, is you’re both really good storytellers. You’re just not reporting, you’re telling stories, and it’s like I might not be interested in the White Sox, but if I read a really good story about the White Sox, it doesn’t matter that I’m not interested in it. I’m interested in the story, and I learned something about humanity in the story. And that’s what you both do very well, is the story and putting the people behind it. And did that just come naturally, or did you learn that, or you taught that? Where does that come from? Cuz not all business writing is like that.

Diana: I mean, I think there’s components you have to always have a good story. And I think at one point I kind of learned a little bit actually through my Mom about storytelling, and she always said that there was kind of four roles in stories. So like you can be the storyteller, you can be the story store, like kind of like the archivist, right? You can be a story seller, which you’re selling stories, right? Maybe it’s for your job or your pitch, even.

A lot of entrepreneurs have to sell. And I can’t think of the fourth one right now. So I’m going to have to go back to my notes. But yeah, I think though people are naturally, you know, business people are going to come up with what they think that means to them, and if they’re even interested. But I think once you start getting down to the individuals who are behind these businesses or even the problems they’re trying to solve, that is where there’s a lot more interesting things to pull out.

So, and then you start to also pull out passion, and why they’re motivated cuz this is also a pathway that most people will never take. And there’s good reason for that. It’s very risky. You’re starting your own business, you’re essentially not making any money for I mean it could be for a while.

So that’s just something that we’re trying to do when we started the Startup Collective, it was really because culturally we saw there is in Iowa a little bit of a challenge that we have, and that is that people don’t see themselves as entrepreneurs. Sometimes that’s not even shown as a career pathway, right? Mostly it’s shown that you need to get a job.

And even in the United States, like we have some of the best DNA of entrepreneurship. Iowa and just in the Midwest, we sometimes fall lower on those rankings when it comes to what’s our rate of new entrepreneurs starting businesses. So, that’s something too that we are trying to be very mindful of in the stories that we tell. And making sure we have diverse voices represented.

Because that’s a really key thing, as if kids don’t see themselves in who is talking or who is the person that has the microphone or is getting interviewed, they might just pass up that opportunity later in life. So that’s something I think a lot about is the representation.

And ultimately, though the problem of you know in order to start a story and to start a business, I just think that once you start to dissect these problems, you, the reader or even the people around that entrepreneur might also identify a new opportunity. So that’s another hope that I have in some of these stories is that people can start thinking of like, “Oh, I don’t have to wait for someone else to solve this problem.” And instead, I can proactively maybe do that and sometimes that’s through the lens of entrepreneurship. So, that’s kind of how I see it. But Tej, you probably have a different viewpoint.

Tej: I don’t, I can’t think of who may have taught me directly. I love watching photographers do their process. So how do they, where they go, how they create their composition, what they choose to crop out to draw the viewer’s attention. I think that’s been part of the storytelling process for me to say, what in this giant landscape is actually important that somebody would care about. So, cropping out the stuff.

The two sets of people who have probably influenced me over the last few years. One is Guy Kawasaki. Guy was the marketing genius behind the Apple campaign in 1984. And then, since then, he’s written a series of books on “Art of the Start.” How do you in five to six slides, get the attention of somebody to tell them and get excited about your ideas.

So Guy Kawasaki’s books have guided me to distill big stuff into little stuff. And then there’s a more recent, just about a 10-year-old podcast called Acquired. These two guys, Ben and David, spend inordinate amounts of time, four to 500 hours of research, looking into a company to understand what makes it tick, and they produce a four-hour-long podcast.

Digging into a company like a Costco or a Trader Joe’s or Rolex or there’s several. The way they tell the story is again distillation. And in one of the recent podcasts, Ben said something that just got me that the written word or the spoken language is a compressed version of thought.

So when you’re thinking, you’ve got a giant landscape. By the time you get to writing it, you have compressed it so much that it has to just it has to be able to grab somebody’s attention. So for me, distillation has become a big part of storytelling to say, why would somebody care to read this particular story?

Me: Wow, very interesting. Well, here I have, before I forget it, I have to share that one of the members of the Startup Collective is a dear friend, Nik Heftman. And boy, is he a heck of a storyteller with film and photographs….He’s just amazing, and I’m slowly learning the other contributors, and I look forward to learning more about them, but it’s just really, really interesting what’s happening.

Tej: Thinking of Nik if I may, step in just second, I was watching another photographer’s work who was talking about bringing cinematographic emotion into pictures. When we look at exposing even our Zoom background that we’re looking at right now, they are bright. They’re equally bright front and back. But if you look at cinema, there is so much darkness in an image that guys like Nick can draw attention to the eye, the plate, the table, the fork by removing light. Whereas the three of us are exposing almost fully equally. There is an art to removal of elements of of a story that must be learned somehow.

And I think that’s where our opportunity is. As storytellers, we have to learn to eliminate while we’re directing attention. It’s been a... photographers and videographers are an amazing group of creatives to learn from.

Me: So does that also apply to the storytelling? Does it also apply to the startup?

Tej: Almost always, because one of the things that startup founders do is talk incessantly about their product because they are so passionate about it. But really, all they need to do is excite the listener with one idea that matters. That’s it. We often use the analogy of the dating analogy, that in a first meeting between a startup founder and the listener is a blind date.

All you’re looking for is the next date. You don’t want to have kids yet. You just want to move to the second date. And that’s a hard lesson to teach to startup founders, who are especially those who are brand new to building a business.

Diana: And there’s a lot of noise too if you think about that. So if you’re starting a business, there’s a lot of advice that comes at you. Especially if you’re looking for advice and you’re a new entrepreneur, maybe you’ve never started a business before. So, it seems really like which path am I going to go today? That’s something I think that also kind of to your metaphor Tej, of noise and light—founders and entrepreneurs really have to get good at is removing noise. So that they really understand what their north star is so that they can show and share that idea, and not saying that they’re going to do everything and be the everything store. Like, granted, that did work out for Amazon. But they still didn’t start like that on day one. And so that’s just something too. I think it resonates with me.

Me: So, how do you put the people with the ideas and the people with money together?

Tej: Through a little bit of trial and error, and then in some cases, we have to allow for the entrepreneur to fail in front of the group of investors. So I’ll start with the... We have a multi-stage process within the community where we say entrepreneurs who have never raised money from anybody, including the three F’s, friends, families, and fools, who trust an entrepreneur first.

Even those who haven’t raised any money should learn what taking somebody else’s money is all about because you’re suddenly beholden to somebody else’s whims right from the beginning. So Diana runs a seminar at the Partnership, which helps with that early training, the freshman year training.

If you were to move forward through the two or three next phases, there is a group of individuals in at least the Central Iowa area called Plains Angels. I helped pull that group together. There’s 100-ish members who like to invest their own money in young company. Some do it for growing their economic footprint. Others like the interaction they have with young companies.

And others yet do it for philanthropic reasons. Very few do it for philanthropic reasons. There are better ways to do philanthropy than invest in startups. So in Plains Angels, we will get 5 to 600 applicants a year looking for money from around the country. Probably about 100 from around Central Iowa. Of those several hundred, we bring in 24 to present to us. And those 24 will talk about their idea. It could be medicine, ag, tech, bioscience, manufacturing, all kinds of areas. And one or more people in the room will become, will get some affinity to that idea. They’ll become interested. So, out of 24 who present to us in a year, seven to eight companies will receive investment from us. And we become a part of those that company’s ownership with them.

We’ve gotten into 72 companies like that across the last 13 years. 17 of them have failed already. Companies of this size, this stage go bankrupt at pretty high numbers. So it’s a high-risk game. It’s not gambling because you’re still paying a lot of attention to it. But companies do fail, and companies do succeed massively also.

The next graduated step is venture capital, which there are three big firms in venture capital in Iowa, but I’d say most startups start with that raising capital that Diana pulls together and graduate up through angel investor.

Me: Diana?

Diana: I mean, I would only add just recently Tej and I and two other organizers in the community, we hosted an Angel Investor Summit. So the whole concept was to get people in the same room. And to teach education first on people that maybe they’re high net worth individuals and they have never written a check into a startup. So first, how do you educate someone like that? That’s looking at diversifying their portfolio, but also giving that opportunity to those startups to pitch and be amongst that network, right?

So those are some other things that in addition to the Plains Angels meetings and these Angel investor networks, we’re trying to start to really bring the community, remove the silos that exist, and they exist all across the state. But gather people to feel comfortable in the same room, but also to learn from each other, and to start, you know, just naturally getting connected, and maybe meeting their next, maybe if it’s not even an investor, but it might even just be their first customer. That’s pretty crucial to an entrepreneur, just as funding might be.

Me: Well, I’m going to share something that I that might be relevant. Well, I think it is relevant because you can explain what was happening in the rooms that I was in. Maybe 10, 15 years ago, I was invited to come to meetings with people with lots of money, and this was at, and maybe you two were in the room. I just don’t remember. I didn’t know you then. But it was at Iowa State.

We met at a bank in Ames. Were either of you there? It was part something funded through ISU. There was an economics professor that wrangled everybody. But it was all these investors from all over the state, lawyers, and different investment companies. And why they invited me to be in that room, I didn’t know. I don’t know. So the person that invited me said that they invited me because I know Iowa pretty well, and I do.

But it was like all these people around with so much money trying to figure out where to spend it, where the opportunities were, and it was very educational to me because there were all different, you know, there were like 25 people in the room representing different companies. And they were strategizing and what to do in the process, and some of them were only interested in high return investments, anything over 15% a year, others were more comfortable with other things. And I probably asked too many questions because if I’m in a meeting and don’t know what they’re talking about, I ask questions. And so I probably dragged them down a little bit. I tried not to ask too many questions.

But one of the things that I learned was that there were people... like there were some people, I’m not going to say where they were from, but they had $10 million that they wanted to spend in their part of the state. And they were just saying, “Well, there’s nothing to invest in. We’ve got $10 million dollars and we want to invest it.” And somebody asked me, “What’s really important in rural Iowa, Bob?” And I said, “well, right now we really need housing.” And housing is would be a great investment. And I know people are are investing in housing. I’ve seen it, you know, happening a lot, but they said, “Oh no, that’s just too low of a return. We aren’t interested in that.” But it was like here’s the most critical thing in their community that I knew about the shortage of housing, but they weren’t interested. And so it was just it was very interesting to me that people were bemoaning having $10 million dollars and nowhere to spend it. Is that common? Is that a problem you solve that you make connections? I mean, they were just sort of whining about it.

Tej: It’s a real thing. The very likely room you are in was hosted by Ames Seed Capital. Ames-Seed Capital is one of the longer running entites. They predominantly invest in Story County;, they used to invest in Story County predominantly. The team is now beginning to look a little broader. So that’s probably the room. I’ve been in it a few times, but not as a regular member.

The concept of having excess capital but not investing in traditional small business or real estate, is also real. And the reason is, many people will take, for example, let’s say $100 million portfolio and say, I want to put a chunk in low-risk bonds and fixed assets.

I want to put some in the market, and I want to put some in high-risk or ultra-high-risk. So that $10 million might have been a component that they had set aside for ultra-high-risk. That ultra-high-risk should return in a well-above-market return. So 15% return, or where I put it in my spreadsheet is about 11%. 11% I can gain from the stock market.

So, for me to take a risk where 60 to 70% of the companies I put in that high risk in fail, I need to have a return that exceeds 20%. Real estate does not provide that kind of return. So, I might put the part of the portfolio that’s real estate ready in building townhouses or apartment buildings, multi-family housing that you see going up all across rural Iowa now in growing towns, but you wouldn’t put that high-risk part of your portfolio. Otherwise, your portfolio balancing gets out of whack.

Me: Okay. Anything to add, Diana?

Diana: I mean, I think it’s great that they had that problem of $10 million. We don’t ever, I don’t get those calls, right? But another thing, maybe because they felt like they were in a trusted room. I think that’s really important to at least the world that Tej operates in, people don’t like to raise their hand and say I’m an investor.

Even when they’re around businesses or business opportunities, it’s just something that in Iowa we’re pretty humble even about our wealth, and even if we created, like what TeJ is doing with telling those stories. Most people, even some of their friends of the stories that you’re interviewing, the founders. They didn’t even know those businesses were that successful. So it’s kind of a challenge, though when we think about going back to cultural perception of starting businesses. If we don’t have a lot of people saying I was successful, and I was successful here in Iowa. People just then think it doesn’t happen.

But then what is actually occurring is we have a lot of great businesses here and a lot of really good entrepreneurs that can mentor that next generation of entrepreneurs that might be younger companies. So I think that it’s not surprising that we don’t get those calls, and they’re like, “Hey, we have 10 million.” Because I know right now, Tej’s trying to raise a new fund for the state of Iowa to invest in more startups.

So, we love those opportunities. But as as you say, like they have to diversify their pie chart and make sure it makes sense for them. But I would also add we’re talking a lot about technology businesses right now, but small businesses too. So, the mainstream businesses, there’s unique ways to set up an investment or to receive royalty, to receive kind of revenue-based investing that I think is a whole different side of educating people into investing into rural Iowa, right? We don’t want to see those main streets go away. And we also need to see business succession. So sometimes the banks won’t fund that new entrepreneur that wants to buy that business.

That’s sometimes where private capital can come in to help offset that debt and income kind of ratio. So, I really would love to see more people investing in rural, and maybe it’s because I grew up in a small community. My dad is a Main Street business owner. But I think too like it’s showing everyone the opportunities. But people do what their friends do. So they might make a call and say how should I invest this 10 million. And that might be the key influence as to whether they invest in startups or whether they just invest in something that might be more typical, like the market.

Me: This is sort of peripheral, but I have since I have you, I have to ask you this. I, you know, I know how small town banks work. I can walk in, and they know me, and they know whether they’re going to loan me and how much the minute they see me. And I really appreciate our small banks. I can walk into a big bank in Des Moines and I’m nobody, okay? And so what I worry about is the future and Bitcoin and the big banks sucking everything in. And if our small banks die in our small communities, we are in big trouble. I know this is sort of a little bit off. Well, it’s not. Not really. I mean.

Tej: It’s not. I do serve on a board of a community bank in Iowa. And what I do see is the delicate balance between the assets... the not the assets, the deposits held by customers, right? The bank owes that money back to its customers. But banks grow and make money when they are able to loan those deposits out to others. So to Diana’s earlier point, those banks will succeed in rural Iowa, if small businesses, if small construction, new home construction is happening with loans from those banks.

Until I joined the world of community bank, I didn’t realize the delicate relationship between my deposit of my paycheck, and that bank’s long-term success. So just because a national bank gives me a better rate or a better service, isn’t good enough for me to live in that community and hope for that bank survival. Hope happens when you cannot control the future.

Here is something we can control. We can control destiny. So rather than hope, let’s switch to action. If we want our local bank to succeed, keep our deposits with them. Get the loan from them. Whether it’s a car loan, a house loan, or a personal loan, be in that relationship so that there is a reason for you to be recognized and for the bank to accept.

I think what we see in the metro area is a lot of movement of rural banks into the metro area because they had the deposits from the community, but the communities where they pull those deposits were not borrowing money with them. They can loan money out in the urban centers. So there’s a proliferation of rural banks across the Des Moines metro.

It’s a running joke on Facebook in the community I live in. I live in Grimes. In the community of Grimes, a new construction is either going to be a car wash or a bank. It’s a running joke on Facebook. It must be another bank. Why do we have another bank? Well, because they need to loan money, and this is where they can create loans.

Me: Anything to add, Diana?

Diana: Yeah, I mean, I think Tej is spot on and particularly because his view of being on a bank board. I’ve seen two in the metro, some national banks that are coming into Iowa, that are going to open up 30 some plus locations across Iowa.

So there’s also going to be that aspect with our smaller regional community banks is that kind of that always watching what are the national banks doing and making sure they still are able to provide those loans. It is so challenging. I work with small businesses that are trying to receive loans, and even the startups that are more technology-driven, maybe they’re developing a software, they have a hardware component.

It is really hard to get access still. So, that and that’s always going to be a challenge and some of that comes with preparation of the entrepreneur and the business. But part of my job is also understanding what is all the alternative capitals. So, these might be the revolving loans that are in every county in Iowa. That’s a program that was started by the USDA. And knowing that those are lower-interest loans.

The SBA is another alternative that you can work with a community bank and they’re going to guarantee some of that loan. So I think those are things just every person should know about, but particularly making sure our community banks are working with those programs. And then the last thing, because we’re situated right now talking in Des Moines, the whole fintech.

So there’s a component of how do you advance your own banking technology and making sure that it can compete with the national banks. And so that’s something too. I just think small banks or community banks really need to be keeping an eye to and Des Moines is actually a hub of fintech startups. So making those connections too is something that. I think it’s kind of critical in this conversation.

Tej: Yeah, Bob, think about the whole digital banking revolution that happened about 12, 13 years ago. One of the companies that drove a lot of that digital banking was out of Cedar Rapids, Banno. It was ultimately purchased by a national bank software provider, Jack Henry & Associates.

Much of Banno’s staff that was acquired in that acquisition still lives and works in Iowa. So they are still building the technology here. There are at least two other bank-related software companies in downtown Des Moines. They’re hidden. You wouldn’t see them because they are the plumbing. They are the phrase we’ve used before. They’re the picks and shovels of the banking industry that are being built in downtown Des Moines. Their names won’t be they won’t be in marquees on Times Square.

Me: Interesting. And fintech, financial tech?

Both: Yes.

Tey: Financial technology and insurance technology are our core strengths, core competencies for Central Iowa.

Me: So, I mean, I can talk to you all day, but I want to sort of try to wrap it up. I’m going to give each of you a magic wand. I’m going to start with you, Diana. A magic wand that will allow you to fix the problem in the world between the startups and the people with the money. Are there obstacles that you need to just wave your magic wand and fix, or does that even work?

Diana: I’ve not thought about that. Like wish, what I would wish to see in that particular relationship...I would say though like a magic wand, so, I think for at least people especially listening like the Iowa Writers (Collaborative) members, there are a lot of people talking about issues, right? And I know Bob, like you, you report on a lot of great stuff.

And I would like to see the magic wand where we start, of course, understanding the issues, but I think entrepreneurs and creatives need to get brought into some of these conversations. Us writers are doing a really good job, kind of exposing the issue. But then rather than... it’s good to have an understanding of why the issue happened, right?

And then to the problem solvers and people such as that Tej and I work with the startup, making sure they’re connected to these issues. That’s something I would really love to see more of, is that we can use entrepreneurship as a lens of solving some of like water. right? That’s heavily talked about. It was talked about in the summer. It continues to be an issue. And of course, everything correlated to it, but why, why don’t we then start to see more startups solving on water, right? And I think we start we are seeing that. I know a couple just on one hand in the state of Iowa that are working on new ways to solve for cleaning water.

And so that’s something that I would love to see because I think once you start to solve these kinds of more complex issues, the investors are going to follow because they’re very passionate about seeing it improve, right? It impacts our quality of life, and then of course, there’s an economic story to it and an opportunity. So that’s something that I think you know is something we need to connect more of the dots.

I think that’s why the Substack community is actually been really beneficial, because now you can forward a story, and maybe you never thought about that issue before. But now your brain’s starting to think about it. And hopefully, you get connected to some of us that work in the startup world to know like, oh, you can do it. There’s a whole community of us kindred spirits, right? That wants you to be successful at least attempting to try to to solve something.

So, that’s kind of what it comes down to at the end of the day for me: making those connections and just being really supportive to the people that are going to take that risk as well.

Me: Great. Thank you.

Tej: For me, it’s an easy magic wand, and it’s a virtual cycle that begins with the waving of the wand that brings what are called accredited investors into the room. People who make $200,000 individually or $300,000 as a family qualify under the SEC as accredited investors who are deemed capable of taking a risk in investing in young companies. There are a whole lot of ... thousands in our metro area who meet that criteria.

We would love to host as many of those individuals as possible when we bring in these start-ups, because you don’t know when a company speaks to my issue or somebody else’s issue. So, for example, there is a company high on our radar out of the University of Iowa that has solved the problem of removing nitrates from water in tiny spaces.

I mean, it’s smaller than your smaller than a shed that holds your mower in the back, yeah. And it produces green ammonia out of it. We would love to find ways to help fund that company. Because this is an Iowa problem. What Chris (Jones) and David (Thoreson) are talking about on their Sub-stacks is this researcher’s core problem. And she can do it. She recognized this problem while traveling overseas and brought the solution to light in Iowa City. There have to be investors in our communities across Iowa, especially the urban centers, who have the money to make this happen. We’re just not finding them. So the magic wand brings more people into the room to listen to this lady’s story.

Listen to the other stories, invest in these companies, make money when those companies sell, and then turn those profits back into our community. That virtual cycle of money movement is far more productive for our economy than simply doing handouts.

Me: Great. Well, thank you. And would you share the titles of your substacks again as we close?

Diana: So two titles under my name. We have the Iowa Startup Collective, so that’s the community of 10 writers writing in different beats, and then Startup Iowa Hot List, but you can find it all under my substack name.

Tej: And you can find mine under the under Diana’s Substack, but it’s separately called a Cultural Record of Iowa’s Technology.

Me: Well, thank you both so much. I really appreciate it, and I want to talk a lot more.

Tej: Thanks, Bob.

Diana: Appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture

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