- The following program is a co-production
of the University of Wisconsin- Madison
and Wisconsin Public Television,
with additional financial support
of the Dwight and Linda Davis Foundation.
[coins clinking, spinning, dropping]
- Jon Eckhardt: There are no rules.
- Dan Olszewski: You know, it's not a sure thing
by a long shot.
- Steven Deller: But some of the most successful entrepreneurs out there
are just simply... driven.
[cash register "ka-chings"]
[coins roll out] [receipt paper tears]
*
- female narrator: Be your own boss.
Make more money.
Work flexible hours.
All reasons someone may go into business for themselves.
But sometimes it's a reversal of fortune
that sparks the entrepreneurial spirit.
- Katie Brenner: And that was the moment.
That was the "Ah-ha" moment for me.
- For one entrepreneur,
a heavy heart and a new discovery
have her on the path to help other families
who face a similar struggle that she once endured.
- And that keeps me going.
I can think back
to how it felt to be in that situation.
- Street that people...
- Another is driven to give his hometown
the second chance it needs.
- Zach Halmstad: I hope it's a place that they can be proud to call home.
-But for these two entrepreneurs
and for many others across Wisconsin,
it's not simply business as usual.
- The bottom line is the bottom line.
But, I've never seen someone so motivated
by other things before the bottom line.
- Steven Deller: People go into business
because they're passionate about something.
- Dan Olszewski: And it's really all about solving a problem.
- From Main Street to the science lab,
the entrepreneurial spirit is hard at work
to help Startup Wisconsin .
[traffic sounds]
[dramatic music]
- 2007 will be remembered by many in the US
as the beginning of a tremendous financial upheaval:
the bursting of the housing bubble,
heavy losses on the financial market,
a massive loss of jobs.
A decade later, the country-- and Wisconsin--
are still feeling the impacts.
- The state of Wisconsin is experiencing
a very slow recovery after 'The Great Recession.'
And, our wages are starting to lag behind.
So, if you look at it in terms of just jobs,
we're doing ok.
But, if you look at it in terms of income,
we're not doing that well.
We have too many communities in Wisconsin
that are heavily dependent on one or two employers.
And if those one or two employers close,
the community is devastated.
If we can diversify our economic base
by having more entrepreneurs, more small businesses,
it creates a more robust local economy.
- These key players in creating a more dynamic economy
can be grouped into two broad types.
There's the lifestyle or Main Street entrepreneur...
- Jon Eckhardt: Maybe it's a small coffee shop,
and the idea is that
that entity, in most cases, stays small,
and their aspiration is to have a lifestyle
around that coffee shop.
The other type of entrepreneurship
we often call high-growth entrepreneurship.
This is where somebody's aspiration
is to build a very large enterprise,
not just one coffee shop
but this might be somebody who might say
I'm going to start a chain of coffee shops.
And how they define success is essentially
how much wealth is created, how many jobs are created,
and how big their enterprise ultimately becomes.
- Dan Olszewski: We really talk about entrepreneurship
as an ecosystem.
Just a mix that makes the whole system work.
You need some of these high-growth businesses
that may be very technology- oriented and have patents.
But then you also need a whole host
of these smaller Main Street businesses.
And the mixture of them makes for the healthiest economy.
- Healthy economies build healthy communities.
From bakeries to biotech,
Wisconsin's homegrown entrepreneurs
are bringing new opportunities to their hometowns.
- That means that entrepreneurship
is extremely important.
The vast majority of businesses that are in Wisconsin,
are here because this is where the business owner lived
when they started the business.
- Zach Halmstad: I grew up here in Eau Claire,
and spent my entire life growing up on the west side of town.
I eventually went on
to the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire
and studied music there.
*
You know it was home,
it was a really great music program,
and I knew the town really well.
- Music wasn't Zach Halmstad's only talent.
- My old office when I worked here was right over there.
- He worked on campus
supporting a network of 200 Apple computers
and began creating new software tools
that made his IT job more efficient,
while making it faster to get new computers
into the hands of users.
- We have these amazing teachers and these amazing students
at the university here,
and if technology is in their way,
they're not teaching as well and they're not learning as much.
If we can help get that technology out of their way,
they can actually be better at their jobs
or better at learning.
- Music led him to college,
but it was his interest in technology
that was about to take him on a different path.
- I'd really gotten a good handle
on what problems an IT administrator faced
when they were trying to deploy Apple products
in their environment.
We started building tools at the university
to address some of those problems.
But I really thought that
if we went out and did this on our own as a company,
with this purpose,
we could actually make a big impact on the world
and help people solve this problem worldwide.
- The most successful entrepreneurs
are really good at recognizing the customer's problem,
and coming up with a solution to solve that problem.
*
- So, with $1,800 in his pocket, a laptop,
and a desire to help companies work better with Macs,
Zach launched Jamf Software.
- From 2002 to 2006, it was just two or three of us
working out of coffee shops and bars.
I was trying to use every second of my free time
to try and write software.
After that, you had to try and get it to people.
And we would get on planes constantly.
Every penny that we made, we spent on flights
to go visit the next customer.
- By year five, Zach's company had thirteen employees,
and was ready to set-up a small office in Minneapolis
and another in his hometown, Eau Claire.
Eau Claire, however, had seen better days.
At the turn of the century, many cities across Wisconsin
relied on lumber or agriculture.
The industrial revolution then brought manufacturing.
But by the 1980s, many of the factories had closed,
and the city identities changed.
Eau Claire was no exception.
- It started making a change of more of what I would call
white collar professional.
Just about the time that sprawl was happening.
- About the time I was 10 or 15,
everything started leaving the downtown area
and going out to the outskirts of town.
The two malls that we had drove a lot of that.
- So, when that happened, a lot of traffic
and retail shopping stopped in the downtown.
And so, it started to decay
and that focus on being downtown sort of left.
- When you did come through downtown, you noticed that
it was definitely a much different place to be.
It had kind of a ghost town feel to it.
- Loving his hometown and seeing it struggle,
Zach was determined to help give it a second chance--
a second chance by opening Jamf
in the heart of downtown Eau Claire.
- When I first started working at Jamf,
it was four guys and a storefront,
and one of them was my husband.
They didn't have office furniture
or anything on the walls.
- Julia actually ran point for us,
kind of just as a friend to come in and help us find the space.
Made sure it was more than just a couch,
'cause I think that's what we were planning on moving in with.
- And they'd sit on the couch in this storefront,
and people would come in with their iPhones and be like,
"Do you fix Apple stuff?"
- We really wanted to be downtown.
We really felt like if we were going to
start creating an office in Eau Claire
that we wanted to be in the center of town.
- Julia Johnson: Zach remembered what the downtown had been.
And he thought, "Hey, we're only four people,
but that's better than not being here."
- Launching Jamf in his hometown
wasn't Zach's only challenge.
The commitment to focus solely on the Apple platform
was endangered by the market dominance of Windows.
- The entrepreneurial spirit is that ability to persevere.
The ability to look beyond
what's the current status quo.
- When we founded Jamf in 2002,
it was actually Apple's worst fiscal year since 1983.
From about 2004 until 2010,
someone told us on a weekly basis
that we had to do Windows
if we ever wanted to be a real company.
So, we continued to do what we believed in
and where our knowledge actually lied.
And probably around 2010 or 2011,
people stopped saying that.
[upbeat instrumental]
- More and more organizations
began adopting the Apple platform on a larger scale,
and soon, business was booming for Jamf Software.
Today, Zach and his team have eight offices around the world,
employing 650 people,
and a client base of 10,000 customers.
For Zach's hometown of Eau Claire,
this has meant a new office building downtown
and 200 new jobs.
- Eau Claire is home.
Eau Claire is home for a lot of us,
even people that maybe didn't grow up here
but have been here 10 years now.
I hope that it's a place that their children can grow up
and have all the experiences
that they would want their children to have.
- Girl: I want a flower. - Mom: Yep.
I think we'll pick some flowers
that are a little bit easier to carry, okay?
- But I want my own flower.
- You can build phenomenal companies almost anywhere.
Although he has offices in many different locations,
his base and his home is in Eau Claire, Wisconsin.
- Being an entrepreneur for me has never been
about making a lot of money or being my own boss.
It's really been about seeing a problem
and going out and trying to solve that problem.
[laughing]
- Here we go.
Let's get some green beans in there.
- Problem solving is often at the heart
of the entrepreneurial spirit.
But for Katie Brenner,
the problem she faced hit particularly close to home.
- You always appreciate having kids,
but when it's hard to have kids
you appreciate it even just that little bit more.
- Yay! Good job.
- My struggles with fertility
really came to a head later
when we were trying to have more kids.
I had the same problem as many women.
I didn't want to talk about it.
It was embarrassing.
It felt like failure.
It felt like a personal failure.
- A personal failure,
compounded by months of at-home fertility tests
and inconclusive blood tests.
Finally, Katie's lifelong passion, turned career,
had her believing there was a better option.
- So, I actually turned to the scientific literature
and started reading
to try to figure out what my test results might mean.
And when I was doing that,
I uncovered a paper from the 1990s
where scientists had developed a way
of measuring hormones in saliva.
And that was the moment.
That was the ah-ha moment for me.
[birds chirping]
- As a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
Katie decided to test this theory in the lab.
She was determined to find a way to accurately measure
the two key hormones linked to fertility
by testing through saliva, instead of blood.
- Timing is critical for fertility testing.
Blood tests and ultrasounds can take months.
If we could provide a test to women
on a daily basis
that would allow them to make those measurements
in the comfort of their own home,
we could give them the information that they need
to get pregnant.
- After countless hours, and some creative chemistry,
Katie made a breakthrough.
She had developed a chemical formula
that could accurately measure
the trace amounts of the two fertility hormones in saliva.
But this discovery was only the beginning.
- If I kept it in a lab,
it would be a great science project.
But if I wanted to actually make something
and distribute it to women across the globe,
there needed to be a business to make that happen.
- Entrepreneurship is the pure embodiment
of the Wisconsin Idea .
They're taking that next extra step
from being an inventor in the lab
to building a product or a service,
and a company that has broad impact
across the state and beyond.
- That intersection with business
is actually what's going to help
disseminate the findings
and make it something that's useable in the real world
in medical practice.
- So many of these businesses, like Katie's,
have the potential to make a world of difference
in individuals' lives.
- The transition from the science world
to the business world
was uncharted territory for Katie.
She turned to a program on campus
designed to help students make that transition:
The Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Bootcamp .
An intensive, entrepreneurial training program
for graduate students,
introducing them to a wide range of concepts
from how to raise financing,
to building an innovative culture in their startup.
- What we're hoping they get out of this is
they can go forward in their career
and keep engaged and excited
about this very daunting entrepreneurial journey.
- It was exactly what this idea needed
in order to really get moving.
- With a crash course in business under her belt
and a scientific discovery on her mind,
Katie's next step was to build a team.
- Hey, Doug. How's it going?
- Hey! How are you guys doing?
- She partnered with her former UW lab mentor, Doug Weibel,
to help on the science front,
and Jodi Schroll for her business background in biotech.
- I loved the idea of what she was trying to accomplish,
so I joined the team.
- Together, they formed BluDiagnostics,
and got to work developing
a saliva-based home fertility test for women.
The plan was to have it consist of three parts:
a disposable test strip
with Katie's breakthrough formula,
an electronic reader
to pull the results from that test strip,
and a mobile app to receive those results.
One of their biggest challenges...
the technology behind the reader.
- We're working on ways to miniaturize that.
We want this to be handheld and really easy to use.
- Katie believes this gap in technology
is one reason why saliva-based hormone testing
didn't initially take off in the 90s.
- I think a lot of time findings need the right timing.
So, you can have something really important discovered
that will not hit the right note in terms of where the field is.
The field may be looking in a different direction.
- But Katie wasn't.
She was determined to keep pushing
the science and technology behind her fertility test.
- I can think back to how it felt to be in that situation.
And, that keeps me going.
- For Katie, this is personal.
She knows what women face with their fertility issues.
It gives her a passion and a drive then
to pursue this in a real way.
- People thought it would be a great idea,
but the technology just wasn't there to accomplish it.
Now it is.
- Today, Katie and her team are closer than ever before.
After several prototypes,
their electronic reader has become much smaller,
and they're confident
a final design is right around the corner.
In the meantime,
they face the same challenges as so many other startups:
fundraising and research to finish their product.
But, Katie's initial discovery
may be just the tip of the iceberg.
- It could just open a whole new door
in terms of our understanding of hormones.
If you measure one hormone,
what's to stop you from measuring other hormones?
- Katie's discovery could be further explored
to help with menopause, osteoporosis,
and even Alzheimer's research.
With entrepreneurism,
it's not just the potential of the idea that's important,
but also the person behind it.
- Our bottom line is helping women.
What this means to me is saving a lot of women
the stress and anxiety that I experienced.
- In entrepreneurship, there is often a saying that
"You bet on the jockey, not the horse."
Investors are probably saying, "I like the idea
"and I trust this team is going to figure it out,
and that's why I want to invest in it."
So, I think she is very much that successful jockey
going forward.
*
- Two Wisconsin entrepreneurs with different passions,
but a similar goal of making life better.
And to achieve that goal, they couldn't work alone.
- If I was in this alone, there would be no Jamf.
But the amazing people we found
are a huge part of what made this successful.
- If you look at innovative firms,
they are less interested in hiring someone
who comes in with a particular set of technical skills.
They're more interested in hiring people
that are able to think about things critically,
and are able to solve problems.
- It's not necessarily that
they're looking for the perfect person for a job.
They're looking for a perfect person to learn that job.
- They have gone to school.
They spent that time learning how to learn,
and they can come apply those same principles
to what we do.
- Zach Halmstad says he recognizes the talent
coming out of Wisconsin's universities.
The problem: keeping that talent here.
- We have this conundrum of
people willing to get educated in the Midwest
and then looking elsewhere for jobs
because they don't have the opportunities
that they're looking for in, say, Wisconsin.
- It's really a two-way street.
It's people leaving the state,
and it's also educated people coming into the state.
But when you look at the number of folks moving into Wisconsin,
that's where we fall short.
It's a net loss.
That's the brain drain.
- One way cities are countering brain drain,
is by improving the city's atmosphere and quality of life.
- So, what folks are looking for is that city experience
but not quite so congested.
And that's where places like a Madison or an Eau Claire
can actually start to take advantage of some of that,
that transition away from these big-tiered cities
to these second-tiered cities.
- In Eau Claire, building quality of life opportunities,
took its own entrepreneurial vision.
A new waterfront park replaced a former industrial brownfield
with walking paths, bike trails
and a year-round farmer's market.
And an ambitious downtown revitalization was proposed.
Known as the Confluence Project,
it includes student housing,
retail space and a performing arts center.
But to move forward, it would need the support
of both entrepreneurs and the community.
- It's very easy to find a reason to say "no" to anything.
But, finding the reasons to say "yes"
are really what help us as a culture move forward.
It feels like someone hasn't done it for a long time.
It's a great community, there are incredible people here.
And, for us to say "yes" is to give it the chance
that it should have had for the last two decades.
- Using the same entrepreneurial problem-solving vision
that built Jamf, Zach turned his attention
to help the downtown revitalization.
He set his sights on the tallest building, a former hotel.
- We used to actually come to this hotel here
for holiday dinners.
They would have a big Easter dinner,
a big Christmas dinner, and things like that.
And that just stopped happening.
- Over the course of time,
it went from local ownership to out of town ownership.
No renovations were made, and it deteriorated.
- It was often pointed to as a failure in downtown Eau Claire
and used as an example of why
nothing good could happen in downtown Eau Claire.
- That's when Zach stepped in.
*
- Zach, Julia, and Jason Wudi,
one of the early partners in Jamf,
decided to purchase the hotel
after its doors were closed following a foreclosure.
But the hotel's troubling reputation
was about to be the least of their worries.
- We learned very quickly
how bad the state of the hotel actually was.
The entire heating system had just been cobbled together.
It cost about $30,000 a month
just to prevent the pipes from freezing.
- What mechanical can be saved?
Hardly anything.
A little bit in the halls, but that's it.
- The elevators were hit or miss,
whether or not they worked at all.
Not a single surface in the entire hotel
was actually worth trying to save.
- This was a huge project,
and I waddled around eight-months pregnant going,
"What did we get ourselves into?" [laughs]
- Problems continued to mount,
including having to replace the entire facade of the building.
The growing scope of the project begun to exhaust their funding.
- That was really hard to keep going back to Zach and saying,
"Well, this is what we're going to need."
And as successful as Jamf Software is,
do you really want to take everything that you have
and put it into something in an unproven market?"
- So, for me the weight was much beyond my own shoulders.
But it kind of felt like if we don't get this done
people aren't going to vote for The Confluence.
If we don't get this done, people just have one more reason
to say downtown Eau Claire will never be successful.
- Over schedule and over budget,
Zach and his partners
continued to pour themselves into the project.
After several failed attempts,
additional funding was secured,
and they got their second chance.
- I think the important part is they didn't stop.
A lot people might have just said, "Oh,
I tried but it's getting too out of hand.
It's too much."
They charged through it.
They wanted to make sure it got done,
and they pulled it off.
- electronic elevator voice: Going up.
- In May of 2016,
the hotel opened its doors with its new name:
The Lismore.
With a complete renovation,
the hotel has left a unique stamp on the downtown.
[phone rings] - Thanks for calling the Lismore Hotel.
This is Tara speaking. How can I help you?
- With a newly reimagined hotel,
rooftop bar, coffee shop, and restaurant,
the team has added to a downtown environment
with hopes of drawing more businesses
to this area of Wisconsin,
slowing the brain drain.
- We're trying to create a community
that people want to live in too.
It's not just about how great this hotel is.
But really, it's about being downtown.
You can walk to an art gallery in either direction,
bike trails, recreation on the river.
I think that a vital downtown is essential to quality of life,
so when you think about
where you want to get your job after graduation,
Eau Claire is becoming a stronger and stronger candidate.
- The Lismore and Jamf aren't alone
in catching a spark downtown.
Businesses, both large and small, have moved in.
More and more people are calling the area home,
with 20% of the city's workforce now living downtown.
And, what's headed there next...
is the Confluence Project.
The community rallied behind it by voting yes,
and citizens and local businesses, including Jamf,
showed their support through donations.
- Local entrepreneurs are more interested
in giving back to the community.
They started their business in their community,
they had made the conscious decision
to stay in that community,
and they believe as though they are part of that community.
- We've been blessed to be very successful in our company.
And if we're not using that success
to actually drive our entire community forward,
we're failing our friends and family.
*
- Zach and Katie are phenomenal entrepreneurs,
and we're fortunate to have them here in the state of Wisconsin.
But, it's important to realize
what separates them from people who are not entrepreneurs,
is that they were those
who took action to become entrepreneurs
and to pursue that dream.
You don't need to be a scientist.
You don't need to be a software engineer.
What you need to basically do is be someone that has a vision,
and then act on your vision.
- Some of the most successful entrepreneurs
we have in the state
are actually just very self-motivated people
that are passionate about what they do.
- A passion for their work can lead many people
down the path of entrepreneurism.
But what initially sparks that passion,
can come from an unexpected place.
- I never pictured myself as an entrepreneur.
I'm a problem solver.
That's what I love doing in life,
and this has just been an opportunity
to learn a whole lot of new things
and to solve some new problems.
And I love it.
- It's a really good feeling for a lot of us.
- For many entrepreneurs across the state,
the bottom line isn't necessarily
always the bottom line.
- I think the potential for entrepreneurship in Wisconsin
is very bright.
We have people that are driven
to make the world a better place,
and say, "You know, I can do this".
- There's not a shortage of people here
that can do great things.
*
- The preceding program has been a co-production
of the University of Wisconsin- Madison
and Wisconsin Public Television.
With additional financial support
of the Dwight and Linda Davis Foundation.