- I want to welcome you all to our Academy Talk: The Entrepreneurial Edge. Tonight's talk is the third event in our year-long series “Growing Our Creative Power.” This series aims to explore how specific investments in the knowledge economy and our creative sectors can make a brighter future for Wisconsin. At the Wisconsin Academy, we're known for our programs and publications that explore, explain, and sustain Wisconsin thought and culture. The work that we do and the events that we host, like the one you're attending tonight, are all designed to bring people together at the intersection of the sciences, arts, and letters to inspire discovery, illuminate creative work, and foster civil dialog on important issues, which seems more important now than ever. Tonight, our speakers will discuss the role that creativity and imagination play as a wellspring for the leading of innovation, new ventures, and turning ideas into action. We're very excited to here from three leaders in this business from around the state. Tryg Jacobson is the co-founder of Jake's Cafe, a creative community and co-working space in Sheboygan. Ben Richgruber is the executive director of the Eau Claire Regional Art Center and leader in the Confluence Project, an exciting new $45 million performing art center in downtown Eau Claire. Gregory St. Fort is the executive director of 100state, a co-working community in Madison, and also founder of the Let's Keep Building, which fights for social justice through entrepreneurship. Moderating this evening will be George Tzougros who, since 1996, has served as executive director of the Wisconsin Arts Board. This state agency promotes and supports the arts in education, stimulates community and economic development, and serves as a resource for people of every culture and heritage. Tonight, Tryg, Ben, and Greg will give their presentations, and then George will lead them in a discussion here at the table. And now please help me give a warm welcome to George Tzougros.  [audience applauding]  - George Tzougros: Good evening, everyone. I am George Tzougros, the director of the Wisconsin Arts Board. I'm glad to be with you this evening. And my time up here is going to be very short, but I wanted to set a few terms out there for you because we're going to throw them around, I think, as the evening progresses, and you should know what it is we're talking about. So we're going to talk about these three things. We're going to talk about imagination, creativity, and innovation. And I think it's really important that we know what we mean when we say these things. And the definition I'm going to give you comes from a book that's called Imagination First: Unlocking the Power of Possibility. It's something that the National Creativity Network has used for these definitions.  “Imagination is the capacity to conceive of what is not yet present or manifest. Creativity is imagination applied.“ So imagination at work, if you will,  “To do or make something that flows from the prior capacity to conceive of the new.” And innovation consists of “further creative actions that advance the form, the depth, the reach, and the richness of that which has been brought into being.” So those three terms we're going to toss around a lot. We often hear about innovation. We rarely hear about the other two. That's why I was so glad that Jane and the Academy wanted to do this conversation because I think it's important that we acknowledge imagination and creativity. I also think it's important that we acknowledge that imagination and creativity are not the sole purview of the arts but of human expression. So it can be science, it can be math, it can be technology, and of course it can be the arts. And we want to make sure that we put that out there for you. And then, a couple of other terms, and then I'm going to sit down. The creative economy. You're going to hear that a lot. What's the creative economy? Well, let's just say and agree with one another this evening that the global economy is the creative economy because if you're going to produce  [audience applauding]   - Tryg Jacobson: Oh, thank our very much. I had a little bit of an opportunity to talk with a couple people before we got started, and I guess I just want to get a little bit, a few hands, how many people here are entrepreneurs or budding entrepreneurs? Okay. And how many people are trying to start fledgling creative communities in old warehouses?  [audience laughing]  Okay, so we've got a little bit of both. I'm going to tell you I was an ex-ad guy. I'd been 30 years in the advertising business and built up a really fascinating business in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. And I'd made the decision about seven years ago I was going to retire. I thought when I retired, which was in sort of the tailwind of this horrible housing recession or whatever you want to call it, that the agency would stay where we were in Sheboygan, and I'd be able to collect rent and make some money in these four big buildings that I had and just live happily ever after. Well, that didn't happen. They left. So now I've got 20,000 square feet of space, an old Baptist church, a Gothic house, a French provincial house, and a kind of federal style building. And there was tons of real estate downtown-all empty buildings. I mean, this was in 2009. It was horrible. And so what are you going to do? Well, I did what I tell my clients to do. If you can't be first in a category, what do you do? You create a new category that you can be first in. So I thought, you know what, I like creative people and this is sort of a creative, hip environment. I think I'm going to start a creative community. Well, you know, who had ever done that before? This is 2010. Richard Florida's book was just written and he started to talk about this stuff, but nobody was doing it. I thought, well, we're going to start a creative community. And so I thought, okay, what do we have to do now? What do creative people want, you know? Well, I recognized that what I needed to do is I needed to cultivate an environment that would be attractive to creative people. People put value in that which they trust. They put very little value in that which they don't. So as an entrepreneur, one of the things you have to do is you have to cultivate an environment of trust. And so how do you do that? An entrepreneur has to make a promise, and then an entrepreneur has to keep that promise. And the value of that trust, the value that that trust that the entrepreneur creates is directly proportional to the uniqueness and the meaningfulness of that promise and how well they develop and keep a brand experience around that promise using what I would call sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. You know, a whole experience. So, as an entrepreneur, what are you going to do to create a very compelling experience that gets people excited, that makes them want to come in to your community? About 25 years ago, I was inspired by a book written by Tom Chappell, and it was called The Soul of a Business. And the first thing that he said a business had to have was a statement of beliefs. I thought, okay, I'm going to write a statement of beliefs after I'm done crying over the fact that I'm going to have to start this business all over again from nothing. And I'm naming it after my father so I knew that it could not fail. But this was the statement of beliefs, and this is what I knew we had to have in the way of a driving force that would be made manifest in this promise that I was going to work for the rest of my life keeping. But it started in this statement of beliefs. Here it is, bear with me and give me a little bit more than a minute, Erin, because it's going to take longer than that, but then I'll be quiet and we'll let the rest of the speakers go, but this is important. Here's the statement of beliefs that was the driving force of the Jake's Cafe creative community.  “We believe that all human beings, regardless of race, color, or creed, religious or political beliefs, have inherent worth and are deserving of respect. We believe that the multidisciplinary creative and collaborative community at Jak  - I guess I can echo that. A lot of the ideas that led to Confluence and many of the other projects that happening in Eau Claire right now were people, and not just your normal silo of people. We would all bounce ideas off of everyone else. I mean, with Confluence you've got university folks, you've got the local arts community developers and funders and all these other people coming together to say, we've got these problems, how do we solve them? And beer. You know? Happy hour.  [audience laughing]   A lot of good napkins were drawn. But it is and there is that social component too. It can't just be like sit down, business, here's the agenda, go. Like, you've got to take that time to get to know each other and relax, and that will help get those new ideas out and then you can have a little bit more fun, and then you're looser and more free to explore those crazy ideas because there is no judgment. I mean, once you hit that level of friendship and trust, then you can do all of that stuff. So, people, definitely people. You know, get out of your office, go out of the cave for a while, and just go talk to people and be inspired, and that will sink in, and when you least expect it, that idea will come popping out. - For Jake's Cafe, we launched Jake's Cafe with the statement of beliefs, but we also launched it with a crazy ad. It's like what happens when Lady Gaga dances with Frank Lloyd Wright, you know? And it's this idea of trying to take two totally different creative disciplines and put them together in the same room and see what happens. It's like playing with chemicals when you're a kid in the basement. And so when we started Jake's Cafe, people started wandering in. They latched on to the statement of beliefs. They liked it. They thought, I want to be part of that. So we had two young filmmakers from Glenbeulah called the Leclerc Brothers. Amazing prodigy filmmakers. They were like 16 and 18 years old. And now they're in LA, shooting in Hollywood, doing awesome stuff. But at any rate, we used these two kids and then a graphic designer and a writer and a few other people in the cafe and we said, we've got to find you guys a problem to solve where you can really put your imagination to work. And we thought, what can we do to fix Sheboygan County, really put Sheboygan County on the map, and to jump start this place so we can really get things started again? Because people were being laid off, buildings were empty, the business climate wasn't all that good back in 2010. These two young men pulled together a copywriter, a graphic designer, a web designer and a few other people and they created a film called The Promise of Sheboygan County. And if you get a chance, look at it. It's amazing. It's a beautiful done film. It's just elegant. These two kids went around and interviewed every CEO in Sheboygan County from each city. And they got really beautiful sound bites. And then they also went and got really great B roll, and they combined the B roll and the sound bites and they put it all together into this absolutely gorgeous film. And they showed the film downtown Sheboygan at the newly restored Sheboygan Theater 800 people from around the community came. And the most beautiful thing was is it not only changed the perception of what people thought about Sheboygan County, it changed the way that people in Sheboygan County thought about themselves. And it gave them the confidence that they needed to really turn this county around. But that was imagination at work. It was taking a problem and giving it to a group of creative people and saying, all right, figure it out. And that's what they did. - The great result of that too was that ultimately they showed that film in the hotel rooms in the area. So if you were coming in and you were staying in the hotel, you got this thing on the TV that was telling you all the great things about Sheboygan County. So if you happened to be somebody who was traveling through and might want to start a business or wanted to relocate your family there, you had this thing that was playing on the television, which is really cool. - Yeah, beautifully done by two young men who were making films in the attic of their barn out in Glenbeulah. And you see the film and you're like, this looks like a Hollywood production. - Nice. - So when we talk about these things, we often can talk about how wonderful because we have the beauty of hindsight. We can say all of this stuff really worked beautifully. It's all great. But what were the challenges that you faced along the way? What would you say your biggest challenge was in establishing the entity that you've got going now? - Go ahead. - I think originally a big challenge we had was, I guess identifying the right resources and also picking the target market. That was really a challenge, right? Because sometimes it may make sense to pick a niche group, and then other times maybe not so much. And we were having difficulty with identity because in the beginning we were identified as, okay, this is a place for former Epic employees to come in. Because that's where it started. Then it became this place where just for specific tech startups. Then it became this place where a bunch of nonprofits came to. And then, you know, then it became, well, the space is also an art gallery, so only artists are here. And we had difficulties with brand message with then in turn hurt our ability to grow. So it took us some time to figure out what is the right message that makes sense for people to understand what is actually happening here. Because, essentially, it's all of these different things. But that was a big challenge because if you can't get that right, then, you know, there's economic implications for that. So once we were able to get that right, then we were able to kind of become this self-sustaining entity. - Yeah. Whatever that is has to be invitational to everybody that you want to come in. 

- Until you get the invitation right, people don't know whether they're welcome or not. - Yep. - Yeah. - Our many challenges… We had-- It's obviously a big physical downtown redevelopment project, and with that comes all kinds of political excitement. You've got tax dollars in there. You've got all these different user groups that are in there. And Eau Claire has a history of not getting stuff right. You do the study, it sits on the shelf for a long time and no one really does it, or we try this and it failed. So I was watching The Princess Bride a few months ago.  [audience laughing]   And I'm like this is our project. Like, Wesley is carrying Buttercup into the Fire Swamp to try and get away from Humperdinck and his crew, and Buttercup is like,  “Wesley, we'll never make it through. “ And then Wesley says what basically became our Confluence motto is, “Nonsense, you're only saying that because no one ever has. “ Like, we can do this. You just need to take your time and deal with it. We ended up with two different referendums because we had city funding that we were asking for and county funding. So the whole project there's like philanthropy, city, county, state, and everybody is playing along. So there was a group that, of course, the cave people, Citizens Against Virtually Everything. So they started a referendum in the city, and they said, well, we should have a referendum to have more referendums, is basically what it was. So that was nonsense and ridiculous, but it made us fine tune our message and it made us prove that we knew what we were talking about. Does this business model work? Will the financials work? Are the partners truly engaged? Can everyone afford to do what they say they can do? So it was a challenge but it also made us stronger. And then the fun part of that is we had another group start another referendum at the county level. So the city level you had to vote no, and the county level you had to vote yes.  [audience laughing]   Yeah. Figure that one out. So we had to get our message straight. We had to organize two different referendum campaigns, basically, political action stuff and really get our story out there. But in the end it made our project stronger. What they thought would stop us and trip us up gave us the data, gave us the confidence, gave us the army of followers to do what we needed to do. And in the end now, it's a much stronger project because we had to go through that. At the time, it was just horrible and life sucked and there was more, that's when I switched from beer to gin.  [audience laughing]   But it really got us a much stronger project, and I am even more confident in what we're doing now than I was before. So, yeah, definitely trouble in-- - I'm concerned that you're writing prescriptions for everybody now. From beer to gin.  [laughing]  I'm afraid where we're going next. Tryg, go ahead. - Breakfast of champions. - For the Jake's Cafe creative community, there were three things. And liken it to preparing the soil and then also using insecticide and then the third thing is trying to cultivate an inspiring and fun environment. The first thing is cultivating the soil. That was all about ensuring that the beliefs and the statement of beliefs that we had developed as an organization were going to be something that we maintained. So we had people that wanted to join the community. We could sort of tell, either with respect to the discipline they were in or the way they were, the way they conducted themselves, not a good fit. Sorry, we'd love to be able to take your rent, but we can't bring you into the community. And we'd have to figure out a way to do that. That was a challenge. To be able to glean who we were going to bring into the community and who we weren't. The second thing was these people are creatives and they're entrepreneurs and they're trying to deal with taxes and starting up an LLCand where do you get an accountant and how are you going to get health insurance? All the things that are really roadblocks and that make it very, very difficult for an entrepreneur to get into this business. And then, over time, we found it was exacerbated by the fact that many of these people that were good, that did have the entrepreneurial gumption to start a business, were also very attractive candidates for local area companies to sort of cherry-pick people from our cafe. Hey, how would you like to have free health insurance and have a job 8:00 to 5:00 and have your weekends free? And so we would lose some of our entrepreneurs to bigger area business. The third thing that was a little bit of a challenge is trying to constantly fine tune your community as programming to the interest of the people in the cafe. We started out with fun things like Thirsty Thursdays and wine and cheese tastings and TED Talk films and discussions and picnics and potlucks and things to get people together. And it continues to evolve. Now we've brought in an art gallery, we've started a little cafe and a restaurant in there. But you have to constantly be working and showing progress within the community. The moment you stop, the moment you stop, things start to get a little bit dead. You lose the hunt. People begin to start to migrate and wander and perhaps look for other opportunities. So the first thing is protect the soil. Cultivate it. Maintain the values. The second thing is do what you can to help these individuals deal with taxes and LLCs and legal issues, because if you don't and they don't get the help and support from you as a leader in the community, they're not going to stay in business. And then the third thing is constantly be looking for ways to enrich and create excitement in the overall brand experience within the community. - So you were talking about the business skills, and I think that's a really interesting challenge because one side of the brain being that entrepreneur and thinking about the great idea may not also have the accounting skills, the fundraising skills, whatever. So in each of your instances, who plays that role? It might be you. Or you might be connected to some other folks who can help play that role for you. So, who is that for you guys? - I guess on our end we work with various partners in the community. So you can't be an expert in everything. So we focus on community-building and co-working, and we'll find various partners, various law firms, accounting firms, and so on, and they'll do office hours or even doing workshops. Different types of engagement. Some of them actually work in our space. So you could be sitting in a table and right across from you is an accountant that you can ask a question to. They just happen to be working in our space as part of an ecosystem. So that's kind of how we've been able to, I guess, address those questions where we have an ecosystem where if you're a member, there's someone, like right next to you. We have a lot of internal communications amongst members where there's this organic referral system for those types of services. And then we've, from an operational standpoint, we made that part of our intake system. When someone is on-boarded as a member, right away here's a list of resources that you may be able to access from within this space or from part of the outer community. So that's kind of how we've addressed that. - Gotcha- For us, moving through Confluence, everybody kind of jumped on to their specialty. Obviously, the university took care of the state funding, the lead on that. They were the recipient of the state funds. When we had the referendums, the local arts groups jumped up and said, this is us, man, we can tell our story. And that really brought them all together. The developers are working with the architects and with the city on development agreements and easements and all that fun stuff when you build giant buildings that you need to deal with. So everyone's kind of working on their specialties there. On the flip side, once we open we expect to be that resource for all of the local arts and individual creators in the community. We'll be able to leverage what we have in that building, whether it's the maker space to give them tools to start or marketing expertise or business and finance, we want to be that for all of those artists and musicians and any creative awesomeness.  - At Jake's Cafe, one of the things that we tried to do, and we realized this early on, we recognized it was very important at the beginning to have a very strong creative core of right-brainers. We quickly learned that an airplane with just one wing would do a tailspin and crash into the ground. So we had to balance that out. We had to have some left-brainers. So that's when we began to bring in accountants and we brought in legal people, people that specialized in patents. We found an individual that happened to be a bookkeeper. We looked for balance so that we had all of those disciplines within the cafe so that when people want to sit down and have a cup of coffee, they didn't have to pay $200 for a legal consultation. It could just be some friendly advice and guiding some people in the right direction so that they would exchange services. Over time, the beauty of what was happening was that we could have somebody come in from the outside, maybe they had an idea for a soccer training method, and they would meet with an intellectual property attorney. And the intellectual property attorney said, you know what? You're going to need a name, and then you're going to need a logo. And then, by the way, you're probably going to need a brochure. And then you might need a video. And then you're probably going to need a little bit of sound design. You're going to need a voiceover. All of these people were in the cafe. So one project might come in, it would start with an intellectual property attorney, and then she would begin to route a project until it finally hit maybe seven or eight people in the cafe. Everybody made money. It all started with one person. So two things were important: to balance the right wing and the left wing so that you had a multitude of disciplines so that people could get their problems solved without having to spend any money, at least at the onset, and the second was a kind of internal referral type of process where you could get people to collaborate and work on projects together and create some very outstanding things that you just couldn't do if you had to hire all of these things independently on the outside. So it's important to have balance in the community. - Yeah. Did you know that this is Global Entrepreneurship Week? So the Kauffman Foundation and 160 countries around the world are celebrating from November 14th through the 20th Global Entrepreneurship Week. So it's completely appropriate that we're doing this now. 35,000 events worldwide are taking place to talk about entrepreneurship. And I think it's interesting that we bring Kauffman up into the conversation because Kauffman's got some things to say about startups and entrepreneurship in places. And, unfortunately for us, Wisconsin finds itself at the bottom end of that list. And so if you want to react to that, I think that's great. And the other piece of that is, from your perspective as entrepreneurs, what's missing? What can't you get access to right now? Or the people that are working around you, what can't they get access to right now that would be helpful to their work? So, go ahead. 

- Okay. Yeah, it's always interesting when the Kauffman Foundation put out that report. What's interesting about it is there's a guy who works for the Kauffman Foundation that works out of 100state.  [audience laughing]   He works remotely, so we have a lot of remote employees that work there. But, yeah, in terms of what's, I guess, consistent in terms of a needs, maybe the most obvious, but it's access to capital. And for sure inclusion of all communities into the entrepreneurship space. And I think that's been, like, this... It's kind of a little bit of both. I don't want to weigh one above the other, but if everyone isn't involved in it, then there's going to be inherent problems with that from the social standpoint and down to the gender standpoint where there's certain gender gaps as well. So if everyone isn't playing and involved in it, Wisconsin's going to suffer from that. So I think if we work on some of these other issues, inherently entrepreneurship will do a lot better because any city or state around the country where they have the most inclusive environments, I mean, there's economic benefits from that. I mean, the studies have shown. So that's from my vantage point. I've seen that's the problem. We've been working on various different initiatives to improve upon that and see how we can work with other partners on working that out with various events, increasing programming, even working with other nonprofits in creating technology because certain areas do not have the technology to even create engagement for entrepreneurship in the first place. So if we can kind of work together as communities and various cities across this state, that statistic will improve, because who wants to be last, right? - Nobody. Nobody.- Our Confluence Project being what it is, it's a little bit different type of hurdles and whatnot, but our local legislators did see that we had a hard time when we got to the state level with this new kind of cool tool that everyone could use. And at first there was some resistance from the folks at the state like, well, if we give you money for this project, everyone's going to want money for their projects. And we said, awesome.  [audience laughing]   If the state can give 30% of the funds and get 100%use of the project, I think that's a pretty darn good deal. And the same with everybody else. So if you can put together this coalition, yeah, you should be giving them some more money. So our local legislators saw that it was difficult, and they're in the process of trying to draft some language so hopefully it can be easier for other groups, other projects. Not just arts centers but any sort of public/private collaboration that you can do. If you've got an idea and there are different people that you can work with, try and knock down those barriers between different types of organizations or entities to just make an awesome project happen, make something really cool come together. So that's the Confluence side. Another hat that I wear, because I said I'd bring it up, a bunch of, there was a crew of us in Eau Claire that purchased and renovated an old run-down hotel, and we just opened up. It's the Oxbow Hotel. Please come and visit. It's a lovely place. It tells the story of Eau Claire quite nicely. But as we were developing that project, that was hard, man. And I think information, you were kind of saying that too. Just being able to access people to bounce questions off of them and figure out how on Earth do you do this. None of us had renovated old buildings before and there were plenty of people that had, so they could have said, no, don't do that. That's only going to be trouble.  [audience laughing]   But we're just moving a wall a few feet. No, no you're not. It's bigger than that. Like, there are all these little things that, capital, we found enough. We needed to do what we needed to do. There was some grant dollars available because of what we were doing and where we were doing it. But just access to info of people that we needed to talk to at the city level to support us with diff - You gotta get some for Paulie. - You've got to do a test with like 100,000 people. Where am I going to get that? So, the point is, is that there's a lot of bureaucracy and there's a lot of bookkeeping stuff and there's a lot of business mumbo jumbo and it's exacerbated by a very difficult health insurance system that people who want to get into this business have to deal with. So if Wisconsin's looking for a way to stimulate entrepreneurship, I don't think creativity is our problem. I think everybody is born creative. Everybody here is creative. Everybody here can be an entrepreneur. It's who's got the guts? Who's got the patience? Who's got the endurance to overcome all of these crazy roadblocks along the way? I think, as a state, if we can figure out a program like BizBox, and you just sign up to BizBox and they take care of all the stuff for you, now you just make your ginger tea and that's it. Just make it, sell it, and deliver it. Keep the promise. We'd be far better off. But we need something magic, like a BizBox.  [audience laughing]   - I'm going to push back one second on the notion that we've got the creativity we need, and only in this respect, what do we do with the fact that our schools are actually draining creativity out of them, which means our future entrepreneurs are not going to have what they need to have an imagination and creativity that will get us those entrepreneurs for the next generation? So, speak to that if you want. Or leave it hanging out there for the crowd to speak to. - I'll speak a moment on that. Eau Claire has a couple of really great people doing some really great things right now. Justin Vernon is of Bon Iver fame, and he decided rather than move off to Chicago or New York or be where other Grammy winning musicians should be, he wanted to stick with a little house in Fall Creek right outside of Eau Claire. So he's got a recording studio out there and brings a lot of people in to do their stuff. Another big community hero right now is Zach Halmstad, who runs JAMF Software, and they just built their world headquarters in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. A few hundred people that they employ right downtown. They actually, as soon as they heard about Confluence, wanted to build their office on top of the mixed use development because they wanted to be as close as they could to everything that was happening there. So Eau Claire is super proud of those two hometown guys. One went to Memorial, one went to North. And they're there. They grew up, they had these very successful businesses, and rather than take them somewhere else, Zach's got a PO Box. His first office was in Minneapolis because people need to see that address to take him seriously. But as soon as they did, he moved everything back to Eau Claire. It's like, ha ha, gotcha.  [audience laughing]   So everybody's super proud of these guys, and these guys, they had a very strong arts education. Zach has actually a music degree, and he runs a software company. So you don't need the IT thing. You need just the creative thinking part. And Justin doesn't have a music degree, but that's his job now is music. But everybody in town loves these guys and wants to just clone them and recreate them. The thing that got them where they are were those arts classes. Taking band and orchestra and taking art and just getting that inside of them so that when they were adults and knew that they wanted to do whatever they wanted to do, they already had it in them. They didn't have to teach it, they didn't have to train, it's there. They've got the lever, pull it, here's an idea. Like, they just had it. So that does scare me that the education system is changing so much, and it's what about this, what about that, and the arts are here as a class instead of being involved in every class. There is creative stuff in math. My accountants don't love it when I talk about that, but it's totally true.  [audience laughing]   We can make it work. So, like, we do need to fight like hell to make sure that that stays in the schools and across all subjects, not as its own, well, here's art, but it needs to be in everything so that the next generation of Justins and Zachs have those skills just built in.  - I do want to make sure that we say thank you to these gentlemen and...  [audience applauding]   And I especially want to say thank you to the Academy, because it's not easy for the Academy to put together these talks, and they've done a fabulous job. And the fact that you guys came out tonight to hear it is also really inspirational to all of us on the stage, so thank you.  [audience applauding]