By Nancy Dahlberg, ndahlberg@miamiherald.com
Yes, this startup story includes that middle-of-the-night idea, passion and persistence. But most importantly, it starts with a big problem that needed to be solved.
“At the height of the recession, we were all seriously involved in trying to help highly skilled, highly educated people find jobs. They were losing their houses, marriages, their health. We saw this as an overwhelming crisis,” explained Angela Pate, chief information officer of FloridaWorks, the workforce agency for Alachua and Bradford counties, the district that includes the University of Florida. “We had to do something.”
Pate (pictured above) reached out to her contacts at UF’s engineering and business schools as well as its technology licensing division. Together they developed many workshops, but the breakthrough came in a 3 a.m. text message from Jane Muir, who is associate director of UF's Office of Technology Licensing and also directs the Florida Innovation Hub.
Muir’s idea: Her office had all this technology available, much of it patentable. Pate had many highly skilled people eager to work. “I need entrepreneurs,” she told Pate. Startup Quest was born.
In a nutshell, Startup Quest is a free 10-week program created for college-educated unemployed or under-employed people who want to learn about starting a technology company. In sort of a reverse accelerator fashion, the ideas for the companies that will be created will not come from the class participants themselves — they will come from the mentors in the program, based on technology in the technology licensing programs at FIU, UF, NASA and other schools and agencies. The mentors — all of whom have deep experience in taking technology companies to market — will assemble and lead teams that will create companies during the 10-week program.
Eighty-three participants finished the 2011 pilot program in Gainesville, which also involved 13 mentors. From that program, 68 people became employed, including 19 self-employed. Fourteen companies were formed, creating 26 jobs. Pate and Muir had proved their model — it was time to scale.
Pate and her team applied for and received a $12 million grant from the U.S. Department of Labor to create eight programs around the state, each which would repeat three times.
Broward County’s Workforce One is one of the agencies, and its Startup Quest program starts next week.