Silicon Valley has this fantasy around it with Startups and Tech. You think of Apple or Google. You think of Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. Many ambitious, young talented people flock to San Francisco and Silicon Valley in hopes to make it big in the startup world. Silicon Valley is the Hollywood of startups.
When you hear Tampa Bay, you think of maybe their sports teams or that it is close to the beach. Tampa Bay doesn’t ring opportunity or where people go to start their careers.
Lakshmi Shenoy is trying to change this around by creating Tampa Bay to be the Silicon Valley of the Southeast.
On paper, Lakshmi’s resume will blow you away. With an undergrad from UChicago and an MBA from Harvard Business School, she has worked with major companies as a business management consultant. She then went on to work with startups in Chicago at the largest startup incubator, 1871. Lakshmi moved to Tampa Bay in 2018 to start Embarc Collective where she is the CEO and is helping to create a space and program to help startups thrive in Tampa Bay.
In this episode, we discuss:
How Lakshmi got into the startup world
How to talk with your audience to solve their problems and build businesses for them
How storytelling is used to successfully obtain funding
What Lakshmi is doing to put Tampa Bay on the map
How a physical space can create a hub to build an audience and community in Tampa Bay and beyond
Show Notes
Follow Lakshmi on Twitter
Visit Embarc Collective’s website
Check out the book, The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
