Greenville aims to become a technology hub
NEXT will incubate 12 young tech companies with big ideas ready to market
MAY 11, 2012 9:02 a.m. 
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Coming to Greenville for the summer: 12 software teams with bright ideas for the Next Big Thing, mentors from big-name companies to coach them and venture capitalists with dollars to get the best of them to consumers.
There’s more at play than taking high-tech startups to market. The Next Big Thing at the NEXT Center gives Greenville a chance to become the Southeast hub for smart technology, a sort of a Rocky Mountain Boulder, Colo., in the Blue Ridge foothills.
“It has all the marks of putting Greenville on the map as a technology hub,” said Kevin Survance, who was chief technology officer in development of MapQuest. Survance now lives and works in Greenville and will be bringing a new app for smartphones to the three-month incubator.
“But it won’t happen overnight,” he said.
Even if the goal is distant, the connections are in place, explained Peter Barth, managing director of The Next Big Thing and a successful technology entrepreneur in his own right.
The Next Big Thing is modeled after Boulder’s successful TechStars, which was originated by Brad Feld, an early investor in Facebook and Twitter, and the inspiration for the high-tech component of President Obama’s Startup America Partnership.
That Greenville became the exclusive Southeastern location for a TechStar-modeled incubator was not happenstance.
In conversations with Feld, Barth learned that TechStar was going to link a national network of incubator programs with Startup America and that there was a “kind of hole” in the Southeast. Barth resolved to fill that hole in Greenville as long as it could be a significant program with international reach.
He met with community leaders, investors and supporters of NEXT, including its developer, Bob Hughes, and told them, “Here’s the opportunity. If we grab this now, we will be up on Atlanta and Charlotte. It will be Greenville. We got people to put money in if we could pull it off.”
He won commitments of $500,000. “This is not like raising money for a company. A lot of our local leaders … are putting in their money as a charitable contribution because they want to see something cool happen here.”
With money in hand, Barth turned to the other essential, making sure the Greenville program could recruit top-flight mentors from “really significant” high-tech companies on the West Coast and Northeast. He gave himself two weeks to find 20 from the West Coast. It only took six days.
Confident “we can make it happen,” Barth incorporated The Next Big Thing, cleverly co-opting the phrase for the quest, and paid the fee to join the TechStars network. At the kickoff in New York, Barth was on hand as The Next Big Thing became one of 22 initial members of the global TechStar and Startup America high-tech network.
On June 11, it will welcome its first group of 12 entrepreneurial teams chosen from applications from 321 young companies from 19 different countries. About half come from the Southeast and the rest “from throughout the country.” Financial potential as a consumer product was a major criteria for selection.
Each team is given “a little feed capital to cover some of their living expenses.” The Next Best Thing underwrites the cost of the program, including free space at NEXT, seven MBA interns and five graphic designers who will work directly with the teams individually.
“We provide them with significant mentorships,” said Barth. “We have about 100 mentors lined up. They are significant folks who are successful entrepreneurs, as well as executives from all the big tech companies. They will be here for the summer.”
The teams already have working prototypes of software products with consumer applications. They are in varying stages of market research into customer demand, bench-work tweaking and development of business plans and all the legal and accounting issues that accompany that.
What they need to bring their products to market is money. On demonstration day, Sept. 13, “all the teams will pitch in front of about 350 top seed-stage investors” who will fly in from across the country looking to get in on the front end of what could be the next big thing.
Survance and his Greenville company, Eleos Technologies, are well into the customer development stage with their new product: an advanced iteration of a product already on the market called Drive Axle, which lets truck drivers transmit documents to their home base with their smartphones.
For Survance, The Next Big Thing is an opportunity “to interact with the other startups on a daily basis as well as with the mentors who will be circulating around the environment in the course of the summer.
“But probably what is more valuable to me is the ability to launch a product within the context of The Next Big Thing, and that is exactly what we intend to do,” he said. “We want to do it on the wings of the energy, the P.R. and the connections that The Next Big Thing has.”
DUO Interactive, a “very small development company in Greenville,” is participating with a Web application designed to make it easy and affordable for anyone, from individuals to universities, to conduct learning online.
Barth said a Chicago Web startup that taps into adults who participate in amateur sports of all kinds “probably has the biggest market” potential of the 12 teams. The software creates a network for team and individual stats, profiles, schedules, records and social networking. Companies like Nike and Reebok “probably already are interested in using the site to sell their goods.”
What Barth, Survance and the financial backers of The Next Big Thing are hoping is that many of the young tech companies that come from elsewhere to spend summers at The Next Big Thing choose to stay in Greenville, as will the local startups. That has been Boulder’s experience, Barth said.
Out of every 10 companies participating in the Boulder program, he said, “they are keeping their best three companies and adding three or more from other places.” That in turn has attracted companies like Google, Microsoft and AOL to establish offices in Boulder.
“The cool thing about Greenville is you not only get to experience technology but also the community,” said Survance. “People live in Boulder because it is Boulder. Greenville has that ambience. It is really attractive to technologists, especially the twenty-somethings who tend to dominate the disciplines in these programs.”
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3.26 Copyright (C) 2008 Compojoom.com / Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."
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