Division and multiplication happen every day in every community.  The great communities have lots of multipliers and fewer dividers, the awful ones reverse and lots of mediocre happens in the middle. At gener8tor, we celebrate one of the most powerful multipliers in any community: the entrepreneurs.   These people—and lack of them—can define a community’s identity for generations and yet very little is said or done to encourage them in the pursuit of their goals.

If you’re wondering what the multiplier effect is like on the ground level, go talk with an entrepreneur.  You can pick just about any topic and they’ll start seeing opportunity.  My favorite personal example is grocery store expiration management: who would have thought there was an opportunity for a business model based around the relatively fast or slow pace of food expiration on grocery store shelves that wasn’t already chewed up by big IT companies? But check out DateCheckPro … Read More »

From our perspective at gener8tor, a fundable startup features five essentials:

A hustler
A visionary/operations person
A brilliant user experience lead
A great hacker
An innovative business model*

In other words, the startups that grab our interest are four-fifths people and one part business model.  This plays out in practice as startups offering ‘A’ execution of a ‘B’ plan appeal to us far more than those promising ‘B’ execution of an ‘A+’ plan.

The hustlers lead it off for us and for good reason – they verify, validate and sell.  We know our hustler-led teams because they’re the ones grabbing revenues, getting attention, and securing follow-on funding before the others.  More philosophically, hustlers fit our model of customer-driven development through minimum viable product and quick customer feedback loops. From an investor’s perspective, the hustlers just make you feel better about the whole endeavor. Hustlers live on what … Read More »

We’re excited to introduce gener8tor as the culmination of a lot of work in putting together an ecosystem to build scalable, innovative startups in Wisconsin.  gener8tor’s work began with its founding team members from Granite MEDSystems and 94labs.  Together we’ve worked with dozens of startups and learned first hand what differentiates the winners from the losers and how to become one over the other.  What we want for gener8tor is quite simple: to win.  And for us to win, we need our startups to win.

Our customers at gener8tor are the entrepreneurs and investors.  Our goal is to put them together in a way that drives value for both.  And we want it to be sustainable.

For Granite, it began thirty-years ago with two entrepreneurs, two filing cabinets and a door for a desk.  Today it’s a global operation that has provided … Read More »