Every Wednesday Geoff publishes "The Pull", a digest of the top news for the Iowa innovation community that week. The following is the introduction to Issue #167.
Much respect to the hard work put in by our friends on the eastern side of the state this week in dealing with #Flood2016 preparations. As of this morning, it looks like the Cedar Rapids community did what needed to be done to avoid another disaster like the 2008 flood and that is such a relief (unfortunately, some smaller communities didn't fare as well).
It was pretty amazing to see that community—including so many of those in the orbit of NewBoCo—come together from afar and follow their work in this age of social media. The 2008 flood pre-dated Facebook and Twitter (at least for me) and since I lived two states away at the time most of my updates came from the national news. I grew up about four blocks west of the Cedar River just north of downtown Cedar Rapids in a neighborhood that was devastated the last time. Thankfully, my family had already moved from the area. I remember a truly surreal image from a news broadcast at the time of a police boat patrolling near my old house where the water level was nearly at the same height as the street signs. While the 2016 flood waters haven't receded, yet, reports indicate that we shouldn't see a repeat of anything like that this time.
On a different note, I'm headed to Baltimore today to participate in the Startup Champions Network Summit. This is the second summit that I've had the good fortune to attend and I look forward to talking with other community builder-ish folks from around the country about what is working (and not working) in their local entrepreneurial ecosystems. More on that to come!
Geoff Wood is the founder, connector and space captain at Gravitate, a workplace community for entrepreneurs, freelancers and remote workers in the heart of downtown Des Moines. In addition to writing here, he hosts a podcast, speaks at conferences, organizes events and has been helping tell the story of the Iowa startup community since 2009.