A question I’ve been hearing a lot more lately has been how to get more women engaged in entrepreneurship. What provokes a woman to start a company or maybe even prevents them? To go one step further, how can we engage women in Iowa to join our own tech startup community?

A guest post by Lyndsay Clark

In 2012 Becker Underwood was sold to BASF, the chemical company out of Germany, for $1.02 Billion (yes, an Iowa ag company sold for over a billion dollars with little public fanfare.) I knew that a 110,000 employee behemoth like BASF was not going to be the right fit for someone like me, so after a little over a year of helping them through the transition I set off to find a new endeavor using my “Startup Network”.

A guest post by Aaron Horn

Last week, I suggested leveraging a StickShift-enabled kiosk to Amanda Styron West for EntreFEST in May. We discussed the idea a bit and settled on a timeline of "Entrepreneurship in Iowa". Something that would be able to catalog not just what is going on today but what went on before us. Think of it as a genealogy project for commerce.

A guest post by Jon Thompson

For me, this question used to be pretty easy to answer. Up until 18 months ago, my answer was that I worked for a large financial institution trying to stop bad guys (and gals) from laundering drug money and doing my best to prevent the financing of terrorism. This always prompts comments from people like, “Wow, that’s really cool” or “I never knew people did that type of thing.” After more than a decade of honing my skills in the anti-money laundering profession, I can tell you with certainty the work I do every day is actually pretty darn cool. Now that I’ve added “entrepreneur” to my title this question takes a lot longer to answer.

A guest post by Zachary Kreger

Midway through my sophomore year at Truman State University I got a call from Joe Dallago, a good friend of mine since high school. Joe was studying at the University of Iowa and he was just pissed; complaining that he had bombed a test because of one question he couldn’t get on his study guide. He emailed his professor, his TA and was sitting in the middle of the library but he couldn’t find the answer. There were 400 students in that class and he had no way to talk to any of them. One of his classmates could have probably answered his question in a couple of minutes and he would have been fine.

A guest post by AJ Nelson