On Friday I had the chance to participate in the OTA Sessions, a one day conference in Sioux Falls that was on par with any entrepreneurial/innovation/creative class-type event that I’ve ever attended. I knew the ticket price and the 4+ hour drive each way would be worth it based on four speakers alone.

It’s best to lead by not making it about you. That’s probably good advice for life but its certainly good advice for getting involved in a startup community. As I wrote on Monday, people will help you out if you raise your hand and ask for help. But, you’ll be more successful is you help them out first.

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

The round up of tech jobs in this state on our radar this week. Go get hired!

Meet Ben McDougal, the Marketing Director at Drake Homes. Connect with this Des Moines-resident on Twitter or run into him at dmStartupDrinks, on the golf course, experiencing an EDM event or out and about in downtown Des Moines.

I tend to think of the startup community as a really welcoming place. If you have an idea, start working on it and then raise your hand to tell people about it (in an authentic way) - people will help you out.

We don’t always do a particularly good job of getting the broader community (those who haven’t self-identified) involved in what we’re doing. I’m not sure the best way to do that but I think that it's crucial to long term sustainability of our community.