If you’re looking to grab coffee at a non-chain shop on Ingersoll, there’s no better place than Zanzibar’s Coffee Adventure. Located just far enough from downtown to offer free and plentiful parking, but close enough that you could easily walk or bike, Zanzibar’s is a homey haven from whatever craziness the week may have thrown at you.

This is a continuing series reporting on fundraising activity by companies in the Iowa startup community. The information is refined from publicly-available SEC filings as available online at sites like formds.com. It's not intended to be a perfect dataset but something to be measured over time to help in measuring changes in the ecosystem.

I've spent the past few weeks looking through SEC filings to try and get a handle on the total amount of money invested in Iowa startup-ish companies over the past few years. If you'd like to see the results check out 2010-2015 Iowa Fundraising Roundup over on the Gravitate blog.

Access to investment capital is something that every startup community is trying desperately to improve and we all know the old axiom that you only improve the things you measure. With that in mind, I've done some research and created a baseline of investments raised by Iowa companies over the last five years.

Raising capital for a new or growing company can be a challenging process, not only because it involves convincing people and investors that the company is worth investing money  into and its growth potential, but also because it can involve a myriad of complicated legal issues. Most capital raises involve the use of an attorney, ideally one that is knowledgeable in the area of the private offering of securities and understands the complexities of private offerings at the federal and state levels. This blog post will spend a few paragraphs setting the background for private offerings and the “exemptions” used and then go to describing the Form D that is filed with the Regulation D exemptions and what info, if any, parties interested in obtaining information on “deals” in Iowa can take from those Form Ds that are filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”).

Welcome to the sesquicentennial edition of The Pull (woot! I've been waiting several weeks to roll that word out).

This newsletter launched on July 23, 2013 and 150 weeks later its not only still alive but its flourishing.