After a lot of hard work from our team and countless trips up and down 6th Avenue, I'm excited to share that Gravitate Downtown v1.5 is officially open for business at our new location: 317 6th Avenue, Suite 102. We're on the first floor of the building and the best way to access us from the outside world is on Locust St. If you're coming via the skywalk system, we're accessible from the lobby of what has historically been called the "Bank of America Building".

The Kauffman Foundation held their first ever ESHIP Summit last week in Kansas City, bringing together about 400 people from all over the world who had some familiarity with the term "entrepreneurial ecosystem". The idea was to get all these folks in one large room and work through some of the foundational elements of what is becoming a burgeoning industry: intentionally working to grow your community's ecosystem. Or as I usually refer to it "startup community building".

I said last time that this week would be busy and that has certainly been the case. 

Over the past few months we've been in talks with several community leaders in West Des Moines about expanding the Gravitate community and programming to their fine city and I'm excited to share that we're now officially up and running with a second location: Gravitate Valley Junction at 318 5th Street (yeah!).

We're excited to welcome Paul Singh and Dana Duncan back to Iowa for the second year as part of their 40+ city North American Tech Tour. Last year, we based the majority of the visit in downtown Des Moines with day trips to both Cedar Rapids and Ames. This year, we're changing things up. They'll start the trip with two days in Iowa City and before anchoring their Central Iowa visit at our our new Gravitate Valley Junction location in West Des Moines.

I had a great time on Thursday at the Technology Association of Iowa's Prometheus Awards event in Des Moines. This was TAI's 12th annual iteration of the event and I'm pretty sure that I've been to half of them. I'm always impressed by how well they're produced and they seem to get better every year.

I know that sometimes industry awards get a bum rap as being too self-congratulatory—I understand where that comes from—but I really like the Prometheus Awards for three reasons.