Nearly 450 people from the Silicon Prairie community gathered at Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha (above) for the inaugural Silicon Prairie Awards.
On top of announcing the 12 winnners of our inaugural Silicon Prairie Awards last week, we also revealed a bit of news about the event. In August 2013, the event will take place in Des Moines, and in August 2014, it will happen in Kansas City.
Our goal in creating the Silicon Prairie Awards was to facilitate a night for the region’s startup community to come together and celebrate the past year. The ability to recognize 48 individuals and companies for their specific accomplishments was an added bonus.
Thanks to our sponsor
Based on early feedback, we feel we accomplished our goal: it was quite the party. We, the startup community, don’t often take an evening to enjoy a few drinks, honor our fellow entrepreneurs for their hard work and bring our startup family together with our real-life family – but we did on Thursday night.
Something else that we don’t don’t often do is get Dwolla in the same room as Hudl or get Front Flip together with Goodsmiths. But we did that on Thursday night, too. In fact, my personal favorite part of the evening was when David Cohen of TechStars, our keynote speaker, did a survey of the room from the stage, asking who was attending from Des Moines, Lincoln, Omaha and Kansas City. People from each city cheered when they were mentioned. In all the major events we’ve put on – four Big Omahas and one Thinc Iowa – we’ve never done anything like that, and it just felt like there was great balance and representation from across the Silicon Prairie.
The next time we plan to bring together the regional community is at Thinc Iowa in October. We’ve already announced nine speakers, including Iowa’s own Jeremie Miller of Singly, and published details about the many networking opportunities to be had. We’ll see you there.
Credits: Photo by Malone & Company.
