Prairie Portraits is a weekly set of questions intended to help the community get to know someone from the Silicon Prairie startup scene a little bit better. Prairie Portraits feature a fixed set of questions ranging from career background and personal perferences to perhaps off-the-wall questions on YouTube videos and entrance music.

Trent Allen stands on the roof of Social Assurance’s building overlooking the West Haymarket skyline with Pinnacle Bank Arena in the background.

Name: Trent Allen
Title/Occupation: Operations and finance at Social Assurance, social media marketing for financial services
Age: 26
Hometown: Treynor, Iowa
Current city: Lincoln, Nebraska
Twitter: @TrentLAllen

Personal

Title of my autobiography: “Develop fast or die”
Thing I can’t live without: My iPhone 4S with iOS6, because I’m not mainstream
Beverage of choice: Mountain Dew in a bottle
Last book I read: “Extending the Runway: Leadership Strategies for Venture Capitalists and Executives of Funded Companies” by Dave Berkus 
Ultimate road trip snack: David’s ranch and barbecue sunflower seeds and Omaha Steaks beef jerky
Entrance song if I was a wrestler: Springsteen’s “Born In the USA” 
Celebrity doppelganger: My mom thinks I kind of look like Alexander Skarsgard and that’s very nice of her. 
Guilty pleasure band and/or film: Miley Cyrus. It sickens me. (Editor’s note: Related Miley Cyrus content)
Chosen career in an alternate reality: Golf caddy
Worst OCD tendency: If I have nothing to say, I’ll respond with “cool.”
Quote I might have said: “The problem is… I still have a bunch of candy in the bottom of my briefcase.”
Which actor or actress, and why: Jennifer Lawrence. She is going to save Panem.
Favorite YouTube video: “Baby trashes bar in Las Palmas”

Local

Best place in Lincoln no one knows about: There is a Mexican restaurant (El Mariachi Taco Cantina) under my apartment—across the street from Pinnacle Bank Arena—that just opened. I went there twice in the last week and was the only one there both times. I think they need some marketing help. 
Lincoln obligatory tourist stop: Watering Hole and The Starlight Lounge
One thing Lincoln has that other Silicon Prairie cities don’t: The University of Nebraska-Lincoln. They provide amazing tech talent and support for startups. 
Best thing going for Lincoln’s startup community: Momentum. The energy is contagious.
Last local restaurant I ate at: Watering Hole
Best meal I’ve had in Lincoln: Valentino’s (pizza) on Husker gameday
Lincoln would be better if… it didn’t take 45 minutes to get from one side of town to the other.

Startup scene

Social media pet peeve: People who spend time following then un-following people. Congrats on having 10K followers that don’t see anything you tweet because they also follow 10K people.
App I’m obsessed with: Email… I’m really fun to be around.
Silicon Prairie startup crush: I’ve never met anyone from Banno but they have positioned themselves to capitalize on a $500 millon+ opportunity better then anyone else in banking. 
Most comfortable startup T-shirt I own: Flywheel, Bulu Box and Cornstalks. They must be the same brand. 
Something most people don’t know about me: I sometimes wonder what would happen if you gave cats their own ecosystem. Would there become billions of equal cats or one vest-wearing cat to rule them all? Hence Investicats.com.
Entrepreneur I most want to grab a drink with: I think I would connect well with Norm Waitt and I’d also like to tell him thanks for his support of Morningside College and Omaha. 
I do what I do because… It’s fun and equally terrifying to launch new software products to billion-dollar companies. I need the pressure or it’d just be a job for a check. But more specifically, I work for Social Assurance because we have a team that is filled with people who are extremely talented at things I’m not very good at.
Before I was in startups… doing accounting for firms both internally and externally.
If money wasn’t an object, my next company would be… a VC firm investing in hyperloop technologies (Elon Musk’s superspeed transportation idea). 
The Silicon Prairie startup scene is missing… younger entrepreneurs. We’ve got some very talented ones, but need more coming out of high school and college.
In five years, I’ll… be working on building a software startup for a problem I haven’t realized yet.
In five years, the Silicon Prairie… will see its startups turn over. We will see great liquidity events and amazing blowups over the next five years. It’ll be important to keep both of these people involved in the startup scene as investors and even more experienced startup founders.

Credits: Photo courtesy of Trent Allen.