WisBusiness: The Podcast

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Ross Leinweber, managing director for Bold Coast Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Milwaukee. As a geographically focused fund, Bold Coast Capital will only be investing in startups based in Wisconsin. The fund recently announced its first closing, and Leinweber discusses the areas of the state he’ll be targeting for investment. “I think what you see in Madison is a much more mature community,” he said. “You have an entrenched set of investors, advocates that have been engaged with entrepreneurial activities for a longer period of time.” Milwaukee, on the other hand, has a core manufacturing community that’s helped build up the city’s broader business ecosystem. “That particular industry, potentially, has been a little bit more reserved or conservative in regards to engaging with some of the newer technologies,” he said. “We’re at a really critical time in which that particular industry is embracing the entrepreneurship movement, so it makes Milwaukee really compelling from an investment perspective.” Leinweber’s fund is backed by the Badger Fund of Funds, which was the anchor investor for the fund. Other participants included local investors from Wisconsin and outside firms from four different states.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with returning guest Sheila Long, founder of MalamaDoe. She discusses what’s new with her Milwaukee-based coworking community for women including a new incubator program aimed at helping members grow their businesses. After categorizing companies into various stages of development, Long is looking to provide personalized guidance on how to reach the next level. “I’m very excited about rolling out this incubator,” she said. “We have a calendar of events, of different opportunities that women businesses can be a part of.” The co-working space now has 26 member businesses and Long said she’s about to begin one-on-one interviews to determine their specific needs. Long also explains a term called “focused fulfillment” and the role it plays in limiting business growth. “I want them to keep growing, because we really need more women on boards, and we need more women CEOs, and we need more women represented at tables,” she said. “If we continue to just stop and settle … we really won’t make a lot of progress for women.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Jennifer Gottwald, director of licensing for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. In the podcast, Gottwald discusses a persistent gender gap in patenting and details strategies for improving diversity in the field. She previews the message she’ll be bringing to an upcoming meeting of the Madison Women in Intellectual Property, or MadWIP. The Jan. 24 luncheon will be held at the Foley & Lardner offices in Madison, where Gottwald will discuss unconscious biases and the effects they’re having on patenting. She explained that many more patent applications are submitted by men than women, though the disparity is improving slowly. “A system was set up for people who were in the science and technology jobs a long time ago, when it mostly was a more homogenous group, and that system doesn’t necessarily fit what we’re doing today,” she said. “We’re getting more and more women in science and engineering — especially at the university level and in companies — but they often are not the people recognizing themselves as inventors, or going through the disclosure process and filing patents.” She also provides an overview of the licensing process at WARF, which handles tech transfer and commercialization for UW-Madison.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Rose Oswald Poels, president of the Wisconsin Bankers Association. In the podcast, Oswald Poels discusses her biggest takeaways from the 15th annual Wisconsin Economic Forecast Luncheon, highlighting comments from WEDC Secretary and CEO Missy Hughes as well as Bullard. She also discusses results from recent polling of WBA members showing bankers in the state have a largely positive outlook for Wisconsin’s economy in 2020. “I’m very pleased to report that for several years in a row now, we continue to see steady growth in Wisconsin throughout 2019, and expect that positive trend to continue through 2020,” she said. In her comments to luncheon attendees, Poels noted the banking industry saw 17 mergers announced in 2019 that affect Wisconsin banks. But she expects the pace of bank merger activity to decrease in the coming year. “Despite these mergers, the size of Wisconsin banks will continue to grow throughout 2020 as they did last year, as long as the economy continues its moderate growth rate,” she said. She cited a recent survey of WBA member CEOs that found 95 percent expect the state’s economy to stay strong or improve this year.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Ben Camp, CEO and co-founder of RehabPath, a Madison-based startup that helps people find treatment options by aggregating online information and providing other resources. “We have a global reach; one of our premier websites is actually in India, so it’s one of the top places for people in India to find addiction treatment,” he said. “We have some websites covering lots of other markets internationally.” Camp told WisBusiness.com the platform will soon be launching in the United Kingdom, and he plans to launch in the United States after raising more capital. The company recently announced a $200,000 investment from fellow Madison entrepreneur Shree Kalluri, who leads a startup called Zerology. Company leaders recently launched a crowdfunding investment round, and Camp explains on the podcast how this effort differs from Kickstarter campaigns. “You’re not just kind of supporting us and getting a perk or something, you’re actually getting equity in the company,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Teresa Esser, managing director for Silicon Pastures, an angel investor network based in Milwaukee. “We look for entrepreneurs who we believe can build strong, valuable businesses in our city and our state and region,” she said. Since the network is based in Milwaukee, she says it’s easier to work with companies based in southeast Wisconsin. But she noted Silicon Pastures has been investing across the state and elsewhere for about two decades. In the podcast, Esser discusses the Milwaukee Rotary Club and the Invest in Milwaukee Committee. This group has been meeting throughout the year and exploring how resources can be directed to new and emerging businesses in the city. She compares investment resources in Wisconsin with other states, breaking down how the state falls behind others. “What would Milwaukee look like if we invested more of our risk capital right here in our early-stage businesses?” she said. “What would Wisconsin look like if we took a portion of the capitol we are currently exporting to venture capital fund managers on the east and west coasts, and we started to put that to work in Wisconsin?”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Richelle Martin, managing director of the Winnow Fund, a women-led fund that’s based in the state and investing in Wisconsin companies. In the podcast, Martin talks about the challenges associated with entering the venture capital world, particularly for certain underrepresented groups. “Venture in general for anyone is not easy. Fundraising is not easy. Quitting your job to go into this and fundraising while not getting paid is not easy,” she said. “It does still take a certain kind of person who’s maybe a little more risk-tolerant.” She also discusses the Badger Fund of Funds, and how the state can do more to support entrepreneurs and investing in Wisconsin.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Manuel Altuzar, president and owner of Globaltranz Consulting, an agricultural staffing agency based in Madison. The company got its start in 1996 as a translation and interpretation services provider and has since grown to offer consulting for dairy and swine farmers, as well as other producers. It now has marketing services as well and consults with businesses expanding to Spanish-speaking areas outside of the country. Globaltranz Consulting is active in 17 states and Altuzar recently told WisBusiness.com that Missouri is his next target for expansion. In the podcast, Altuzar discusses the rising need for skilled employees in the agricultural industry, as well as some of the related pressures placed on farmers and their families. His business has expanded in recent years as demand has “skyrocketed,” particularly in the Midwest. He also talks about the state’s dairy culture, as well as his personal connections to Wisconsin and his alma mater UW-Madison. “When I came to Wisconsin 25 years ago, I felt welcome from day one,” he said. “And I remember thinking, this is home.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Clay Burdelik, a Madison-based entrepreneur who recently launched a new venture called Cockpit Mobile. He built his company’s software with a team of developers at StartingBlock Madison, an entrepreneurial hub and coworking space. The platform helps event organizers and workers coordinate tasks and communicate through a news feed. Burdelik and his team launched the company earlier in the summer, and have piloted at several music festivals including Austin City Limits, Voodoo Fest in New Orleans and Freakfest in Madison. In the podcast, Burdelik discusses a recent pivot he made after realizing his previous venture wasn’t viable. He talks about lessons learned from the recent pilots, and details plans to expand to other large outdoor events such as marathons and triathlons. “They’re great events that we can get set up really quickly,” he said. “They can be up and running in the environment in 10 minutes. Let’s say a 5K or 10k, it can really help them with their volunteer coordination.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Katie Gold, a researcher and graduate of UW-Madison who helped develop a method for earlier detection of plant disease. “Disease today is one of the biggest problems in agricultural production; billions of dollars are lost every single year due to disease,” she said. “We estimate about 30 percent yield lost globally.” She and her colleagues combined advanced field, aerial and satellite-based methods of disease detection to identify infections before visual symptoms manifested. They started with late blight in potatoes, which famously led to the Irish Potato Famine. And she said late blight represents one of the biggest problems for Wisconsin’s potato industry. Gold says the disease continues to impact human populations around the world, and this method could offer a new way to get ahead of disastrous outbreaks. Gold was one of the featured researchers who presented this week as part of WARF Innovation Day. In the podcast, she discusses how the new detection method could be broadly applied to other plant diseases, and highlights next steps for the development of the technology.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Doug Stafford, president and CEO of Pantherics Inc., a Milwaukee startup developing a pill-based alternative to treat asthma. His company spun out of research from UW-Milwaukee, focused on ways to treat various inflammatory diseases of smooth muscles, including asthma, irritable bowel syndrome and other conditions. “In asthma, there’s inflammation in the lung, and as a result of the inflammation, the muscle in the airways contract and that’s responsible for the difficulty breathing,” he said. “But it’s not just in the lung — there are other conditions in other organs in the body that have a similar disease process.” Stafford, who’s also the director for the Milwaukee Institute for Drug Discovery, explained his company is approaching the problem with a platform technology to create new drugs for various inflammatory diseases. “The current treatments, even in asthma, are unsatisfactory in many different ways,” he said. “Drugs are either not very effective, or in the case of steroids that are used in asthma, there are many adverse effects.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Laura Heisler, director of the Wisconsin Science Festival. The podcast centers on the upcoming events, which run Oct. 17-20 with discussions, presentations and experiments planned across the entire state. It’s been held every year since 2011, around the same time the Wisconsin Institutes for Discovery was launched on UW-Madison’s campus. “We were really interested in creating a community connection between scientific research at UW-Madison — but also more broadly across the state — and the citizens of Wisconsin,” she said. Heisler says the Wisconsin Science Festival is part of a “global movement” of science festivals that have been rising in popularity over the past decade. “Every place that started the festival has seen it thrive and grow over the past 10 years,” she said. Hundreds of events are being held in dozens of communities across the state, covering topics in the fields of: technology, math and engineering; sports, health and medicine; agriculture and the environment; and a number of other focus areas. In the podcast, Heisler spotlights events of interest to the state’s business community.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Shree Kalluri, CEO and founder of a Madison startup called Zerology. Kalluri and others announced this week that Zerology is partnering with Green Cab of Madison to replace the taxi cab company’s hybrid electric fleet with fully electric Tesla Model 3s. In the podcast, he explains what drove him to launch his tech startup earlier this year. Over the past 20 years, Kalluri has seen “phenomenal growth” in the Madison area but notes that development has led to congested freeways and rising emissions. He says partnering with Green Cab is just the first step toward revolutionizing transportation in Madison, including initiatives related to public transit in the region. “Madison is an amazing community,” he said. “Let’s make Madison the most sustainable city in the world — let’s show the world how it’s done.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Matt Cordio, president of Skills Pipeline, Startup Milwaukee and Startup Wisconsin. The podcast centers on the upcoming Startup Wisconsin Week, which is anchored by Startup Milwaukee Week. It will be held Nov. 11-17, with over 50 events in Milwaukee alone and many more spread across the state. He says these initiatives “are focused on connecting, educating and celebrating high-growth tech entrepreneurs” throughout Wisconsin. “We think they’re a critical part of the economy as we evolve forward to a tech-driven economy,” he said. Events will highlight the various organizations working in the startup space, in places like Appleton, Beloit and Eau Claire, as well as Madison and Milwaukee. “We’re also excited too about what’s happening in Green Bay, with Titletown Tech, that’ll be heavily highlighted,” he said. “Also in those smaller cities too, like Beloit — they have 15 events there, and it’s really been interesting to continue to watch the transformation of Beloit’s economy to a tech-driven economy driven by Hendricks Commercial Properties.” In the podcast, Cordio also touches on the “concerning trend” of Milwaukee lagging behind Madison in terms of venture capital activity. “If we aren’t punching at our weight in terms of venture investment dollars, we need to really focus on fixing that,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” features Sheila Long, founder of MalamaDoe, a Milwaukee-area coworking community for women. “We’re an inclusive working community for every woman, so we’re all about building community one woman at a time,” she said. “And we really want to help women increase their reach in business and grow businesses, or grow their place at the table.” The companies represented in MalamaDoe are diverse, including a battery technology company, an attorney focused on startups and nonprofits, a travel agency, an online clothing retailer and other women-led businesses. Long discusses the importance of leadership and role models in her coworking space, and gives her take on what leaders in the state can do to foster the growth of women-led companies.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Lisa Johnson, CEO for BioForward Wisconsin. She discusses the upcoming Wisconsin Biohealth Summit and provides an update on an initiative first launched in 2017 called Women in Biohealth. The initiative held nine events last year covering professional development and networking within the industry, and more events are being held this year. “And actually making them also connect with women outside of their companies, so they’re understanding how important that is to advance their careers,” she said. “We’re getting a lot of interest from elsewhere in the country about what we’ve done, because it was ground-up. It wasn’t some big national organization… We did this on our own.” The annual Wisconsin Biohealth Summit showcases what biotech and biohealth companies in the state are doing, with a focus on the future of the industry. The event is being held Oct. 2 in Madison. “We’re also bringing in people from the outside, that we think are good compliments to some of these individuals, that can expand on some of our topics like imaging alongside artificial intelligence,” she said. “We don’t want to stay just in our own little world in Wisconsin. We also want to hear about what’s going on elsewhere.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” with Steve Conway, executive director of the Chiropractic Society of Wisconsin. He discusses a new bill that would enable more groups — including CSW — to offer continuing education for chiropractors in the state. Under current law, sponsoring these programs is restricted to certain organizations, but Conway sees the legislation as a chance to even the playing field. “So an association like ours — which is a full-fledged chiropractic association; we’ve been around for seven years — we cannot provide continuing education for our members,” he said. “This is going to be very helpful for our organization, to be able to do this for our members.” The bill passed the Assembly Committee on Consumer Protection with bipartisan support Thursday after previously making it through a Senate committee.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Greg Keenan, manager of the WARF Accelerator program. He discusses some of the research being commercialized through the program, which will be showcased at the upcoming WARF Innovation Day in early November in Madison. “As you might imagine, this campus covers a very broad spectrum of technologies,” he said. “Our program supports everything from medical devices to innovations in food and ag, to material science to chemistry.” He says the program has more than 100 technologies in the Accelerator portfolio alone, each of which has received investment from WARF. “We talked about the challenge of connecting with industry — this is one way we’re doing that, by highlighting these technologies and trying to increase that engagement with industry and the community,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Kevin Klagos of First Choice Dental, a Dane County care provider with 11 clinics in the Madison area. He discusses a bill the company is supporting aimed at getting more early-career dentists to work in rural areas of the state. The bill would create a scholarship program that would award five $75,000 scholarships each year to students at the Marquette University School of Dentistry who commit to practicing in qualifying rural areas that lack access to dental care. The legislation is backed by the Wisconsin Dental Association, Marquette University and the Wisconsin Farmers Union. Klagos also talks about the growth of First Choice Dental since it was founded in 1996 by a group of three Madison-area dentists. He touches on the importance of community for dental practice, and gives his take on the state’s rural dental care shortage. FCD has 190 employees serving the Madison region, including 25 general dentists and seven specialists. “We’ve been able to expand in the surrounding areas around Dane County, and as Dane County has grown, we’ve been able to grow with them,” Klagos said. “We believe that people prefer to go to the dentist closer to where they live, and we’ve brought those services closer to them.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Grady Buchanan, an investment analyst at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and the CEO and co-founder of OmniValley. Buchanan discusses the growth of the platform, which connects investors and others in the venture capital space across the country. When he first came on the podcast in summer 2018, the platform had about 100 members. That’s now risen to 450. “It’s funny to think about just what’s happened in a year,” he said. “We’re still targeting about a third accelerators, a third venture firms and a third what we call limited partners or institutional investors that are investing in venture funds.” He says the platform was recently relaunched and rebranded in June with an ecosystem map and updated member list. “We’re pretty agnostic to where they are location-wise,” he said, but admitted he has an “inherent bias” toward members in the Midwest. He says about seven international entities have joined the platform, but he said it’s mainly aimed at U.S.-based firms and accelerators. “We’re pretty heavy in San Francisco, New York, Boston as you can imagine, but we’re also very heavy in the Midwest in some of those alternative, more peripheral markets,” he said. “We’re pretty happy with the dispersion that we have.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Andrea Dlugos, co-manager for Wisconsin Investment Partners, one of the state’s largest angel investor networks. “That means we’re a group of individual angels — each member makes their own investing decisions,” she said. “In our group, each member has their own contribution to make. Both in terms of monetary contributions, but also what each member has to add from an experiential standpoint to the group.” Dlugos gives an overview of WIP, which has a portfolio of investments totaling more than $25 million. She explains why individual investors would band together in a partnership, also highlighting the types of companies WIP chooses for investment. “When we started, we were focused on investments in the life science business sector,” she said. “But in recent years WIP has expanded to investing outside life sciences, including software, health IT and high-tech manufacturing.” She also previews the upcoming Early Stage Symposium, held each year by the Wisconsin Technology Council to bring together investors and startups from around the state. This year’s event will be held Nov. 6-7 in Madison.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Taralinda Willis, co-founder and CEO of Curate Solutions, a Madison startup with a platform for aggregating and analyzing publicly available documents. Curate scans through public municipality data, including documents from city councils, school boards and county boards of supervisors. The company searches these documents for clues to upcoming projects and delivers insights to its customers. These are typically general contractors in the commercial space looking for private projects. “In this area, a lot of people tell me they read the Madison Plan Commission, but there’s no way they could also get to Verona, and Sun Prairie and Waunakee and all those other areas that are expanding potentially even faster than Madison is,” she said. She says Curate is active in 22 states and plans to expand to all 50. That effort will be supported by a recently completed funding round for $1.65 million, which brings the company’s total investment so far to $2.2 million. One participating investor was the Idea Fund of La Crosse, recipient of the state-backed Badger Fund of Funds. “We’re a Wisconsin-based company, and so we wanted the people of Wisconsin to have the opportunity to participate in our fundraising round,” she said. “It takes a village to run a company, so the more people we can have supporting us, the better off we are.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with returning guest Craig Doriot, CEO for an Appleton-based startup called Dodles. He gives an update on his company, which is developing a social animation platform that aims to make it easier for anyone to animate. He also talks about a new venture that spun out of Dodles, called Pound Social, focusing on social media engagement and growth for companies and individuals. On the previous podcast with Doriot, in August 2018, he outlined his strategy for user acquisition, which involved both face-to-face interactions at comic cons and other events, as well as online engagement through other social media platforms and influencers. This time around, he explains how that strategy shifted, expanded and eventually led to the launch of Pound Social. “We’re definitely more on the social side now than the traditional comic con approach — we’re exclusively in that area now,” he said. “And we’ve actually built out that strategy, and that’s where the spin-off company came from, the tactics that we use for online engagement.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with JP Miller, curriculum director and programs lead for a Madison company called Maydm. Maydm aims to teach girls and youth of color in sixth grade through high school about opportunities in the fields of science, technology, engineering and math. “We teach them skills such as web development, Android app development … all sorts of these STEM-related engineering skills that can be used in the workplace,” he said. “Our ultimate goal is to reach parity with national demographics.” Program participants are as young as 10 years old, and JP says Maydm’s recent summer program had about a dozen middle-schoolers. These kids get started with a simplified coding program that helps them learn through a process that’s similar to solving a puzzle. “These kids are amazing — kids in general are amazing. They’ll surprise you everyday if you just open your eyes and your ears and listen to them,” he said. Miller stresses the importance of making these activities fun for kids. “They’re middle-school students, and it’s summertime! You know, we’re not going to be in a stodgy classroom,” he said. “They want to have fun, so we start by having fun.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Eric Borgerding, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Hospital Association. He discusses WHA’s budget priorities ahead of the Assembly and Senate taking up the spending bill passed by the Joint Finance Committee. He touches on provisions that would increase reimbursement, as well as budget changes to regulations surrounding telehealth. Borgerding said the budget put forth by Gov. Tony Evers was “probably the strongest health care budget I’ve seen in 30 years.” He said the guv listened to concerns raised by WHA and others, and proposed a “really strong piece of legislation.” “While it’s not everything he wanted, it’s not everything we wanted, it remains — coming out of Joint Finance — a very strong health care budget,” he said. “By and large it still remains very positive.” Borgerding said telehealth is a “critical technology” for expanding access to health care. “It’s a technology issue, it’s an infrastructure issue like broadband capacity,” he said. “And it’s a workforce issue. It’s a way for us to capitalize on our existing workforce in ways that take care to where the patient is, rather than having to get the patient to where the care is.” He said the guv included “some really positive things” in the budget changing regulations around telehealth, as well as some reimbursement policy changes in the Medicaid program related to the emerging technology. “We still have many steps to go, as it relates to fully realizing the promise, if you will, of telehealth but we’re certainly getting there,” he said. Assembly Speaker Robin Vos said yesterday Republicans aren’t looking to make “dramatic changes” to the JFC’s budget ahead of next week’s planned votes in the Assembly and Senate.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Sean Marschke, president of the Wisconsin Chiefs of Police Association and chief of police in Sturtevant. He discusses a bill from bipartisan authors that would provide health insurance to the families of police officers killed in the line of duty. The legislation has 91 sponsors, representing about 70 percent of state lawmakers. “These legislators are saying, finally this is something we can do to say that we back the badge, that we back first responders in our state, and that we’re going to take care of their families,” Marschke said. He says committee hearings are tentatively planned for this fall and said passage by the end of the year would be “a great Christmas present.” “We’ll do whatever we can to help it pass,” Marschke said. The legislation has been introduced by: Sens. Van Wanggaard, R-Racine, and Janet Bewley, D-Mason, as well as Reps. John Spiros, R-Marshfield, and Steve Doyle, D-Onalaska. It’s been introduced before with different funding sources and coverage inclusions, but this version is seeing the strongest support yet. “In past bills, a lot of times the ‘how to pay for it’ was a question, and that question still exists today,” Marschke said. “It’s something that I truly leave to the Legislature figuring out how that comes, whether municipalities take care for it and then put in reimbursement, or whether the state takes care of it.” He believes lawmakers can come up with the best formula for funding, adding: “It doesn’t really matter who pays for it. It shouldn’t be the families that pay for it.” Marschke stresses that providing insurance for the families of fallen officers would be “truly a small fiscal amount.” On average, he says two law enforcement officers die in the line of duty every year in Wisconsin. If passed, the new law wouldn’t apply to unmarried officers, or to spouses of fallen officers that remarry. “If you look at the numbers for what this would cost, it’s a drop in the bucket,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Ellen Sexton, CEO for UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Wisconsin. She discusses a housing support program UHC is piloting with a goal of reducing health care costs for some of its “most complex” Medicaid members. The program is covering all housing costs for 12 individuals with some of the highest costs and utilization numbers, many of whom were previously homeless. These individuals are housed throughout Milwaukee County and were able to choose the area they wanted to live. The program was launched last summer in partnership with the Milwaukee County Housing Division, which helped locate housing for participants. “Think about somebody who has diabetes; they have to keep their insulin at a certain temperature,” Sexton said. “It’s pretty hard to do that when you’re living out of a shelter, or living out of your car.” In the past year, the program has significantly reduced the number of emergency room visits and inpatient hospital stays for participants, according to Sexton. She said several people have “graduated” from the program, and others are seeing marked improvements in their lives. Some of the participants require intensive case management, with several being paid daily visits. “We’re setting goals for them, whether it be health, maybe in the area of education, jobs, things like that,” she said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Wally Block, founder of TherVoyant, a Madison research startup focused on precision guidance for complex medical procedures. “We’re experts in guiding this therapy called convection-enhanced delivery,” Block said in a recent interview. “You put small holes into the skull, put catheters into the brain, and then under pressure, you push the drug through the spaces between cells to move it much further than you could go with just a hand injection.” In many cases where this therapy was attempted and failed, Block says autopsies revealed the drugs didn’t go where they were expected to go. “Our value is, we allow you to test the drug, not the drug delivery, because we immediately provide the feedback that the drug is going where you want it to go,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Amy Achter, managing director of UW-Madison’s Office of Business Engagement. She’s held the position for about a year, since the university’s former Office of Corporate Relations shifted to its current structure as the Office of Business Engagement. She discusses details of that transition, including how OBE is developing new strategies for connecting with businesses in the state and elsewhere. “Folks realized that companies view us as one UW, and want to be able to come here and talk to one person about all the opportunities — and that wasn’t really happening,” she said. “They may want to talk about talent, or training, or sponsored research, or opportunities for philanthropy and we can now address all of those.” Earlier this year, the university announced a new American Family Insurance Data Science Institute, which was an expansion of an already existing relationship between the university and the Milwaukee insurer. According to Achter, OBE helped that connection flourish. “In that case, both parties have found so much value in that relationship,” Achter said. “We’re very excited and proud about that.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features an interview with John Sauer, president of LeadingAge Wisconsin, a nonprofit nursing home company based in Madison. In the discussion, he highlights challenges facing nursing homes in the state, and explains why LeadingAge is backing an $83 million budget request for the coming biennium. If approved, he says those funds would be used to boost reimbursement for nurses and other care providers. Sauer notes that Wisconsin has the second-worst Medicaid nursing facility rates in the country. And one in five caregiver positions in the state are currently unfilled, based on a survey conducted earlier this year. That means about 16,000 positions in assisted living and skilled care are vacant. These pressures are causing many nursing facilities to fold. Since 2016, more than 30 nursing homes in the state have shut down — 11 of which closed since the start of this year. “It’s a well-documented workforce crisis,” he said. “We can’t just simply raise our prices to attract more people if public payers are not willing to step up and help fund those increases.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Ali Bakhshinejad, a researcher and founder of a Milwaukee startup called VasoGnosis. After working as a research assistant and earning his PhD from UW-Milwaukee, Bakhshinejad spent six months in a postdoctoral fellowship at the Medical College of Wisconsin where his research formed the basis of his early-stage company. He’s creating software that could help guide health care specialists as they attempt to diagnose brain aneurysms and plan surgical approaches. Building on years of research, Bakhshinejad officially launched the company in February and is continuing to develop specialized software tools. “We are not claiming that we are diagnosing,” he said. “We are going to help radiologists and the surgeons that are treating these patients to be better for diagnostics and surgical planning.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Amy Arenz, CEO of Concero, a recruitment consulting firm that works in the software and technology space. The Madison company doesn’t recruit software programmers and others for the technical side of these businesses, although Arenz said that’s a potential area of growth. For now, Concero focuses on recruiting for senior executive positions in sales and marketing. “That’s why being here in Madison works, because it’s not necessarily recruiting for companies at their corporate sites, which would be San Francisco or the Bay Area for us,” she said. “It’s challenging; the market is tight and there’s a high demand for this talent.” She says Concero differentiates itself from competitors both by the “years of experience we have, and the tools we use.” “We work with some of the top 100 software companies globally; we also work with early stage Series A and Series B startups, so there’s a broad range,” she said. “We are partnered very close with the venture capital firms in the Bay Area, so we help a lot of those companies that don’t have that recruiter in house.” Concero, which started in 2010, is continuing to grow in Madison. The company opened its Chicago office about a year and a half ago, and more recently opened an office in Oakland, Calif., last month. “We’re going to continue to grow in this niche space, as well as we have plans to grow and also support technical recruiting,” she said. “Some of the programmers, developers — we don’t service our clients’ needs there now, but I do see that as an area for growth.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Elmer Moore Jr., the executive director of Scale Up Milwaukee. He was recently announced as one of the co-chairs of the upcoming Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Conference, to be held June 4-5 in Milwaukee by the Wisconsin Technology Council. In this week’s podcast, he discusses what attendees can expect from the event, as well as some of the work Scale Up Milwaukee is doing to foster growth in the area’s business ecosystem. “We are consistent, very loud, very provocative champions for growth,” he said. “We recognize how entrepreneurial growth can really catalyze a region.” In the past five years, he says Scale Up Milwaukee has helped more than 100 companies through its various accelerator programs. Last year alone, those companies collectively added about $50 million in revenue. “There’s a way that we can collaborate and coordinate our activities so that we’re fostering growth,” he said. “Growth in revenue, growth in the number of businesses, growth in profit, growth in wealth, growth in reputation — it really means growing the ecosystem in this region to support folks with great ideas.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Jon Young, head of WARF Therapeutics, a relatively new effort at the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “The UW-Madison campus has always had a strong focus on biological and clinical translational sciences,” Young said. He noted two of the most lucrative products in the WARF portfolio are Warfarin and Zemplar. He says these “life-changing” drugs have impacted the lives of thousands of patients, and generated millions of dollars in royalties. Those funds were then used to catalyze new research on campus and improve infrastructure at the university. In his new role, Young says he wants to establish drug-discovery processes with internal and external partners. “The overall goal is to build a portfolio of drugs that will meet the high-quality standards that industry is expecting against diseases with unmet medical needs,” he said. “The boundary between academia and the pharmaceutical industry is becoming more permeable as the two converge on common goals for the improvement of human health.” Looking ahead, he sees some big opportunities in the fields of neurodegeneration and cancer treatment.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with John Imes, executive director of the Wisconsin Environmental Initiative. He discusses the state’s push toward clean energy, touching on Gov. Tony Evers’ plan to get the state to carbon-free electricity, as well as how businesses could capitalize on this shift. “If you believe in climate change and you believe in science, well then it’s reasonable to expect that we can accelerate and scale up the solutions that are in front of us and create a green economy for the state,” he said. “The science to me is demanding that we be bold. So let’s be bold.” Imes notes many businesses in the state are investing in sustainability efforts as well as clean energy technology such as solar panels. And he says the Foxconn development in southeastern Wisconsin represents a major opportunity in that space. “Where are the opportunitites to employ rooftop solar to offset carbon emissions associated with the production that happens at that facility?” he said. He added the facility’s many roofs could collect as much as 500 million gallons of stormwater runoff every year, not including roads and parking lots. He says zero-runoff design could be put in place to capture that water, filter it and return it to Lake Michigan. Foxconn estimates it could have a $1.4 billion supply chain in the state, and Imes says the Taiwanese tech company could impose higher environmental standards on its business partners. “Here’s an opportunity for Foxconn to require that those suppliers meet those environmental standards,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a conversation with Barbara Hastie, founder and CEO of PoWER, a startup that aims to provide security certification for ride-sharing apps. She’s joined by Paul Jones, a lawyer with Michael Best & Friedrich who specializes in startups, venture investment, business development and other related topics. As an experienced entrepreneur himself, he’s acting as a mentor to Hastie as she works toward launching her early-stage business. The company’s name stands for Protecting Women Every Ride. “PoWER is a rideshare enhancement app and also a certification service that connects female passengers with PoWER-certified drivers for a more safe and secure ride,” Hastie said. “We also have elements that have pre-ride safety features and in-ride features as well.” Hastie says she and Jones are meeting soon with directors of TitletownTech in Green Bay, an effort between the Green Bay Packers and Microsoft to invest in and develop early-stage tech startups. “It will be a busy spring, but hopefully be productive and lead to a full launch very soon,” Hastie said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Lane Brostrom, CEO for Cmxtwenty, a Milwaukee company developing a pain management drug that could serve as an alternative to opioids. The company recently completed a Phase 1 human clinical trial that showed its drug candidate has similar effects to strong opioids without the negative side effects normally associated with opioids. These include respiratory depression, risk of addiction, nausea and constipation. Brostrom says company leaders are currently focused on preparing for a Phase 2 proof of concept study with an intravenous form of the company’s drug, also called CMX-020. It will be tested on patients who’ve recently undergone a hip or knee replacement. “We want to show CMX-020 would be good for post-operative pain,” he said. “This will set the stage for showcasing that we can in fact replicate the analgesia of opioids but without adverse events.” Brostrom says the drug is still “a few years away” from the market, but adds: “We’re getting very close.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: the Podcast” is with Mike Partsch, chief venture officer for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “Because of our role with the university, we have a major impact on the ecosystem in Madison,” he said. “And because of that, I think we also have a role, a responsibility to help the ecosystem statewide.” Under a newly formalized structure called WARF Ventures, WARF’s $110 million investment fund will invest directly in startup companies. The organization typically invests in UW-Madison startup companies that rely on WARF intellectual property. “There can be some investments outside of that space, but there have to be strong connections to the university,” he said. Although Partsch is the inaugural chief venture officer, WARF has been making direct investments from the fund for a number of years. As part of his role, Partsch will be managing the existing portfolio of 16 companies. “In addition, of course, I’ve got to make new investments, and oversee the investment process — evaluating new technologies we’re looking at, doing the due diligence, and then making those investments,” he said. WARF is holding an event April 23 where Partsch will officially launch WARF Ventures, and will provide more details on the new venture office.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Scott Birrenkott, assistant director of legal for the Wisconsin Bankers Association. He provides an update on a survey released in December gauging bankers’ views on industrial hemp. At the time, WBA found about 80 percent of banker respondents said they wouldn’t provide loans to industrial hemp farmers or processors. But over the past several months, Birrenkott has seen that shift in conversations with members. He said someone responded in the negative. “But after reading more about it, after learning more about it, discussing it, they’re feeling that they’re more open to it.” He says this represents a trend of Wisconsin bankers feeling more inclined to do business with companies in the hemp industry.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Brad Hollister, founder of a Madison-based logistics firm called SwanLeap. SwanLeap was named by Inc. magazine as the fastest-growing U.S. company of 2018. Hollister discusses that meteoric rise, as well as his plans for sustaining the company’s growth. Over a three-year period, SwanLeap grew from $113,000 in revenue to over $100 million, for a growth rate of over 75,000 percent. “It’s been an absolute rocketship,” he said. “The numbers look really big and impressive when they start small. But now that the numbers are big, certainly we’re seeing a lot of growth but we definitely can’t continue the percentage that got us to the notoriety nationally and internationally that we’ve had.” SwanLeap helps business customers save money on shipping costs using an artificial intelligence system. He says the company’s success is built in part on listening to clients, understanding their needs and crafting software solutions to fit those requirements. That slows down the process of activating new customers, but Hollister says it’s worth it. “The product roadmap is being defined by the customers,” he said. “We have to really listen and put ourselves in the shoes of our clients.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Yu-Lin Yang, president of Transcend UW. This student org, which grew out of UW-Madison’s engineering department, helps connect participants with funding sources for their startup ideas. Student organizers put on a number of events throughout the year, including an innovation competition, project reviews with Madison entrepreneurs, pitch events, workshops on intellectual property and coaching opportunities. Transcend UW gave $55,000 last year in equity-free funds to student entrepreneurs. As Yang explains, other student orgs on campus will work with business clients that need a certain project done, so they structure student projects around those requests. “For us, we are super open-ended,” Yang said. “We want students to come up with their own ideas, their own ambitions, and come compete.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Joe Scanlin, CEO and co-founder for a Milwaukee startup called Scanalytics. The company was founded about six years ago around a technology with broad applicability: smart floor sensors which help building managers track human movement. “Our floor sensor can be imbedded into existing flooring, it can be added on top of existing flooring, or be part of new construction,” he said. “We’re finding a non-invasive way to measure the paths people are taking.” That can include retail locations, elderly care facilities and even commercial real estate firms with millions of square feet under management. “What they need to know is, what is the occupancy rate and does it make sense for them to consolidate space and maybe even expand, and where should they do that?” he said. “Those are all questions that we help answer.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features returning guest Roxie Hentz, founding executive director for CEOs of Tomorrow. She discusses an upcoming trip to Botswana she’s planning for youth entrepreneurs where they will hone early-stage business ideas while learning about other cultures. “What I realized is the social issues that they are addressing are actually global issues,” she said. “So we really want to push them to think locally but act globally.” The Social Global Excursion Program heads to Gaborone, Botswana in August. Participants will train impoverished African youth to “understand and promote and learn” entrepreneurial skills. “Long-term, we’re looking to build partnerships between our youth and their youth to run businesses together,” she said. “So we’re pretty excited about that.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Andy Walker and Chris Eckstrom, partners with Rock River Capital Partners. The firm is looking to make $1 million investments in post-revenue companies, according to Walker. But Eckstrom says about 20 percent of the fund is set aside for more “opportunistic” investments, which can range from $250,000 to $2 million “for the right deal.” Walker (pictured here) says Rock River Capital Partners is one of the larger recipient funds for the Badger Fund of Funds, and was meant to be growth-focused rather than an early-stage seed fund. About 28 percent of Rock River’s fund came from the Badger Fund of Funds, and Walker says that made raising the rest of the fund easier. In the podcast, Walker calls for expanding the Badger Fund of Funds, to support more late-stage funding in the state. And he says allowing money from that fund to be spent out of state would be another positive step.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Dave Grandin, CEO for Kiio. This Madison startup has a pain management system for people with lower back pain. Grandin returns to the podcast to discuss what’s changed for Kiio in the past year, and touches on a new partnership with Walgreens, Kiio’s biggest customer yet. “Since the last time we spoke, there’s really been some significant progress,” he said. “We did a study with Quartz, which is the UW health plan, as well as we’ve added on a significant number of new customers.” Kiio supplies its digital therapeutic platform to health plans, as well as employers for their workers who experience lower back pain. The platform is now being used by five insurers covering much of Wisconsin and parts of nearby Midwest states. “When you get reductions in pain, reductions in drug use, better outcomes and savings, that’s a win-win-win,” he said. “For the patient, for the health plan, and of course for Kiio because then we’ve got happy customers.” Grandin shares that he has been suffering from lower back pain, and used the Kiio system in late December after experiencing a flare-up. “I used it for about seven or eight days, and I was already feeling better. But just because I was feeling better is not a good reason to stop,” he said. “You want to go through the entire program, and so a lot of the things we’re doing are to make the program easier to use, more friendly, more engaging, more fun.” He says Kiio has made progress in that area already, “but there’s more work to do.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Erin Rasmussen, founder of an early-stage business called the American Wine Project. She grew up in Madison but spent the last decade in California studying winemaking. Her new venture has several wines in development, and she says she wants to stimulate interest in the “farm-to-table” model of wine in Wisconsin. “How do I as a Midwest native bring thoughtful, artistic, high quality winemaking to a region that is really just beginning its wine industry lifespan?” she said. “It’s really only pretty recently that we’ve had the technology and the research done to be able to consistently grow grapes that survive our cold winters.” Rasmussen is a graduate of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation’s Upstart program, which supports minority and women entrepreneurs. She and her business partner are currently looking for a space to set up their winery, which she says presents some different challenges here than in California. “The ways that that happens in California are not available to me here,” she said. “For example, what’s called ‘custom crush’ -- renting a space in someone else’s winery to be able to produce wine under your own name.” She’s not farming her own grapes herself, though she says she may explore that in the future. “It’s winemaking as I’ve done it for the last 10 years working for various high-end wineries in California,” she said. “I’m treating these grapes that grow in the Midwest like they’re $10,000-a-ton cabernet from Napa Valley, because I think that’s what it takes to make great wine.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Saran Ouk, CEO and founder of ConNEXTions, a Madison nonprofit startup connecting low-income youth with mentorship and financial education. She says the goal of her business is to guide underrepresented adults in the Madison area toward financial, educational and career goals. After starting the program in 2016, Ouk says the community response was impressive. “We’ve actually had a lot more mentors apply than mentees. The first year we started with just seven mentees and 25 mentors applied. So we don’t really have to work hard to find mentors,” she said. “People just love the thought that they could guide a young adult with their career goals.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Tom Still, president of the Wisconsin Technology Council. He discusses the Governor’s Business Plan Contest, now in its 16th year, which gives entrepreneurs the chance to have their business ideas validated through several stages of competitive judging. The deadline to enter the first round of competition is 5 p.m. on Jan. 31. Applicants will submit 250-word write-ups for the first round, which go through an initial judging period. Those that make it through the first stage will submit a 1,000-word essay, followed by another round of judging. Winners from that round will write a full business plan for judgement, and the finalists will give live presentations in June at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference. “It’s a somewhat lengthy process. But it’s designed to give people that room to breath, essentially, and to build their plan along the way,” Still said. The Tech Council is holding a series of info sessions to give entrepreneurs a better idea of what’s expected and how to enter. One will be held the evening of Jan. 9 at the Coliseum Bar in Madison, and another will be held Jan. 10 at the UWM Accelerator in Wauwatosa in the early afternoon. “Even though it’s been around for 16 years, there’s always a new crop of entrepreneurs, and those are the ones we are trying to reach, because it really fits best with them,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Dr. Tim Bartholow, chief medical officer for WEA Trust. This Madison-based insurance company has a public employee member population of nearly 100,000 people. He explains that the health problems he’s trying to solve for those people “are problems that I couldn’t have solved patient-by-patient.” “My job every day is to figure out how to match patient need with the skill sets that are available to take care of those individuals,” he said. Bartholow discusses the company’s health management programs, which have successfully driven down rates of hospitalizations and opioid prescriptions. “I hasten to say, there are people who actually need opiates, and we have to be careful to make sure that people get what they need,” he said. But he adds that opioid mitigation program had very few complaints and concerns. WEA Trust has a partnership with another Madison-based company called Kiio, which has a platform for managing lower back pain with at-home exercises. “We think -- whether it’s back pain or diabetes, or a variety of other conditions -- that patients need to able to be more in control,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Paul Jirovetz and Michael Terrill for DevCodeCamp, a program teaching people software development skills. Terrill is the director of instruction for the program, and says individual class sizes vary from just a handful of people to larger groups. “With the larger classes, you can get nice group projects going as well,” Terrill said. “You get that individual experience, but you also get that collaboration experience… When you go on a job, you’re not going to be working by yourself. You’re going to be working on a team of people.” Jirovetz (pictured here) is vice president of operations for DevCodeCamp. He says employers keep coming back to hire more of the students, as they’re more industry-ready than some coming out of universities with computer science degrees. “At the end of the day, we’re forcing them to think and problem-solve. We’re forcing them to be okay with making some mistakes and getting out of their comfort zone,” Jirovetz said. “They quickly realize, ‘I can do this stuff.’” One standout project was created by a student named Kao Xiong in just 10 days. “He was a big fisherman; he decided he was going to create an app that would allow him to keep track of all his data,” Jirovetz said. He created an app that could take a photo of a fish, identify it, capture its size, location, local weather conditions and even water currents. The application would then plot all that information onto a map. “If you give something like that to the DNR, all of a sudden we have all this information,” Jirovetz said. “What is the best time, the best current, the best weather conditions to catch perch -- well, Kao created something that can do that.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Erin Tenderholt, founder of a Madison-based startup called Blexx. Tenderholt has created a new patent-pending technology in hopes of improving how people dispose of hypodermic needles. “This cost is bigger than you imagine. Ask a nurse, ask a tattoo parlor, ask a funeral home director about their experience with hypodermic needles,” she said. “The time to change this is now.” She notes that Americans go through 7 billion hypodermic needles each year. The current method of disposal requires several logistical steps, including a disposal unit, transportation and storage resulting in incineration off-site. “This long process is costly, unsafe and terrible for the environment,” she said. To improve that process, Tenderholt has created a prototype device -- about the size of a large water bottle -- which can sanitize and destroy needles within seconds. “We make needle disposal safer by having less people come in contact with contaminated needles,” she said. “We make it way cheaper by eliminating unnecessary processes, and we are reducing unnecessary plastic waste and carbon emissions by trucking.” Blexx was the audience vote winner of the recent Elevator Pitch Olympics, held in Madison by the Wisconsin Technology Council as part of the Early Stage Symposium.