Chris Dima, Author at Walnut St. Labs

State Rep. Dan Truitt @ WSL

Our Press Releases are Really Paying Off!

After sending out a couple of press releases, we received a decidedly smaller percentage of feedback than expected. Unfazed, we followed up with those individuals and organizations that expressed the most genuine interest.

State Rep. Chris Ross was kind enough to sent a conference call to discuss that growth we’ve seen since launching the coworking space, and now the incubator. He outlined his own insights and gave us a number of leads within the local political sphere that he thought might expand our reach.

Rep. Ross also mentioned that West Chester was Rep. Dan Truitt’s locale and admitted that “we can become pretty territorial over these sorts of things”. Regardless if Rep. Ross was a kindly passing off the torch or an actually frightened by what Dan’s response would be, we were nonetheless grateful for the referral.

Before I could followup with Dan’s Offices, I received an email from his assistant, Matthew. We ping-ponged our differing availability and settled on an acceptable google calendar event, as is customary in this day and age.

Wednesday came around and I rushed to vacuum both floors, scrub the bathroom floor and perform other domestic duties, all the things your supposed to do before a State Rep.visits your incubator. Henry was kind enough to make a pot of coffee before I showed up, so that was covered, but I was concerned that Dan was going to show up before I was able to eradicate all the dog hair that Luna (our WSL mascot) bestowed on us the week before.

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Dan walked in and we rushed the door to shake his hand and welcome him to our space. Thankfully the vacuum was well tucked away by this time. I offered him some coffee and we migrated to the basement, where all the truly serious discussions take place.

We sat down and I tried my best keep quite while Chris and Kevin began to explain our mission statement and intersectional business model. I was able to squeak through some thoughts, but I tried soak it all up and let Chris and Kevin do the talking. It was difficult for me to keep a lid on it. What can I say, passionate elevator speeches are a cornerstone at incubators, and Walnut St. Labs is no exception.

Chris drew up the three main facets of our business on the white board and explained how collaboration feeds into the intersection of each facet. We reviewed our recent impact on the community and our ultimate goal to create jobs.

Dan Trueit and Keven Color

I could tell the more Dan understood about our community and people-centered model, the more engaged he became. It was cool to see him get excited about the things that we really care about. He shared how the government has moved jobs from state to state to create the appearance of news job, without actually creating new jobs. He also mentioned that our facilities would have help him when he was starting up his business in the 90’s.

We came out of the meeting feeling encouraged that his interest will translate into a longstanding relationship. We’ve gained another perspective from a political leader with enough professional experience and expertise to truly appreciate what were building here. Each person we’ve had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with has expanded our scope, which has contributed to overall growth, and we’re super grateful for that.

Brad Miller, Founder of MongoSluice

Brad Miller Presents MongoSluice

Our Startup Meetup this week was perhaps the most technically stimulating event that we have hosted. Brad Miller has devote the vast majority of his free time to developing MongoSluice, a software tool developed to accelerate the rate of streamed data between MongoDB and traditional relational database systems.

“The tool (MongoSluice) solves the problems most enterprise developers face: how to pull insight from giant datasets stored in Mongo quickly and reliably — without building disposable one-off solutions.”

“MongoSluice will maintain the relational integrity of nested MongoDB data, such as nested Mongo objects and arrays. Its compatible with all RDBMS systems with a JDBC drivers, including MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle, SQL Server, Netezza, and Postgres”

“Upcoming feature enhancements include a programmatic API to define complex extraction processes, and a concurrency framework for increased speed and efficiency of exporting. This will allow the end user to build complex nested structures using database queries and export those structures directly into MongoDB”

Despite all the time and effort, that Brad has put into his project, he was able to gain some nuanced and valuable insights from the audience.

It was inspiring to see that even during our more formal talks, we have established an comfortable and conversational environment. We encourage open discussions of ideas, sparking passionate debates used to strengthened and expand each speakers projects. It is our hope that these talks are mutually beneficial to our audience, as well as our speaker.

Thank You Rick Nucci!

Rick Nucci Startup Meetup Vignette

A Huge Thank You to Rick Nucci, President of Philly Startup Leaders, Co-Founder of Boomi & Guru . He spoke at WSL on Tuesday and we had so much fun.

Excerpt from Rick’s Full Startup Meetup

On Startups:

“A lot of people talk about why we do startups in the first place. Startups are becoming almost satirical now. Does anyone watch Silicon Valley? On HBO, anyone heard of that show? Its very funny. Its also amazingly accurate and true! You watch it and think ‘imagine if it was actually like that”, but it actually is. And you know, thats all the glamour. Those of you who are doing it now or have done it before know that its definitely one of the top three hardest things you’ll ever do. Thats because there really is no rule book, no manual. And at the end of the day you have to figure it out on your own. Which is why when you do its very rewarding.”

On Founders:

“We had a lot times at Boomi that we were internally focused, which is horrible, horrible, horrible, because one of the great things about a startup is everything is suppose to be democratic and we’ll figure it out together and everything will be awesome. We work big companies before with bureaucracy and politics and we were i a startup and we’re free, but guess what? We spent all our time having internal meetings and fighting with each other. It comes back to what I’ve heard over and over again, you have to have a tie breaker, because you eventually reach gridlock, impasses.”

On Unique Value:

“Back in 2007, people we’re talking about cloud computing like it was a fad. Oracle was dismissing it, Microsoft was dismissing it, IBM was dismissing it, now its all they talk about. Back then it wasn’t, we sort of had that first mover advantage… We wanted to do for integration, what salesforce did for CRM, salesforce.com. People would here that analogy and they would get it. So we figured the unique value out, but we were dismal at (promoting/marketing) it. So much so that, it was one of the main reason that Boomi 1.0 really never got growth. Really crowded market, lots of players,all bigger than us, not able to stand out and differentiate.”

On Products:

“When we were building Boomi, and now with Guru, (our) startups have been really personal. And if you’ve done one or your doing one, you already know what I mean. Again, there are no layers between you and the end customer. Were humans, we try things and they don’t work, so we get unhappy. And when we try things and they do work we get happy, and thats a natural process. So this piece of advice is somewhat counterintuitive; view you product as a series of experiments to get to something that actaully works. And the more methodical and emotionless you can be about that the greater your chance for success, its a direct correlation. When we were building Boomi 2.o, we indoctrinate this philosophy into everything we did. With Guru, we’ve plugged it in hard to our product strategy, into our way of thinking.”

Rick Nucci @Walnustlabs

Today was an incredible benchmark for our Weekly Startup Meetups! When the WSL team tracked down Rick Nucci we downplayed the size of his expected speaking audience, so that if we ‘packed the house’ it would be a surprise. We worked really hard to appeal to all different sorts of people in the Chester County area, and I think it paid off.

Walnut St. Labs, as an innovation hub, has hosted a number local leaders and innovators in a variety fields to showcase their experiences and review their insights. Slowly but surely, we have expanded our reach into Philadelphia’s epicenter of technology. Rick was kind enough to visit Walnut St. Labs today, and we were so happy to show him the turn-out he deserves.

It is our hope the the startup community within West Chester will continue to propagate as our Meetups continue. We consider the Lab to be a catalyst for change in Chester County’s startup community.

Rick says it best: “(Now) What an amazing time to start a company”

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“Indecision is paralyzing, crippling, for a startup” –Rick Nucci

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“View your product as a series of experiments, to get it to where you need it to be” –Rick Nucci
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Chris Merkner Reads @WalnutStLabs

After leaving his family to tour the United States this past year, Author and Professor Chris Merkner stopped in the Lab to read “In Lapland” aloud and share his unique perspective of his craft. Despite Chris’ admitted hesitance or skepticism toward his own self-promotion, he mentioned how his mindset has shifted since the completion of his book: The Rise and Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic .

Below are some excerpts from “In Lapan”:
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(pgs. 30-31) “All day Sunday we’re on broadband scrolling over online paint resources. By sunset we have selected a Country Rill from a company in Pennsylvania and had shipped overnight to the house. We pay an ungodly figure to overnighted this paint, but there is no looking back: when it comes to paint, when it comes to everything at this point in our lives, cost is negligible. We charge it. We have no time for savings. All the saving we’ve been doing, all that’s over. For the first time that weekend, we eat dinner without rushing. We have even turned on the television. It’s our last supper.”

(pgs. 35-36) “She is def and she is dumb. She is swiping at the chair rail in long, reckless strokes. She’s made a speckled rill of Green Rill on our old berber. She’s crouching like a catcher, raking along the wall next to the fireplace walls. Paint is flinging and dripping. She strokes in those long, reckless strokes lavishing the wall above and below the rail. Her Muscles tremble and twitch. Her knees crack. I take a glob in the forehead and come to. The small of her back.
I have lost my breath.
I haven’t really ever seen her like this. She turns and takes my hand, yanks me toward her, kisses me, her tongue firing in my mouth. “C’mon,” she pants. “Get into it.” Those walls that had kept me up at night are done in thirteen minutes. In thirteen minutes I’m on my back panting beside my wife looking. We’re both breathing out of our mouths, leaning against the sofa. It’s a whole mess we have here. However, in the public sense, it is done.
Or, as my wife puts it, “It’s started.” The-Rise-and-Fall-356x535

(pg. 40) “Friday, the brush is frayed and starchy, limpid and stiff at the same time — caked in a sort of translucent lacquer and generally incapable of offering a stroke of Country Rill that does not somehow ruin a previous stroke. My whole rhythm is off. I’m doing harm. My wife just winces, says things like, “Oh, Guud.” I have covered the kitchen walls three times over. My arms ache, and my hands are blistering badly. I picture my shoulders as the inside of a rotting boat on a destitute beach. I drink water like a dog. I’ve taken to eating M&M’s again. I’m taking down the big bags of megastores that require paid membership.

Buy The Rise and Fall of the Scandamerican Domestic

Waste Oil Recyclers: Eco-Incubator

Doing Earth Day Right!

We invited Jim and Brenda from Waste Oil Recyclers to speak at our Earth Day Startup Meetup. We were inspired to hear all the great things they’ve done for their community, local businesses and their client-base. Below are some of the highlights.
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Birth of the Modena Garden Project

“It’s not just about the oil collection anymore. It’s been a lot about collaboration. Which is why I think this concept (Walnut St. Labs) is so cool! When Waste Oil Recyclers moved to Modena, which is now called Mogreena, Organic Mechanics soil became interested and shared space on site. He (Mark Highland) started off as a sole proprietorship, interested in organic soil, to (selling) his products in Whole Foods stores from here to Chicago. A number of years ago, the people on site said, ‘well we have all this extra space why don’t we plant some stuff?’. It started off very grassroots. Hang out on Wednesday nights we’ll work on the garden, and whatever we harvest people will share. And about two years ago we had an improptu meeting, with the Coatesville Youth Initiative, Chester County Food Bank , some other local farmer/ CSA people, just people we knew in the area, and we ended up coming up with the basic plan that turned into the Mogreena Garden Project.”

–Brenda McNeil, VP of Marketing @WasteOilRecycle

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Waste Oil Recyclers as an Eco-Incubator

“I think how all this ties back into this place (Walnut St. Labs) specifically, our work site was a way for Organic Mechanics to share a space and share rent. We’ve brought a lot of businesses on site and we all helped one another grow, and we all shared resources. We all shared a lot of beer in the building of the place. Since then, we’ve expanded that complex. We expanded into another 4 acres, in a 24,000 square foot warehouse, where we have new tenants. We are trying to act as an incubator as well for a lot of these new businesses, by helping them move in, giving them adequate resources, and maybe cheap rent to start with. Maybe work-trade or some sort of barter, which happens all the time there.

The Mogreena Industrial Complex that this is all housed in, currently has six businesses: Veterans Construction, Organic Mechanics,Tom Breglio Wood Working, Philadelphia Block & Board and Fred’s Fine Cars. So, we have all these different people help one another on a daily basis. At first, people were trying to get the lay of the land, and now I go over there and I’ll see three different businesses all building a pallet tower, housing flowers and giant flowers made of old scrap cans, and all these wonderful pieces of artwork, but they’re also helping each other in their core businesses. The way that the complex is laid out, it does provide adequate space for those projects to take place. I think collaboration is extremely important, and having a diverse enough group of businesses in a community that you’re part of, that interacts on a daily basis can only be a good thing.

–Jim Bricker, Co-Founder and CEO @WasteOilRecycle
Custom Mobile App

“We do have a technical component to our business that is really pretty cool. We have our own full-time IT person. From square one, he designed the software program that was very specific to the company, and it allows our drivers to be out with iphones and recording what they’re collecting from every client in real time. They have their route on their phone and can GPS everything. They can enter the gallons in real time, so that at any given point in time, my client can call me and I can tell them exactly how much we collected, when we collected, and it allows us to run a lot of interesting reports. It’s great from a sales perspective to see where we have gaps in our service territory.”
–Brenda

“We have an algorithm that tells us when Limoncello is full. We can see exactly home many gallons are in their dumpster. By doing that, we can preempt the service. It makes our business more effective, but it also allows us to provide better services to our clients.”

–Jim

i2n awards microgrant funding to Walnut St. Labs, an innovation lab in downtown West Chester, PA.

i2n is an initiative of the Chester County Economic Development Council

EDITORS: The following information is for immediate release. If you have any questions, please contact Kevin Fleming, Managing Partner of Walnut St. Labs, at 484.888.0619.

WEST CHESTER_The Ideas x Innovation Network (i2n) awarded Walnut St. Labs with $11,600 in microgrant funding through the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development’s Discovered in PA, Developed in PA (D2PA) program.

The grant is designed to help Walnut St. Labs expand its facility as well as events and activities that promote entrepreneurship and local early-stage companies. The funding was award to Walnut St. Labs after review and consideration of the i2n board.

“Walnut St. Labs just opened in November of 2013, but the group has shown the ability to quickly create a strong community focused on innovation and entrepreneurship, which fits well with the mission of i2n,” said Mary Fuchs, senior consultant for i2n who helped develop the grant and is working closely with the managers of the lab. “The lab’s location — in the heart of downtown West Chester and its proximity to West Chester University – is key not only for visibility with the community, but also for expanding i2n’s network of physical and virtual resources for emerging growth companies.”

Ideas x Innovation (i2n), an initiative of the Chester County Economic Development Council, supports emerging growth businesses throughout their entire life cycle by leveraging the assets of academic institutions and other partners to create a network of physical and virtual resources. i2n is funded in part by private sector support, educational partners, and the Pennsylvania Department of Community and Economic Development’s Discovered in PA, Developed in PA (D2PA) program, which enabled i2n to provide the microgrant to Walnut St. Labs.

D2PA was established by Governor Tom Corbett in 2011 to build capacity to support Pennsylvania businesses and to spur creativity and innovation in the provision of economic development services. Last fiscal year, the D2PA program supported initiatives tied to growing the life sciences, advanced manufacturing, business incubators, and education, workforce and economic opportunity collaborations.

Walnut St. Labs hosts a weekly speaker series which is in partnership with West Chester University’s Dr. Edwin Cottrell Entrepreneurial Leadership Center.

Chris Dima, Founder of Walnut St. Labs, said, “Our events have grown fast, and we’re finding that there is a very long list of innovative people in this area who are happy to share their experiences with others. We’re going to use this funding to expand the reach of existing events and to promote the awesome success stories of innovation happening in Chester County and Southeastern PA.”

Previous speakers at the Walnut St. Labs Startup Meetup include: George Krautzel, Managing Partner at MissionOG, venture capital firm; Mark Rybarczyk, founder of Vuier; Brandon Hilkert, CTO of Pipeline Deals and recent author of a book of Ruby on Rails; John Fisher, founder of Brandywine Photonics; Michael Raber, Director of Innovation and Artisan Mobile; Andrew Schwabe, Founder of Point.io and more. Video recaps of events are available on the WSL YouTube channel at – www.youtube.com/user/walnutstlabstv

In addition to events, Walnut St. Labs offers co-working space to small companies and individuals starting new business. Co-working companies have access to desk space, conference rooms, whiteboards, and great networking and referral opportunities. Walnut St. Labs also operates a startup incubator.
Managing Partner, Kevin Fleming, said, The collisions that occur from co-working and the events have created chemistry that is bringing people forward who are domain experts looking to solve a problem in their area of expertise.”

To learn more about Walnut St. Labs, visit www.wsldivi4.kinsta.cloud.

Senator Dinniman: The Paradigm Shift

Today @WalnutStLabs, Senator Dinniman shared his views on the post-industrial age of technology and how organizational structures have shifted.

Standardization of labor and production has been replaced by customization, the pyramidal hierarchy of organizational structure has transitioned to a horizontal template.

“I believe it’s learning communities such as these, which are the future. Because once someone graduates from the university, they have to continue learning throughout life. And so, What your going to see in society is more and more of these learning centers, where bright and creative people will come together to collaborate, to help each other out. And in this process, that is how innovation will continue to evolve. “

WSL added to BFTP’s Southeastern PA List of Accelerators and Incubators

Last week, Walnut St.Labs was added to Benjamin Franklin Technology PArtners’ Southeastern Pennsylvania site!

WSL joins the list of the major Regional Company Incubators and Accelerators! We are thrilled to align ourselves with such a nuanced and community-oriented organization, such as BFTP. We feel honored to be associated with the best and bright incubators and accelerators in our region, and are inspired to continue serving as a catalyst for creative tech endeavors.

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Baby Booming at Night Owls

Last Night Owl’s Was a Party!

Last Tuesday, while WSL founder Chris Dima was busy with meetings, trips a to corporate coffee shop that will not be named in this blog, emails and other fun business owner type stuff, Mei and I snuck out to the Beer Mill, bought ourselves the choicest of craft IPAs, and quickly hid all 72 of them in the communal fridge. We were greeted by Chris’s remarkably beautiful and significantly pregnant wife, Kiersten and their two cutie-pie daughters, Lucia and Calla. They brought with them some balloons with baby monkeys on them, and a very sugary, carb-loaded creation with the words “BABY” in all caps written on the top. It was at that point that I suddenly realized, Chris was pregnant too! Shortly after, I came to my senses and congratulated Keirsten in saying ” You’re really the man of the hour!”, in an effort to be as complimentary and gender neutral as possible.

Around 7 O’clock or so, everyone shouted “surprise, you’re pregnant!!” or something similar and proceeded to eat cake and guzzle as much heady beers as is socially acceptable during work parties, while maintaining a level of coherence necessary to continue on working and socializing. I didn’t show up until around 7:30 or so, because I fell asleep on my couch after returning home from work, so I admit the apex of the surprise was recounted from pure speculation on my part. And although I missed that climatic point in time where Chris realized that he too was pregnant, I can assure you that it was glorious and touching, all at the same time.

We had some new visitors to the lab, that had no idea of the havoc that ensues at our Baby Parties. Tom, a Developer from Wilmington DE, found solace in a quiet corner next to the terrarium. It seemed to calm him from all the Bro-shower excitement. A couple who was new to Night Owls Ryan and his girlfriend jumped right into the party and talked (social media etc.) with Kevin and Matt for hours.

Some people did actually get some serious work done. Mark and Brandon grabbed a desk and plugged away on Vuier-related stuff. They just launched Vuier 2.0, the leading way to monetize digital video content. Coincidentally, they were the only ones who were adept enough to look up at Mike as he came by to take pictures of everyone. Perhaps their sharpened attention to their surroundings could have been attributed to drinking tons of water, rather than beer.

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