Creative Technologists: music, art & venture capital
I am not a musician, and the interview for this story triggered a question in my mind that I simply had to research further. I was speaking with Kaylee Williams as the leader of the small team at Innoventure Iowa responsible for investing nearly $40M in Iowa’s startups and inquired about her creative pursuits. I had an unfair advantage having observed Kaylee’s work in a band and as one of the prominent faces in Beth M Howard’s movie Pieowa. Her reminiscence of the bass guitar gifted to her over a decade ago may still be influencing her work in unimagined ways.
A momentary AI detour
With no foundational knowledge of music or instruments, I asked Google’s Gemini to “help me understand the role of a bass guitar in a band”.
I quote:
If a band is a building, the bass is the foundation—you don't always notice it until it's missing, at which point the whole structure collapses
If the bassist isn’t perfectly synced with the drummer’s kick drum, the song feels “sloppy” regardless of how good the melody
A band without bass sounds thin and small.
So, I prompted - “this sounds a lot like the role of early capital in a young startup. Am I hallucinating in thinking this?”
If a startup is a garage band, the CEO (vocalist) gets all the accolades, and guitarist the attention. The bass remains audible but in the shadow
Too much money is like too much loudness, when there is too much of either, the groove is gone
Even the best product (melody) needs weight of capital to fill the room
Perhaps the above is a stretch and professional musician colleagues from the Iowa Writers Collaborative will correct me. I get the sense the AIs weren’t hallucinating in extending this metaphor.
Innoventure Iowa
Much has been written about this entity, yet much remains misunderstood. What stands true, however, is the immense impact the organization has had on Iowa’s startup landscape across agriculture, AI, advanced manufacturing, biosciences, and pure technology companies.
The American Rescue Plan Act injected $1.9 trillion in economic stimulus nationwide to accelerate recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic via direct relief to individuals, businesses, and governments. A portion was earmarked for states to apply for funds used to spur entrepreneurship via State Small Credit Business Initiative (SSBCI). Iowa applied for and received $96M. Innoventure Iowa represents about 40% of those funds that are deployed in an evergreen venture fund model. Returns from the investments are designed to be reinvested in promising future businesses. Unlike traditional VC funds, InnoVenture Iowa didn’t raise funds from lots of limited partners, does not provide carried interest to its leadership team or the board, administratively reports via BioConnect Iowa to the Iowa Economic Development Authority and the United States Treasury, and will not distribute future earnings to any limited partners.
Since its inception, Innoventure Iowa has invested $13.4M of the $40M in its corpus. As with private venture funds, it has reserved $20M in capital for follow-on investments in successful portfolio companies. It is governed by an Investment Committee and is a strong partner to Iowa’s private venture ecosystem.
InnoVenture Iowa, like the bass guitarist, provides foundational support to startups. Companies within the targeted sectors apply to InnoVenture for funding consideration once they have secured a private/leading source of capital. Leveraging its significant corpus, it matches a startup’s private fundraising with a meaningful amount of capital.
Despite Iowans’ humility, Kaylee and her team find themselves elevating Iowa startups in the eyes of peers outside Iowa. Out-of-state venture funds with little to no exposure here in flyover country receive InnoVenture’s outreach to Iowa companies. The annual InnoVenture Challenge further platforms innovations in Iowa for investors who are increasingly traveling to Des Moines for exposure to innovations born here.
And through it all, Kaylee is on stage, hyping up the crowd with boundless optimism and contagious stage presence.
Origins
Kaylee grew up in Cedar Falls, daughter of Maureen (Mo) Collins-Williams and Dave Williams, and sister to Rob and Clair. Mom was the Director of Entrepreneurship Outreach at the University of Northern Iowa and her parents together owned their small business called Antiques of Marion, so entrepreneurship flowed through conversations. No surprise then, that a young Kaylee found herself with a $100 investment from mom to launch a dog walking business. That early push led her to $5/per dog per walk and gave her a taste for independence, trailing behind four to five leashed companions around the neighborhood.
Kaylee developed an interest in art. Her parents encouraged her to join band and choir in middle and high school, and she would often walk to Java Joe’s on Saturday mornings growing up to draw in her favorite seat by the window. She learned how art and skill evolve through time and practice. Poetry entered her life around this time and she found creative ways to blend the two, continuing these passions into college where she pursued a degree in English.
Music and Startups
Kaylee began working for a startup in Des Moines called VolunteerLocal with an office in the city’s entrepreneurial incubator, Startup City Des Moines. Lovingly called ‘the island of misfit toys’, Startup City was a regular hangout for Marco Santana, an early journalist focused squarely on startups and entrepreneurship for the Des Moines Register. Working on a story he asked, ‘how is playing bass guitar in a bluegrass band like building a startup’?
River Glen, her partner then and now well-known Iowa singer songwriter, had gifted Kaylee a bass guitar and taught her to play. She found herself closing her laptop each day at StartupCity only to open her guitar case to play gigs at night in a duo act with River. The parallel between the startup and band was obvious to her: in business and in music, you are always performing. As a startup team member by day and a creative at night, she was adopting the life-long entrepreneur lifestyle-constantly building, constantly selling, and constantly engaging with audiences. As in a startup, the artist was creating art live, in the moment, accepting the applause and the failure, winning or losing in the public eye.
Kaylee continued to compose music and lyrics in her mid-20s. She left the band in time, just as her personal repertoire and skill increased. She added an acoustic guitar to her collection and began writing her own songs.
Those failed or successful experiments added to the confidence now plainly visible whenever Kaylee steps on stage to hype Iowa startups. That learned experience is her constant reminder to take big risks and share your successes and failures. Hiding only prevents growth.
You won’t ever start if you don’t love your garbage
Our discussion meandered into Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird. In it, Anne offers advice on overcoming perfectionism, tacking large projects, and finding inspiration in everyday life, all frame by her father’s advice to her brother to write a report, ‘bird by bird”. Building iteratively, the practice of embracing what worked and letting go the rest is what Kaylee calls loving your garbage.
What holds our community back is the innate fear of letting go. Zombie startups with failed hypotheses continue to struggle, afraid of letting go. Failed programs are kept alive for fear of negative news stores. Despite living in a culture of planting anew each spring, our entrepreneurial communities continue to irrigate and fertilize failed crops.
Kaylee’s thoughts resonated with my feelings on the topic. We aren’t shedding enough, which is keeping us from building enough. Kaylee shared her belief that ecosystems, including entrepreneurial ecosystems, need to grow like forests, wild and redundant. Healthy ecosystems thrive on feed what works and destroy what doesn’t.
Launching Eat Free Pie DSM
Kaylee has always had a penchant for volunteer work, and no shortage of charitable causes she cares about – perhaps no surprise she was drawn to (and spent nearly a decade of her life building) a software company designed to help people volunteer more easily and more often in their communities. I plan to bring you VolunteerLocal’s story in the future but, in brief, VolunteerLocal is an early company in Iowa’s startup ecosystem that boasts an international book of business and employs a small team here in Des Moines.
I asked Kaylee about Eat Free Pie DSM, a charitable event she started in Beaverdale in 2020 that has expanded city-wide in the last five years. The concept for Eat Free Pie was born from her elderly neighbor, Chuck Reed, who shared with her that he’d be isolating on Thanksgiving Day to avoid getting sick. He asked if she’d bake him a pie and she agreed, delivering it to him the next day from across their shared driveway.
It was her sister Clair who wondered if there were other immunocompromised people like Chuck who might find cheer in a free pie on Thanksgiving Day. The two sisters created a sign-up for their neighborhood (using VolunteerLocal, of course) and called their effort “Eat Free Pie”. Nearly forty pies were requested, baked and delivered by Kaylee, Clair and friends in that first year’s effort.
Despite the world’s miraculous reopening by Thanksgiving 2021, neighbors and friends wanted the community effort to continue. Last year, Clair and Kaylee delivered nearly 200 pies to residents all throughout Des Moines and were featured on Iowa Public Radio in an interview with Charity Nebbe.
Beth Howard, who at the time was creating a documentary focused on the role of role of pie in Iowa culture, pie’s unique place in Americana, and the role of pie’s analogous pastries in other cultures heard of this effort and connected. It is Kaylee, Clair, Maureen, Brenna, and multitudes of volunteers who are profiled in Beth’s amazing movie Pieowa.
Transitions
Kaylee has morphed more than once in the 15 years I’ve known her. The artist of her teen years remains active even as her investment team at InnoVenture delves deeper into the numerical and analytic pursuits of venture investing. She is naturally active with the startup community and the brainchild behind the upcoming “Iowa Startup Week” this fall, pulling together community, sponsors, investors, friends, and startups. She is still composing music, now for her one-year-old son, Gus, still illustrating and still baking pies every year with her sister for Eat Free Pie DSM. Kaylee is an optimist and a builder, and her impact continues to grow with each passing year, continuing her mom’s tradition of helping build Iowa’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Why I think these individual stories are important?
Creative individuals live and work across the state, in rural communities, suburbia and urban centers. They are writers, poets, singers, musicians, photographers, YouTubers, authors, speakers, podcasters and so much more. The Internet has given them the world as a potential market, and many are creating their own versions of the Silk Road. The Okoboji Writers and Songwriters Retreat is one such venue where creatives assemble to share, expand, and hone their craft.
Most are independent, individual, and creative in their special spaces - be it a comfortable nook, an intimate stage, a pottery studio or even a car on the open road. They may not be building IPO-ready businesses yet are creating a life and livelihood unique to their need, passion, and initiative.
She had me at the Pieowa name!
Fun story, Tej!