One of the reasons I love this town is that we are a little blue island in a vast sea of Florida red.
But it’s not just that.
GNV is also an awesome island of creativity, innovation and invention in a Florida sea awash in strip malls, tourist traps, condos and ideological group-think.
Here in GNV we live or die on a culture of collaboration that, these days, seems almost quaint in the context of contemporary American cut-throat capitalism.
Which is the other thing I love about GNV. We don’t vote people off our island. Rather, we hoist them up on our shoulders.
Case in point: I wrote a story about two University of Florida engineering grads who have, improbably, landed a $250,000 U.S. Space Force contract to design the prototype for a modular satellite that may, one day, help clear earth orbit of space debris.
Wait! What?
Listen, these guys are barely halfway through their ‘20s. What can they possibly know? If they’re so smart why aren’t they working for Space Ships R Us or some other multi-national conglomerate with an army of scientists, lobbyists and pols on the payroll?
So what’s the deal?
Turns out that what Logan Ritten and Austin Keatley do have in their favor is the full force and weight of the GNV innovation-collaboration community behind them. Check it out.
Logan – a UF aerospace engineering grad – was working in a beef jerky store. Austin – with a Gator mechanical engineering degree – was toiling away for an Atlanta audio-visual tech company that seemed a dead end, career wise.
Ah, but one does not simply leap out of the dried meat and see-hear trades and into the space biz without a little help from one’s friends.
So they formed Ares Orbital Corp. But on their own they had no hope getting the funding needed to develop the “micro autonomous rocket system” of their dreams.
Turns out it takes an island to raise a techie.
First they won $10,000 in the OneSixOne Accelerator/Pitch Competition, “That really helped get us started,” Logan told me. OneSixOne being a GNV entry-level venture fund that helps local entrepreneurs get a leg. up.
But wait! To qualify for Space Force funding, they also needed an influential partner. So Logan turned to one of his former UF professors, Rick Lind, who agreed to sign on as principal investigator. Next thing you know, UF is designing an artificial intelligence “brain” for Logan’s and Austin’s proposed “Athena” vehicle.
“When Logan mentioned they were doing this, I’m was amazed,” Lind told me. “When students are willing to go off on their own and try to be entrepreneurs UF has resources to help them get a foothold.”
Enter Augie Lye.
Augie is a classically trained violinist turned UF computer engineering grad who hit it big with a video game called “Dungeon Defenders.”
But not right off.
Like Logan and Austin, Augie needed some help way back when. Enter Gainesville businessman Ken McGurn.
The two met at a party. Ken asked Augie “What do you do?” Augie replied “I’m a genius.” From which conversation McGurn gave Lye work space so he could get his computer game empire off the ground.
Flash forward.
Now Augie is President of Chromatic Games and doing very well, thank you very much. He gets an email from a UF source suggesting he might want to talk to the duo of Ritten and Keatley.
“I grabbed coffee with them and it ended up taking four hours,” Augie told me. “We started talking about space propulsion and alien technology. And it just hit me that these kids are crazy enough to to pull it off.”
Long story short, Lye loaned an equipped warehouse he owns to Logan and Austin. They worked there for nearly a year before they were able to move into a rented work space they could call their own.
Talk about paying it forward.
I asked Augie why he did that. He said “because we’re all on the same island. Especially here in GNV” so far removed from the usual centers of venture capitalism.
Listen, I dunno if Logan and Austin are gonna make it in the space biz. For all I know they may crash and burn. Nothing is assured in the start-up multiverse.
What I do know is that they have a shot right now because they are…
…a, intelligent, well educated and motivated and,
…b, they have a dream and,
…c, UF has their backs and,
…d, there is a coffee collaborative here in our little island of innovation that can help give them at least a fighting chance of making it into space and beyond.
Having gotten this far, they hope to raise $1 million through the UF-affiliated Gainesville Tech Fund and other community-based venture capital “angels.” And good luck to them.
Oh, and because I am an old editorial writer who feels a compulsion to editorialize, I must tack on this cautionary note.
Listen if Ron DeSantiser manages to cleanse the University of Florida of all suspect and impure influences, then there is a very good chance that much of the creativity, innovation, inventiveness and collaboration that has made it possible for a couple of talented young guys like Logan and Austin to reach for the stars will inevitably get washed away in the rinse.
Because that very bubbling caldron of inquisitiveness that DeSantiser wants to cool down is itself the fountainhead of GNV’s creative community.
But that’s a topic for another blog.
Right now, let’s just hear it for a couple of young Gators who embody the best that our little island of intellectual collaboration has to offer.
I love this town.
FreeGNV 