Wisbusiness: The Podcast

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a conversation with Bill Murphy, director of the recently announced Forward BIO Institute. Murphy is a professor of biomedical engineering at UW-Madison. The Forward BIO Institute was announced late last week as part of the Forward BIO Initiative, a new effort focused on translating research into industry applications. “What I’ve discovered over the past 15 years of doing research at the University of Wisconsin is that the greatest impact we can have is if our technologies, our inventions, make their way out of the university and get out into companies that can generate products,” he said. Murphy says the Forward BIO Institute will be partnering with several groups, including the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. “WARF is an example of a logical partner; WARF’s goals are our goals,” he said. “They want to see these groundbreaking technologies get translated into impactful solutions to medical problems. “What we want to do is allow that p

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Dave Gee and Professor William Dougan, directors of UW-Whitewater’s Launch Pad, a startup accelerator for students. In under 10 years, the program has led to several success stories, including Scanalytics of Madison, which has developed a floor sensor analytics platform. “One of our really big successes is Joe Scanlan and Scanalytics, which has gone on to get a significant amount of traction with his value proposition, and has attracted a significant amount of capital,” Dougan said. Another Launch Pad grad made it all the way to ABC’s “Shark Tank.” Though Henry Schwartz didn’t win over the judges, his beer startup called MobCraft got a significant bump in orders and online traffic after appearing on the cable show. “We also have a student, Sam Lukach, and he founded a startup that actually helps people mount TVs to dorm room beds,” Gee said. “He got a large contract, I believe it was about a $2 million contract, with a company that provides AV

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Jocelyn Kopac, a small business consultant based in Johnson Creek. She focuses on digital marketing, but says she often ends up playing the role of business coach, guiding decisions in a number of areas. Specializing in companies with about five employees or fewer, she says one of the most common questions is, “How do I start?” “I don’t know how many people have come to me over and over… ‘How did you start? How did you get to where you are?’” she said. “I tell them, you just have to launch. I see these businesses starting, but they never launch themselves into their business.” She says many of these businesses struggle with their own identity, trying to brand themselves “eight different ways, because whoever bites is whoever’s going to bite.” She adds: “The world is a big place; the internet is a big place. There are people that are looking for specifically what you’re doing; it’s just a matter of reaching them.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a discussion with Kim Litwack, dean of the College of Nursing at UW-Milwaukee. She discusses an initiative the university is launching alongside Heritage Senior Living, a West Allis company with about 20 care facilities across the state. Through this partnership, students will be researching technologies like virtual reality and social robotics in the context of these care facilities. “It’s not just cardiac monitors and IV pumps and things that everyone can use -- these are special,” she said. “To be on the driving edge and help design them, determine best practices, I think will be very appealing to students.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Derek Zenger, co-founder for LUM, a music startup that’s launching its platform Friday. “We’ve been hearing grumblings within the music community for artists not being able to promote and advocate for themselves and getting drowned out by corporate music, as well as fans lacking the ability to discover these very talented artists that are connected,” he said. LUM, or Live Undiscovered Music, is seen by its founders as a way to solve both of these problems with one platform. “LUM is a music-streaming and discovery application that’s actually built on a standalone social network,” he said. “It really allows for this opportunity that doesn’t currently exist for fans, music lovers, artists, venues and the whole music community to interact with each other and listen and discover music on one single platform.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a chat with Dean Foreman, chief economist for the American Petroleum Institute. He discusses a “renaissance” in energy in the United States, driven by innovation and new technology. He also gives his take on the ongoing tariffs situation, and how it could affect the energy industry in Wisconsin. “When you’re producing a lot of farm machinery, automotive things and selling these globally, there’s a lot of plastics, a lot of materials that go into that,” he said. “These are all byproducts of the energy renaissance.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Craig Doriot, CEO for an Appleton-based animation startup called Dodles. “Dodles is a social animation platform, and that means we make it really easy for people to animate, even if you have no artistic abilities,” he said. “We really try to reinvent the animation process to simplify it, and make it mobile-friendly so people can do this right form their phones.” Doriot got the company started with $2 million of his own money. Last year, local investors contributed to a $300,000 funding round, and a $600,000 is currently underway with just over $450,000 raised.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a chat with Lisa Johnson, CEO of BioForward Wisconsin. This Madison-based nonprofit supports the state’s biohealth industry, putting on events and providing relevant services and resources. It represents over 200 Wisconsin companies in fields like medical devices, diagnostics and digital health, as well as research institutions and others involved in the industry. She discusses an initiative called “Women in Biohealth,” which began in 2017 and helps provide opportunities for professional development. “It’s really a support network,” she said. “A safe environment, to really uplift women and give them the tools they need to advance in companies.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a discussion with Ellen Sexton, CEO of UnitedHealthcare Community Plan of Wisconsin. She discusses the social determinants of health -- things like education, housing, food, access to medical care and more. These factors are getting increased attention from insurance companies and other businesses involved in health care, as improving them can lead to fewer costs down the road. “One of the things that we’re looking at launching is with some of our most complex members, people that have high ER visits and impactable cost of care,” she said. “Actually subsidizing their rent and putting them into housing… then wrap-around support services to get them the care they need, be it substance abuse or working on their diabetes.” UnitedHealthcare has about 9,000 employees in the state, and covers over 1.6 million people in Wisconsin. Of that number, over 1.2 million are covered through individual or employer-sponsored coverage; about 292,000 are seniors in

This week's episode of "WisBusiness: The Podcast" features Lucas Frisbie, startup team strategist for StartingBlock Madison. He discusses the recent soft launch event of the entrepreneurial group's co-working space and offices, and talks about how the startups he works with are adjusting to their new digs. Looking ahead, Frisbie touches on some of StartingBlock's planned events and the importance of getting community buy-in for the space to thrive. "We want people to remember that this isn't just for StartingBlock, this is for the community in general," Frisbie said. "It's going to take the community itself to come together to build and get to where we want to be."

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a chat with Christopher Patterson, CEO of Madison-based Metisoft Solutions. The discussion is about blockchain -- the technology behind cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and other industry advances. “The key characteristics of blockchain technology which makes it so valuable is its acts as a ledger to record transactions in a which that is immutable -- you can’t change them after the fact,” he said. “It’s distributed, so not just one computer or one organization has access. And it also provides a means of trust in an environment that might otherwise be trustless.” He discusses how blockchain can be used in supply chain management and other spaces; he also gives his take on where blockchain is headed. “There is a lot of talk about blockchain disrupting established financial industries, and I can see that happening -- in the far future,” he said. “Not in the next five years, because in the next five years the technology is still going to be matu

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Grady Buchanan, the co-founder and CEO of OmniValley. Buchanan is an investment analyst with the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. The OmniValley platform is a private, online community for professionals in his space -- investors, venture capital firms, accelerator organizations and others. After launching in March, OmniValley now has more than 100 members. “One of the luxuries that I have as an institutional investor, we can connect with other institutions -- we’re a fairly close-knit group,” he said. “The world is pretty small altogether, and our world is even smaller.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” is with Pete Layton, CEO and owner of Tallgrass Restoration, a Milton company that restores land to its natural state with native plants and animal species. “When the earlier settlers came here they did a lot of planting in the wetlands because they could plow it up,” he said. Nowadays, when businesses impact wetlands with a development, they are required to do some restoration to offset the damage done to the environment. “What they’ve found is it’s much better to hire a firm like ours -- that are professionals about it and do it on a large scale -- and get their wetland credits from us,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Andrew Verboncouer, president of Digital Fertilizer, a northeast Wisconsin entrepreneurial support group. This community-building group is celebrating its fifth anniversary next week in Green Bay. “What we try to do is engage, connect and empower the startup community in northeast Wisconsin,” he said. “We bring in speakers, sometimes from the Fox Valley, sometimes from San Francisco, Chicago, to really share their story and some hiccups along the journey.” He says this inspires community members to get started with their own business ideas and take some risks as they lean on the resources available through Digital Fertilizer. This podcast was recorded last week in Madison at the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs Conference.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a discussion with John Ernst and Irene Strohbeen (pictured here) of Kinnektor, a Fox Valley entrepreneurship group with plans to extend its reach into the greater Midwest. “When we look at other regions, we see there are many nodes involved in making the ecosystem successful, and helping each individual that has a business-related mission and goal to accomplish,” Ernst said. He sees help coming from: entrepreneurial support organizations like Kinnektor, venture capital investors, universities, accelerators and other groups. “What I see in the future and what we hope to see here in Wisconsin is that there is acceptance for many nodes to participate, which helps widen diversity, not only in discipline but in thought,” he said. “I realized, I have quite a bit I can contribute to mentoring and helping to guide startups because that’s essentially what I’ve been doing for most of my career,” Strohbeen said. “What I really enjoy doing is providing ad

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Jonathan Wiggins, president and CEO of Madison-based sports startup called myAgame. He’s developing an “interactive playbook” for use by football teams and their coaches, with a second round of beta testing to begin in the fall. “We’re going to have a few teams utilizing our software. My goal is to have 30 teams total -- 20 youth, 10 high schools -- across the state,” he said. “I just want to build on the success we had last year with Memorial High School’s program.” The school’s football team hadn’t won a game in four years, and hadn’t won more than one game per season in nine years. After implementing the myAgame system, “they were eight seconds away from making the playoffs for the first time since 2000 -- so that’s huge.” Coaches send their playbook into the company to be digitized, so that player-specific assignments can be sent out the night before a game. Players can sign into the platform from any internet portal, practice their assign

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Don Eisenhauer, the program director for Young Rembrandts Metro Milwaukee. This company goes into local schools and school districts in the Milwaukee area to put on before- and after-school art activities with a goal of supplementing existing art programs. Parents pay the company directly for these activities, which are hosted with permission from the school. Eisenhauer says this provides creative growth opportunities for kids that are dwindling as funding for art programs dries up in some areas and schools statewide put increasing focus on high-stakes testing. “I believe the future worker is going to have more success in any job -- whether it’s developing products or offering a service -- I strongly believe that any worker will have more success if they have more right-brain or more creative ability,” he said.

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Karen and Eric Riggers, co-founders for Appleton-based food startup Reinvent Ferment. After starting the company late last year, they began selling their fermented food products in early 2018. Though they do have their own version of sauerkraut, they also sell kimchi, and curried cauliflower as well as fermented fruit products like mango and raspberry. Their goal with this company is to provide all-natural foods with positive benefits on digestive health. “Living fermented foods introduce good bugs,” she said. “Your gut health is responsible for your immunity, it’s responsible for inflammation in body systems… we also know gut health is also responsible for our mental health -- you have more serotonin in your gut than in your brain.” She says that’s where the idea of “gut instinct,” or “gut feeling” comes from. “In a western diet, that’s largely based on processed foods that we heat pasteurize to kill bad bugs, but we’ve also killed all of t

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features a discussion with Jignesh Patel, a computer sciences professor at UW-Madison. He discusses the role of computer sciences in Wisconsin’s biggest industries, explaining how agriculture, manufacturing and health care are being transformed as technology becomes more widespread. “Every sector of our economy is now becoming data-driven [but] in many cases we are still in very early days,” he said. “You act on what the data is telling you now based on patterns that you’ve inferred, from collecting and learning… you can make better decisions, you can make manufacturing much more economical.”

This week’s episode of “WisBusiness: The Podcast” features Shirley Malski, an international business consultant at the Small Business Development Center in UW-Oshkosh. She helps businesses identify opportunities and resources for international trade as they work to develop a global presence. In this discussion, she talks about the importance of international trade to Wisconsin companies. “Oftentimes, you can see mitigation of risk by diversifying across a number of different economies and a number of different geopolitical environments,” she said. “Here your product might be in a mature or even a declining stage, but if you introduce it to a new market somewhere, it’s probably going to be in a growth stage.”