PBS Wisconsin Documentaries

The following program is a co-production of the University of Wisconsin- Madison and Wisconsin Public Television, with additional financial support of the Dwight and Linda Davis Foundation.

coins clinking, spinning, dropping

Jon Eckhardt

There are no rules.

Dan Olszewski

You know, it's not a sure thing by a long shot.

Steven Deller

But some of the most successful entrepreneurs out there are just simply... driven.

cash register "ka-chings"

coins roll out

receipt paper tears

Steven Deller

female narrator

Be your own boss. Make more money. Work flexible hours. All reasons someone may go into business for themselves. But sometimes it's a reversal of fortune that sparks the entrepreneurial spirit.

Katie Brenner

And that was the moment. That was the "Ah-ha" moment for me. For one entrepreneur, a heavy heart and a new discovery have her on the path to help other families who face a similar struggle that she once endured. And that keeps me going. I can think back to how it felt to be in that situation. Street that people... Another is driven to give his hometown the second chance it needs.

Zach Halmstad

I hope it's a place that they can be proud to call home. -But for these two entrepreneurs and for many others across Wisconsin, it's not simply business as usual. The bottom line is the bottom line. But, I've never seen someone so motivated by other things before the bottom line.

Steven Deller

People go into business because they're passionate about something.

Dan Olszewski

And it's really all about solving a problem. From Main Street to the science lab, the entrepreneurial spirit is hard at work to help Startup Wisconsin.

traffic sounds

dramatic music

Dan Olszewski

2007 will be remembered by many in the US

as the beginning of a tremendous financial upheaval

the bursting of the housing bubble, heavy losses on the financial market, a massive loss of jobs. A decade later, the country-- and Wisconsin-- are still feeling the impacts. The state of Wisconsin is experiencing a very slow recovery after 'The Great Recession.' And, our wages are starting to lag behind. So, if you look at it in terms of just jobs, we're doing ok. But, if you look at it in terms of income, we're not doing that well. We have too many communities in Wisconsin that are heavily dependent on one or two employers. And if those one or two employers close, the community is devastated. If we can diversify our economic base by having more entrepreneurs, more small businesses, it creates a more robust local economy. These key players in creating a more dynamic economy can be grouped into two broad types. There's the lifestyle or Main Street entrepreneur...

Jon Eckhardt

Maybe it's a small coffee shop, and the idea is that that entity, in most cases, stays small, and their aspiration is to have a lifestyle around that coffee shop. The other type of entrepreneurship we often call high-growth entrepreneurship. This is where somebody's aspiration is to build a very large enterprise, not just one coffee shop but this might be somebody who might say I'm going to start a chain of coffee shops. And how they define success is essentially how much wealth is created, how many jobs are created, and how big their enterprise ultimately becomes.

Dan Olszewski

We really talk about entrepreneurship as an ecosystem. Just a mix that makes the whole system work. You need some of these high-growth businesses that may be very technology- oriented and have patents. But then you also need a whole host of these smaller Main Street businesses. And the mixture of them makes for the healthiest economy. Healthy economies build healthy communities. From bakeries to biotech, Wisconsin's homegrown entrepreneurs are bringing new opportunities to their hometowns. That means that entrepreneurship is extremely important. The vast majority of businesses that are in Wisconsin, are here because this is where the business owner lived when they started the business.

Zach Halmstad

I grew up here in Eau Claire, and spent my entire life growing up on the west side of town. I eventually went on to the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire and studied music there. You know it was home, it was a really great music program, and I knew the town really well. Music wasn't Zach Halmstad's only talent. My old office when I worked here was right over there. He worked on campus supporting a network of 200 Apple computers and began creating new software tools that made his IT job more efficient, while making it faster to get new computers into the hands of users. We have these amazing teachers and these amazing students at the university here, and if technology is in their way, they're not teaching as well and they're not learning as much. If we can help get that technology out of their way, they can actually be better at their jobs or better at learning. Music led him to college, but it was his interest in technology that was about to take him on a different path. I'd really gotten a good handle on what problems an IT administrator faced when they were trying to deploy Apple products in their environment. We started building tools at the university to address some of those problems. But I really thought that if we went out and did this on our own as a company, with this purpose, we could actually make a big impact on the world and help people solve this problem worldwide. The most successful entrepreneurs are really good at recognizing the customer's problem, and coming up with a solution to solve that problem. So, with $1,800 in his pocket, a laptop, and a desire to help companies work better with Macs, Zach launched Jamf Software. From 2002 to 2006, it was just two or three of us working out of coffee shops and bars. I was trying to use every second of my free time to try and write software. After that, you had to try and get it to people. And we would get on planes constantly. Every penny that we made, we spent on flights to go visit the next customer. By year five, Zach's company had thirteen employees, and was ready to set-up a small office in Minneapolis and another in his hometown, Eau Claire. Eau Claire, however, had seen better days. At the turn of the century, many cities across Wisconsin relied on lumber or agriculture. The industrial revolution then brought manufacturing. But by the 1980s, many of the factories had closed, and the city identities changed. Eau Claire was no exception. It started making a change of more of what I would call white collar professional. Just about the time that sprawl was happening. About the time I was 10 or 15, everything started leaving the downtown area and going out to the outskirts of town. The two malls that we had drove a lot of that. So, when that happened, a lot of traffic and retail shopping stopped in the downtown. And so, it started to decay and that focus on being downtown sort of left. When you did come through downtown, you noticed that it was definitely a much different place to be. It had kind of a ghost town feel to it. Loving his hometown and seeing it struggle, Zach was determined to help give it a second chance-- a second chance by opening Jamf in the heart of downtown Eau Claire. When I first started working at Jamf, it was four guys and a storefront, and one of them was my husband. They didn't have office furniture or anything on the walls. Julia actually ran point for us, kind of just as a friend to come in and help us find the space. Made sure it was more than just a couch, 'cause I think that's what we were planning on moving in with. And they'd sit on the couch in this storefront, and people would come in with their iPhones and be like, "Do you fix Apple stuff?" We really wanted to be downtown. We really felt like if we were going to start creating an office in Eau Claire that we wanted to be in the center of town.

Julia Johnson

Zach remembered what the downtown had been. And he thought, "Hey, we're only four people, but that's better than not being here." Launching Jamf in his hometown wasn't Zach's only challenge. The commitment to focus solely on the Apple platform was endangered by th e market dominance of Windows. The entrepreneurial spirit is that ability to persevere. The ability to look beyond what's the current status quo. When we founded Jamf in 2002, it was actually Apple's worst fiscal year since 1983. From about 2004 until 2010, someone told us on a weekly basis that we had to do Windows if we ever wanted to be a real company. So, we continued to do what we believed in and where our knowledge actually lied. And probably around 2010 or 2011, people stopped saying that.

upbeat instrumental

Julia Johnson

More and more organizations began adopting the Apple platform on a larger scale, and soon, business was booming for Jamf Software. Today, Zach and his team have ei ght offices around the world, employing 650 people, and a client base of 10,000 customers. For Zach's hometown of Eau Claire, this has meant a new office building downtown and 200 new jobs. Eau Claire is home. Eau Claire is home for a lot of us, even people that maybe didn't grow up here but have been here 10 years now. I hope that it's a place that their children can grow up and have all the experiences that they would want their children to have.

I want a flower. - Mom

Yep. I think we'll pick some flowers that are a little bit easier to carry, okay? But I want my own flower. You can build phenomenal companies almost anywhere. Although he has offices in many different locations, his base and his home is in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Being an entrepreneur for me has never been about making a lot of money or being my own boss. It's really been about seeing a problem and going out and trying to solve that problem.

laughing

I want a flower. - Mom

Here we go. Let's get some green beans in there. Problem solving is often at the heart of the entrepreneurial spirit. But for Katie Brenner, the problem she faced hit particularly close to home. You always appreciate having kids, but when it's hard to have kids you appreciate it even just that little bit more. Yay! Good job. My struggles with fertility really came to a head later when we were trying to have more kids. I had the same problem as many women. I didn't want to talk about it. It was embarrassing. It felt like failure. It felt like a personal failure. A personal failure, compounded by months of at-home fertility tests and inconclusive blood tests. Finally, Katie's lifelong passion, turned career, had her believing there was a better option. So, I actually turned to the scientific literature and started reading to try to figure out what my test results might mean. And when I was doing that, I uncovered a paper from the 1990s where scientists had developed a way of measuring hormones in saliva. And that was the moment. That was the ah-ha moment for me.

birds chirping

I want a flower. - Mom

As a researcher at the Un iversity of Wisconsin-Madison, Katie decided to test this theory in the lab. She was determined to find a way to accurately measure the two key hormones linked to fertility by testing through saliva, instead of blood. Timing is critical for fertility testing. Blood tests and ultrasounds can take months. If we could provide a test to women on a daily basis that would allow them to make those measurements in the comfort of their own home, we could give them the information that they need to get pregnant. After countless hours, and some creative chemistry, Katie made a breakthrough. She had developed a chemical formula that could accurately measure the trace amounts of the two fertility hormones in saliva. But this discovery was only the beginning. If I kept it in a lab, it would be a great science project. But if I wanted to actually make something and distribute it to women across the globe, there needed to be a business to make that happen. Entrepreneurship is the pure embodiment of the Wisconsin Idea. They're taking that next extra step from being an inventor in the lab to building a product or a service, and a company that has broad impact across the state and beyond. That intersection with business is actually what's going to help disseminate the findings and make it something that's useable in the real world in medical practice. So many of these businesses, like Katie's, have the potential to make a world of difference in individuals' lives. The transition from the science world to the business world was uncharted territory for Katie. She turned to a program on campus

designed to help students make that transition

The Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Bootcamp. An intensive, entrepreneurial training program for graduate students, introducing them to a wide range of concepts from how to raise financing, to building an innovative culture in their startup. What we're hoping they get out of this is they can go forward in their career and keep engaged and excited about this very daunting entrepreneurial journey. It was exactly what this idea needed in order to really get moving. With a crash course in business under her belt and a scientific discovery on her mind, Katie's next step was to build a team. Hey, Doug. How's it going? Hey! How are you guys doing? She partnered with her former UW lab mentor, Doug Weibel, to help on the science front, and Jodi Schroll for her bu siness background in biotech. I loved the idea of what she was trying to accomplish, so I joined the team. Together, they formed BluDiagnostics, and got to work developing a saliva-based home fertility test for women.

The plan was to have it consist of three parts

a disposable test strip with Katie's breakthrough formula, an electronic reader to pull the results from that test strip, and a mobile app to receive those results. One of their biggest challenges... the technology behind the reader. We're working on ways to miniaturize that. We want this to be handheld and really easy to use. Katie believes this gap in technology is one reason wh y saliva-based hormone testing didn't initially take off in the 90s. I think a lot of time findings need the right timing. So, you can have something really important discovered that will not hit the right note in terms of where the field is. The field may be looking in a different direction. But Katie wasn't. She was determined to keep pushing the science and technology behind her fertility test. I can think back to how it felt to be in that situation. And, that keeps me going. For Katie, this is personal. She knows what women face with their fertility issues. It gives her a passion and a drive then to pursue this in a real way. People thought it would be a great idea, but the technology just wasn't there to accomplish it. Now it is. Today, Katie and her team are closer than ever before. After several prototypes, their electronic reader has become much smaller, and they're confident a final design is right around the corner. In the meantime,

they face the same challenges as so many other startups

fundraising and research to finish their product. But, Katie's initial discovery may be just the tip of the iceberg. It could just open a whole new door in terms of our understanding of hormones. If you measure one hormone, what's to stop you from measuring other hormones? Katie's discovery could be further explored to help with menopause, osteoporosis, and even Alzheimer's research. With entrepreneurism, it's not just the potential of the idea that's important, but also the person behind it. Our bottom line is helping women. What this means to me is saving a lot of women the stress and anxiety that I experienced. In entrepreneurship, there is often a saying that "You bet on the jockey, not the horse." Investors are probably saying, "I like the idea "and I trust this team is going to figure it out, and that's why I want to invest in it." So, I think she is very much that successful jockey going forward. Two Wisconsin entrepreneurs with different passions, but a similar goal of making life better. And to achieve that goal, they couldn't work alone. If I was in this alone, there would be no Jamf. But the amazing people we found are a huge part of what made this successful. If you look at innovative firms, they are less interested in hiring someone who comes in with a particular set of technical skills. They're more interested in hiring people that are able to think about things critically, and are able to solve problems. It's not necessarily that they're looking for the perfect person for a job. They're looking for a perfect person to learn that job. They have gone to school. They spent that time learning how to learn, and they can come apply those same principles to what we do. Zach Halmstad says he recognizes the talent coming out of Wisconsin's universities.

The problem

keeping that talent here. We have this conundrum of people willing to get educated in the Midwest and then looking elsewhere for jobs because they don't have the opportunities that they're looking for in, say, Wisconsin. It's really a two-way street. It's people leaving the state, and it's also educated people coming into the state. But when you look at the number of folks moving into Wisconsin, that's where we fall short. It's a net loss. That's the brain drain. One way cities are countering brain drain, is by improving the city's at mosphere and quality of life. So, what folks are looking for is that city experience but not quite so congested. And that's where places like a Madison or an Eau Claire can actually start to take advantage of some of that, that transition away from these big-tiered cities to these second-tiered cities. In Eau Claire, building quality of life opportunities, took its own entrepreneurial vision. A new waterfront park replaced a former industrial brownfield with walking paths, bike trails and a year-round farmer's market. And an ambitious downtown revitalization was proposed. Known as the Confluence Project, it includes student housing, retail space and a performing arts center. But to move forward, it would need the support of both entrepreneurs and the community. It's very easy to find a reason to say "no" to anything. But, finding the reasons to say "yes" are really what help us as a culture move forward. It feels like someone hasn't done it for a long time. It's a great community, there are incredible people here. And, for us to say "yes" is to give it the chance that it should have had for the last two decades. Using the same entrepreneurial problem-solving vision that built Jamf, Zach turned his attention to help the downtown revitalization. He set his sights on the tallest building, a former hotel. We used to actually come to this hotel here for holiday dinners. They would have a big Easter dinner, a big Christmas dinner, and things like that. And that just stopped happening. Over the course of time, it went from local ownership to out of town ownership. No renovations were made, and it deteriorated. It was often pointed to as a failure in downtown Eau Claire and used as an example of why nothing good could happen in downtown Eau Claire. That's when Zach stepped in. Zach, Julia, and Jason Wudi, one of the early partners in Jamf, decided to purchase the hotel after its doors were closed following a foreclosure. But the hotel's troubling reputation was about to be the least of their worries. We learned very quickly how bad the state of the hotel actually was. The entire heating system had just been cobbled together. It cost about $30,000 a month just to prevent the pipes from freezing. What mechanical can be saved? Hardly anything. A little bit in the halls, but that's it. The elevators were hit or miss, whether or not they worked at all. Not a single surface in the entire hotel was actually worth trying to save. This was a huge project, and I waddled around eight-months pregnant going, "What did we get ourselves into?"

laughs

The problem

Problems continued to mount, including having to replace the entire facade of the building. The growing scope of the project be gun to exhaust their funding. That was really hard to keep going back to Zach and saying, "Well, this is what we're going to need." And as successful as Jamf Software is, do you really want to take everything that you have and put it into something in an unproven market?" So, for me the weight was much beyond my own shoulders. But it kind of felt like if we don't get this done people aren't going to vote for The Confluence. If we don't get this done, people just have one more reason to say downtown Eau Claire will never be successful. Over schedule and over budget, Zach and his partners continued to pour themselves into the project. After several failed attempts, additional funding was secured, and they got their second chance. I think the important part is they didn't stop. A lot people might have just said, "Oh, I tried but it's getting too out of hand. It's too much." They charged through it. They wanted to make sure it got done, and they pulled it off.

electronic elevator voice

Going up. In May of 2016,

the hotel opened its doors with its new name

The Lismore. With a complete renovation, the hotel has left a unique stamp on the downtown.

phone rings

the hotel opened its doors with its new name

Thanks for calling the Lismore Hotel. This is Tara speaking. How can I help you? With a newly reimagined hotel, rooftop bar, coffee shop, and restaurant, the team has added to a downtown environment with hopes of drawing more businesses to this area of Wisconsin, slowing the brain drain. We're trying to create a community that people want to live in too. It's not just about how great this hotel is. But really, it's about being downtown. You can walk to an art gallery in either direction, bike trails, recreation on the river. I think that a vital downtown is essential to quality of life, so when you think about where you want to get your job after graduation, Eau Claire is becoming a stronger and stronger candidate. The Lismore and Jamf aren't alone in catching a spark downtown. Businesses, both large and small, have moved in. More and more people are calling the area home, with 20% of the city's workforce now living downtown. And, what's headed there next... is the Confluence Project. The community rallied behind it by voting yes, and citizens and local businesses, including Jamf, showed their support through donations. Local entrepreneurs are more interested in giving back to the community. They started their business in their community, they had made the conscious decision to stay in that community, and they believe as though they are part of that community. We've been blessed to be very successful in our company. And if we're not using that success to actually drive our entire community forward, we're failing our friends and family. Zach and Katie are phenomenal entrepreneurs, and we're fortunate to have them here in the state of Wisconsin. But, it's important to realize what separates them from people who are not entrepreneurs, is that they were those who took action to become entrepreneurs and to pursue that dream. You don't need to be a scientist. You don't need to be a software engineer. What you need to basically do is be someone that has a vision, and then act on your vision. Some of the most successful entrepreneurs we have in the state are actually just very self-motivated people that are passionate about what they do. A passion for their work can lead many people down the path of entrepreneurism. But what initially sparks that passion, can come from an unexpected place. I never pictured myself as an entrepreneur. I'm a problem solver. That's what I love doing in life, and this has just been an opportunity to learn a whole lot of new things and to solve some new problems. And I love it. It's a really good feeling for a lot of us. For many entrepreneurs across the state, the bottom line isn't necessarily always the bottom line. I think the potential for entrepreneurship in Wisconsin is very bright. We have people that are driven to make the world a better place, and say, "You know, I can do this". There's not a shortage of people here that can do great things. The preceding program has been a co-production of the University of Wisconsin- Madison and Wisconsin Public Television. With additional financial support of the Dwight and Linda Davis Foundation.