David Baugher

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon - When Cileia Miranda-Yuen first came to St. Louis from Brazil in 1999 to pursue a master’s degree at Webster University, her initial reaction to the area was less than positive.

“The first year I was here, I couldn’t wait to find a way out,” said the 47-year-old Clayton resident. “I was really not happy. I didn’t feel embraced. I felt judged.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: When Pat Mulroy, the general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority, presented a resource plan to her board in 2000, it showed a half century of clear sailing ahead.

Then Mother Nature intervened.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: As regional vice president of operations for RehabCare, Lisa Meyers communicates with a good many applicants for physical therapists' jobs at the 360 locations she hires for across Missouri and southern Illinois.

Unfortunately, she wishes some of those applicants would communicate a bit better themselves.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: It’s an experience Gabe Lozano knows well.

“You and I have probably met tons of guys who have the billion-dollar idea,” said Lozano, a local entrepreneur and founder of LockerDome, a sports-oriented social media platform. “Most people never get past an idea to an actual product. That’s the part of the ecosystem we want to impact.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Even the pull of a Cardinals playoff game and Blues home opener couldn’t keep folks away from yesterday’s StartUp Connection at the St. Louis Science Center.

“We’re obviously getting a crowd that’s passionate about what’s going on here and they can watch baseball and hockey another time,” laughed Phyllis Ellison, managing director of the event, which ran concurrently with the major sporting contests.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Four out-of-town startups are getting a financial boost that will bring them to St. Louis, at least for the near future.

“After the four months, if they decide that their business is better suited elsewhere, they are free to make that call,” said Matt Menietti, a venture partner with local accelerator SixThirty, “but we’d like to think we have a very strong reason for them to stay.”

This article originally appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: St. Louis has become a hub for agricultural sciences and commercialization but still lags in capital formation. That was the sentiment expressed by attendees at the Ag Innovation Showcase held at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center this week during a series of breakfast interviews by the Beacon.

This article originally appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: From installing home energy monitoring systems to raising one's own poultry, a wide-array of do-it-yourself methods for sustainability took center stage at Schlafly Bottleworks in Maplewood Tuesday night.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: As Jason Deem announces the completion of his latest idea at Nebula Coworking, he’s hoping his clients might be getting a taste of a faster future – fiber.

“It’s critical, particularly for technology businesses but really for any business to have reliable internet,” he said. “As much as we’ve been expanding, the only way to accommodate the bandwidth we need was to go to fiber.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: If the big question on the collective mind of the St. Louis entrepreneurial community is how to get there from here, then a co-founder of Mapquest.com would seem to be the perfect guy of whom to ask directions.

“This is where the action is going to be,” Chris Heivly told a sizable crowd of the local startup world’s best and brightest. “I think capital will be redistributed over the next few years and doing this kind of stuff from the get go [is good]. … Just keep putting gas in the car and great things are going to happen.”

The article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Collecting court data may seem a dry business but when Andrew Winship talks about the process, it becomes clear that the end product is something far more remarkable than a simple pile of statistics on verdicts and rulings.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: As dozens gather in the gritty workshop area at Arch Reactor on South Jefferson, a tiny plastic yellow pyramid, perhaps an inch tall, is growing. Rising a millimeter at a time, it grows almost imperceptibly with each pass of a precisely controlled print head.

Meanwhile, Chris Fox talks a bit about the dream he has of a new, 3D printed world.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: When Jason Jan came to the United States, he traveled a bit, even spent some time in California. But when it was time to settle down and found his own company, the native Malaysian knew just where he wanted to do it.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Genetically modified (GM) crops were on the agenda at the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center on Thursday morning with an appearance by environmentalist Mark Lynas. He told the crowd about his own journey from one side of the debate to the other.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Dave Chronister's first hack happened when he was 8. The son of a St. Louis County police officer and a church secretary, he wiped out his parents' entire hard drive out. But it was an accident.

"I've never done the dark side, per se," says Chronister, founder and managing technology partner of Parameter Security, which is in St. Peters.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: For most people, turning 30 isn’t a cause for festivities.

But for the Arch Angels, hitting $30 million in investment seems as good a reason for a party as any.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: It may not be quite the fast food-fuelled all-nighter of most youthful memories, but cram sessions aren’t just for university kids anymore.

“It might be relevant for college students who do it more often,” said Travis Sheridan, assistant vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship at the St. Louis County Economic Council, “but I think a lot of us could use a good cram session from time to time.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Two competing visions of sustainability will be on display early next week in a program designed to let the general public explore the future of food production.

“Sustainability in terms of our food means different things to different people and there are different perspectives on what it means to grow food sustainably,” said Rose Jansen, director of Earth science programs and speakers for science at the Academy of Science-St. Louis, a local nonprofit.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: If we are a culture that often equates dirt with worthlessness, Howard G. Buffett would like to change that.

“Soil may not be sexy, and that’s probably part of the problem,” he told an audience of a few dozen on the Monsanto campus Tuesday afternoon. “But it is what sustains our productivity and we can’t change that.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: A mobile coupon service for smartphones, a boring bit company and a digital marketing tool for restaurants are among 20 winners of the second annual Arch Grants competition.

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Jenny Dibble is hoping women will go WEST.

“We have the traditional entrepreneur but also female leaders within organizations,” said the 29-year-old Webster Groves resident. “We serve to help push women beyond the owner/operator role into the CEO role, get them out of the day-to-day and into the growth stage of their business.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: When his slide clicker malfunctioned up on stage, Brian Kohlberg kept his cool. Afterward, he was philosophical.

“It was just one of those things I can’t control so I had to keep moving on and show the resilience of our company,” chuckled Kohlberg, founder of Manufacturers' Inventory, an online marketplace for industrial and electrical components. “We’re going to hit some bumps in the road….we’ll still make it through.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Framed in front of the handsome brick incubator facility at 315 Lemay Ferry Road, Beth Noonan expresses the hopes of a lot of folks in county economic development.

“We believe that our incubators will be a place where people connect and things happen, a place where entrepreneurs can share ideas and solve problems together,” Noonan told several dozen gathered in the chilly shade of a white tent. “We look forward to working together to drive the success of our client companies and of the region.”

This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: A shipping container may not seem the ideal place for a fine dining establishment, but Phil Valko knows that sometimes it’s good to think outside the box.

Even if that box happens to be a repurposed cargo storage unit housing a restaurant on a vacant lot.

“Their idea is so insane, it just might work,” Washington University’s director of sustainability told a chuckling standing-room-only audience in the dimly lit basement of Bridge, a fashionable Locust Avenue wine bar.