KANSAS CITY, MO. ? Time was, a fledgling tech company called CivicPlus had to explain to prospective customers why it was based in Kansas ? and not some tech-heavy coastal city.
?We said, ?Hey, you get Midwest values, but with Silicon Valley quality,?? recalled Ward Morgan, owner of the government software maker based in the college town of Manhattan. ?It did throw people off to think that there was a tech company in Kansas.?
Today CivicPlus, founded in the 1990s, serves 3,500 cities and counties on two continents.
Investors see fertile ground in Kansas and Kansas City for more tech startups to take root. Far more have already done so than the public might realize, former Google vice president Brian McClendon says, yet the region falls short of its potential.
?We need a lot more (of) both investment and employment to make this region vibrant,? he said. ?Every industry is going to be upended by tech, and if you don?t have those tech companies, the industries you currently have will get replaced.?
McClendon and his wife ? fellow Silicon Valley tech veteran and angel investor Beth Ellyn McClendon ? unveiled this week their efforts to map out every tech startup in Kansas and Kansas City in hopes of making the sector more visible to prospective investors and tech workers.
The Lawrence residents found nearly 200 tech startups, and hundreds more players with longer histories. Think Cerner and Garmin, two of the region?s biggest tech companies that employ thousands of employees each and were founded in the seventies and eighties.
The bulk of startups ? more than three-fourths ? sit in the Kansas City area. Farther west, clusters have sprung up in Wichita and Lawrence. Beyond that, things get pretty sparse.
Iola?s Jayhawk Software, a division of Advantage Computers, 1000 W. Miller Rd., is included.
Brian McClendon, creator of Google Earth and a former Uber executive, returned to his hometown of Lawrence to teach electrical engineering at the University of Kansas. In 2016, McClendon ran as a Democrat for Secretary of State, losing to Republican Scott Schwab. McClendon is pictured here on a campaign trip to Iola. REGISTER FILE PHOTO
THE MCCLENDONS identified nearly 30 tech startups in Lawrence, population 97,000, and none in Topeka, population 125,000. (Local media in the state capital have reported, however, plans for a startup accelerator focused on animal and agricultural science. The area stretching from Kansas State University and Manhattan through Kansas City to the University of Missouri in Columbia is often referred to as the animal health corridor because of the researchers and businesses concentrated there.)
Kansas City venture capital firm Flyover Capital backs tech startups across a large swath of the country outside the handful of East and West Coast states that get the most attention from big-time investors.
