Northwest Arkansas’ Startup Junkie gets new director
November 29 - December 5, 2021
By Dwain Hebda
With the right public and private support, Arkansas’s entrepreneurs have the grit, hustle and drive to make The Natural State a new center for startups in the United States. That’s the assessment of Caleb Talley, newly minted Executive Director of the Startup Junkie Foundation, a seminal small business advisory organization based in Northwest Arkansas.
Talley, who stepped into the role in late October, said with access to expertise and capital – such as that for which Startup Junkie is known – the potential for the state’s entrepreneurs is nearly unlimited.
“People say Northwest Arkansas is the next Austin,” Talley said. “Maybe we don’t want to be the next Austin. Maybe we want to be better than that.”
The Forrest City native said the climate for startups in general has never been better, especially after the validity of COVID-inspired remote work arrangements was borne out. This brought about a shift in perspective among Arkansas’s startup community particularly, as it scuffed the allure of relocating to other parts of the country. In fact, the opposite has been true as over the past decade, several startups were exposed to Arkansas while participating in Startup Junkie programs and ultimately decided to stay.
And as Arkansas hometowns and backyards have become more appealing to native and migrating entrepreneurs alike, it’s brought advisory groups such as Startup Junkie more squarely into the limelight to help those ventures get off to a solid start.
“Our mission is to empower innovators and entrepreneurs,” he said. “We serve anybody, from ideas on the back of a napkin to X millions of dollars in revenue. We serve mom and pops, brick and mortar, small businesses and the most advanced AI technology you can think of. We do that through consulting and events, with various types and levels of expertise on the team.”
Startup Junkie is composed of two parts: Startup Junkie Consulting, began in 2008, formally organized a decade ago as an LLC providing free consulting services for entrepreneurs. Startup Junkie Foundation, a 501(c)3 nonprofit, followed in 2015. Based in Fayetteville, the groups originally served only a small slice of Northwest Arkansas, but over time expanded to reach Central Arkansas startups through The Conductor, its public-private partnership with the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.
Today, Startup Junkie produces and provides various services to entrepreneurs from Siloam Springs to South America, connecting startups to expert consultants in the fields of banking, finance, technology, marketing and other areas, free for the asking. The industry-agnostic group also hosts various events and programs for ventures at all stages of development.
“We just finished our third cohort two weeks ago, the Fuel Accelerator, and we will be launching the fourth iteration of that in 2022,” Talley said. “The Fuel Accelerator is an artificial intelligence and machine learning accelerator program.”
“We also have Science Venture Studio, which is a program we rolled out earlier this year. It serves science- and technology-related startups and helps them apply for federal non-diluted grant funding to help them commercialize what they’re working on. That is also moving forward.”
Talley, who joined the group as a marketing and events director in May 2019, ascends to the top spot in a period of growth, as Startup Junkie recently expanded its footprint eastward into seven new counties.
“When I started, we served a two-county region, Washington County and Benton County, from Fayetteville to Bentonville,” Talley said. “During COVID, we got some additional funding to help us serve a broader region. So now, we’re serving a nine-county region from Washington and Benton Counties extended all the way out to Baxter County.”
“That’s led a lot of our events into those regions, as part of this little entrepreneurial development movement. Martha Londagin on our team has been traveling out east to some of the rural communities there, leading workshops on marketing, financing, launching a business, that sort of thing.”
Talley said despite obvious differences between Northwest Arkansas and the state’s more rural reaches to the east, small businesses’ needs are largely the same and therefore the group’s messaging is too.
“We don’t go out there and our accents change with the audience we’re addressing,” he said. “It’s meeting them where they are as far as where on their [entrepreneurial] journey they are, and helping guide them to where they want to be as a venture ecosystem.”
“We’re still learning what it is they’re most hungry for as a community, but one thing we definitely have learned is that they are hungry. These are places where there’s really a bubbling excitement for what’s possible.”
The same direct translation cannot be said for the group’s initial efforts to expand into certain minority population sectors within its footprint. While Startup Junkie has already made impressive strides in attracting women entrepreneurs to its programs, penetrating the area’s growing Hispanic community has proven a more difficult task.
“This past year, in my role as the events director, we put together some Spanish language webinars that, at least during my tenure, we had not done before,” he said. “That very first Spanish-only webinar we did, we didn’t have a single attendee on Zoom. It was completely a presentation to nobody and credit to the presenter who volunteered to lead that and was willing to record it so that we can distribute that as a resource. That’s disheartening, to see nobody show up.
“Well, we continued. We kept doing it and we put on a few more, didn’t give up. We didn’t take the approach of, ‘We’re going to scrub this, this didn’t work.’ We approached it from the perspective of, ‘We’ve got to continue to build upon our reputation within the community to gain the trust of all the communities in Northwest Arkansas,’ and I think we leaned into that.”
One way Startup Junkie has done that is through Kiva, a global nonprofit loan program that expands access to capital for entrepreneurs around the world. Introduced in Uganda in 2005 and brought to the states by former President Bill Clinton in 2009, the program was introduced to Arkansas via Startup Junkie Foundation’s launch of the state’s first Kiva Hub, made possible by the Walton Family Foundation. This local resource center allows applicants to access no-fee, no-interest microloans up to $15,000.
“Kiva is one of the most feel-good parts of what we do,” Talley said. “It’s kind of like Kickstarter, but for loans. People give $25 at a time to fully fund a $15,000 loan to help a disadvantaged small business owner purchase a new sign, for example, so people can find her restaurant off the highway or something like that.”
“It’s particularly useful for individuals who have trouble accessing business loans. Perhaps because of credit scores, perhaps they’re undocumented, perhaps they have criminal records, or just whatever the reason might be they can’t go into a bank and get a loan. We’ve fully funded over 50 of those loans in the community in the past year and a half and I think that went a long way in helping build trust within the community.”
Talley began his career in newspapers, having graduated from the University of Arkansas with a degree in journalism. He cut his teeth working for his hometown daily, the Forrest City Times-Herald, then joined Vowell, Inc. in Little Rock where he edited AY Magazine and helped resuscitate a flatlined Arkansas Money & Politics magazine. In his new role, he directs six full- and part-time employees.
“I love this venture ecosystem,” he said. “You hear the stories of how far it’s come in the last decade plus, and then having the opportunity to see how far it’s come in the two and a half short years that I’ve been here, it’s almost like that growth and that trajectory become palpable. You feel committed to it. Seeing people who were just starting out two and a half years ago have such success now, just to be a small piece of that is exciting.”
PHOTO CAPTION:
Startup Junkie Executive Director Caleb Talley shares conversation with Cameron Smith, founder of Rogers, Ark., employment agency Cameron Smith & Associates.
