The Jon Lock, Dalman Supply Co.’s flagship product

Jon Dalman is the founder of Dalman Supply Co., a small business in Nashville, Tennessee, that designs and manufactures high-quality bike locks from materials like leather, steel cable and rope. Dalman founded the company in 2013 after developing his flagship product, the Jon Lock, and receiving some amazing feedback from family and friends. Since then, he’s been working hard to turn his passion for quality and craft into a full-time job.

Until late last year, Dalman Supply Co. was a completely bootstrapped venture, which, for a manufacturing company, hasn’t always been easy. According to Dalman, the biggest challenge has been time. “[Bootstrapping] holds us back because we have to wait until we’ve raised the money to put a look book together, put tags on the products, etc.,” he says. “It’s a setback, but as far as the business goes, we’ve been able to make it work since day one like that.”

Dalman’s relationships with makers and small business owners in the Nashville community have definitely helped his business grow without too much added expense. Dalman traded his own goods and services for the goods and services of others. It’s how he got new website, for example, which is expected to launch next month. “I have a friend who builds websites,” Dalman explains, “so I built him desks at a big discount. He, in turn, built me a website at a big discount. It’s a website I would never have been able to afford otherwise, and he got desks that he couldn’t afford at the time.”

Dalman says this system has worked because he existed in the same world as many others who were just getting started in their own industries. His friends needed opportunities to cut their teeth in the market, and he assisted them with that.

Until last year, Dalman’s primary focus has been on building a quality product, on finding ways to source more sustainable materials and on sharpening his manufacturing process. But in late 2015, Dalman Supply Co. signed a distribution deal in Europe that Dalman expects will give his business that extra push, one that will stimulate growth and end the bootstrapping phase of his venture. “It’s given us the type of capital we need to now invest in the business,” he says. “Even though we’ve been around for a few years, this spring we’re actually going to launch into advertising and marketing.”

Dalman Supply Co. has never advertised before, but Dalman says the company has hired a marketing strategist and a videographer to launch the brand.

Dalman expects production to double this year, and he hopes that, with the European market covered, he’ll be able to spread distribution to other parts of the world. “The majority of our sales last year went to Europe,” he explains, “and now this year we don’t even have to think about it. So all the work we put into selling can go toward other markets.”

Dalman hopes to acquire distribution contracts in Dubai and parts of Asia. He also plans to sell his products in more stores across the U.S.

The post #MyStartupStory: Dalman Supply Co. Bootstraps Its Way Into European Market appeared first on Startup Southerner.

No matter where your niche is within the startup world, I guarantee you have a use for the Raspberry Pi—that fancy little $35 computer board everybody and their robot dog is talking about these days. Your application may be as simple as turning an old TV into an arcade machine for the break room or as complicated as tracking the energy use of every electronic device at your office. Maybe that application is a marketable product you want to develop. Maybe it’s just automating some time-consuming task that otherwise zaps your productivity. Whatever the case, I’m determined to show you that you need the Raspberry Pi in your life.

If you ever feel that fear or anxiety begin to rise, never forget there is an army of nerds like myself who want you to succeed and provide the tools and assistance in an open manner. Grab a Raspberry Pi kit and get started.

Among all the cool stuff we could do with the Raspberry Pi, I’ve decided to start with a project that is centered on you. Technically, it’s centered on me, but plenty of this should translate to your own work life. Your work environment most certainly affects your ability to operate, so let’s create a “Connected Office” to give us some critical information about our work environment and add some “smart” functionality to make our lives easier. That is to say, let’s make a Raspberry Pi-based system that measures some key environmental properties in our office, displays those values in a platform-independent manner, and reacts to our needs without a whole lot of effort. That’s a very highfalutin’ way of saying we want occupancy and environmental sensors but we don’t want to pay a lot of money for it.

The Connected Office

Below is a diagram of my objective for this connected office build that has a Raspberry Pi Zero (any Raspberry Pi will work, but this one is adorable), a door sensor, environmental sensors, Bluetooth and plenty of room to grow. Early on, this type of diagram likely has little meaning to you (aside from some inevitable anxiety) but I’d like to show how we can go from a basic problem statement to this complex electronic device. Hold on tight, y’all.

That’s quite a lot to throw at you, I know, but I want to start with the end-goal in mind and show you all how we can dissect this into manageable chunks. We begin with the simplest portion of the connected office system—the door sensor. This is a simple switch of sorts mounted to a door frame that controls the flow of electricity through the circuit based on the presence of a magnet that’s mounted to the door itself. In short, I want a little bit of current flowing through the switch whenever the door is closed and none when the door is open.

This device that’s either OFF or ON (i.e., digital) is the simplest of Inputs/Outputs we can deal with for the Raspberry Pi. We simply need to connect one end of the switch to one of our General Purpose Input/Output (GPIO) pins on the Pi. I’ve chosen GPIO #17, but you can choose any of the available digital GPIO pins.

To help sort through this rat’s nest of wires in the connected office prototype, let’s look at the door sensor in isolation. Here’s a schematic that shows the available electrical connections on the Raspberry Pi and how the door switch is connected. I want the Raspberry Pi’s 3.3 V to flow to GPIO #17 when the switch is closed and I want GPIO #17 to be grounded when the switch is open.  I’ve added a resistor between GPIO #17 and ground for that purpose. (Note the resistor needs to be more resistive than the switch or else it’s the path of least resistance.) Without grounding that pin, that is said to be “floating” and can return nonsensical data as it’ll flip between 1s and 0s.

Now that I’ve wired just this one part of the connected office system together, we’re ready to interface with the device. I’ll leave the task of setting up the Raspian operating system and prerequisite packages on the Raspberry Pi for you; there are numerous tutorials available through the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Adafruit that can guide you through the setup. I’ll be skipping a lot of the basic software installation portions here and focus on the end results.

Presuming you have a fresh installation of Raspian (or preferred operating system) and this basic circuit constructed, you’re ready to connect that sensor to the world. But now you’ve hit the dreaded Omnivore’s Dilemma… You have seemingly innumerable ways of communicating with that sensor, so which should you choose? Well…whatever works for you. Don’t let me tell you how to do it the best way for you. Chances are if you’re into startups, you’re probably inclined towards JavaScript and Ruby on Rails given the rapid prototyping afforded by those languages, but you could certainly use Python, C/C++, etc. to reach the same basic objective.

I want to show you a few different ways of connecting this door sensor to the Internet of Things, so let’s walk through it the hard way and some much easier ways.

The Hard Way: Linux Command Line Interface

Like it or not, you’ll need to get comfortable with the command line interface (CLI) in Linux if you’re interested in the Raspberry Pi. With the coming era of Windows on the Raspberry Pi, I see a general shift towards graphical interface, but never forget the practicality of the command line. Nowadays, we need this simple user interface to at least install the fancy applications and functionality we desire from the RasPi. Don’t think of it like going back to 1990s-era DOS; think of it as an exceptionally practical means of computer interfacing that just happens to look like 1990s-era DOS…

Presuming you have the Pi booted up and this circuit constructed, let’s read the state of that sensor via the command line interface. You’ll likely not use this much (if ever) but it’s useful to see it at least once; it helps put things into perspective at least.

Navigate to /sys/class/gpio

cd /sys/class/gpio

List the folder contents with:

ls

You may or may not see entries of the form gpio##. You will see them if they are active in this device tree. To do so, try:

 echo 17 > export

 Another ls and you should now see gpio17. Change the directory to gpio17 with:

cd gpio17

One more ls and we now see the properties of gpio17. We now want to issue the following command:

echo in > direction

This sets the direction to input. We can read the state of gpio17 by simply reading value with the cat command:

cat value

Try opening the door switch and re-run cat value. (Note it helps to simply press the up key to load the prior command. Another way is to issue the “bang bang” command: !! ) Your screen should look something like the following but will most likely be pi@raspberrypi as I named my Pi Zero nihil:

There you have it.  A door sensor reader that’s not terribly useful at all unless you’re stuck in 1995. We could create a simple script that repeats the process of reading gpio17 and logging that value to the console at a set interval. Better than the manual mode, but I want to be able to see a plot of this over time on any device I choose.

I think we can all agree that it’s time to look at some easier ways of interfacing with this door sensor.

With modern-day webapps, you’ll find seemingly innumerable ways to code for the same basic objective. I have a C/C++ background but am interested in mastering JavaScript. I’ve seen a lot of neat JavaScript apps these days and want to use this project as an exercise in JS. If you feel more comfortable using another language, then by all means, go for it. The core of this Internet of Things application here is making HTTP POST and GET commands, so one can do any number of nifty tricks to accomplish that. My end goal is a full stackwebapp connected to a number of microcontrollers, microprocessors, desktops and my cellphone; all roads then lead to NodeJS.

The Easy Way: Adafruit.IO

Next we need to choose an Internet of Things platform. You’ll find many out there, each with their own usefulness, but I’ll pick adafruit.io for this application. We can jump ship later if we so choose, but for now let’s get acquitted with connecting the Raspberry Pi to adafruit.io via JavaScript. Thankfully Adafruit.com was so nice as to create a tutorial for a simpleNodeJS adafruit.io app. This makes the barrier for entry incredibly low. It’s well documented with easy to understand commentary.

Here’s an example of an Adafruit.io Dashboard that contains both gauges and timeplots of sensor data. I show a day in the life of my office told from the temperature & humidity sensor we will be exploring in a later part of the connected office project. Without a whole lot of effort, I walked through the basic adafruit.io tutorials and had myself this fancy dashboard ready within an afternoon.

This is all great for data logging, but the Internet of Things is ideally more than just data logging; there should be an element of reactivity or context-dependent action. Practically, I don’t care what the specific temperature is down to the hundredth decimal place. I do however care if that temperature goes outside of a certain range of temperatures. With this adafruit.io tool plus If This Then That, we’ll get just what we need to suit this IOT application to our everyday lives.

If you’re working along with this tutorial, now’s the time to try out the adafruit.io tutorials for Raspberry Pi: https://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-io-basics-digital-input/overview. For part 1 of this Connected Office build, I’ll simply adapt the canonical digital input application for a magnetic door sensor but I’d like some reactivity; if the door is opened or closed, I want a push notification on my phone. We already have our switch circuit wired and by now should note that’s essentially the same as the button circuit in the adafruit.io tutorial. The application we’ll be using on our Pi is as follows.

If you’ve worked though the digital_in.js example from adafruit, then you’ll see my code here is barely different. I don’t really need new functionality at the moment, so I’ve changed the feed name to ‘door’ and added a snarky message to the console log. The original program connected a toggle button to a power strip, but the same underlying functionality is identical. We can add more sensors simply by adding more GpioStream.readable() commands and piping that data to additional adafruit.io feeds.

The whole JavaScript program here is fairly understandable even without much expertise in the language. Libraries such as those we see in the require(…) commands are useful tools that we can implement easily and let them do all the heavy lifting. (Want to try doing this from the command line interface? My thoughts exactly.)

We begin by using the gpio-stream package that does all the heavy lifting for reading GPIO #17 and the adafruit-io package that takes care of communicating with adafruit.io. (Make sure you put your own Adafruit IO key and username in the program.) The core functionality we want is the state of the door sensor to be written to the ‘door’ feed on adafruit.io every time the state of GPIO #17 changes.  All of this is handled by the door.pipe(aio.feeds(‘door’)) function. This starts the “pipe” that looks for changes on door (note we set that to GPIO #17 in the first command); if a change occurs, this will immediately update the ‘door’ feed with that new value.

Give this a test while the program is running and you’ll see that value updated on your adafruit.io feed every time the door is open. If you set up a dashboard with a gauge and time-plot of the door sensor feed, you should see something like the following:

Adafruit.io has a few basic type of triggers: reactive and scheduled. With reactive triggers, you can send an email, issue a webhook, or modify the value of another adafruit.io feed. Not a whole lot going on in the responsiveness realm however they are integrated with ifttt.com—perhaps one of the coolest IOT apps I’ve encountered so far. If This Then Thatconnects a vast array of devices and webapps to each other. Want to get a text message every time a human goes into space? ifttt.com can do it. Want to set your thermostat to 68 degrees every time someone mentions you on Twitter? ifttt.com can do it.

Here I’ll use ifttt.com to connect this door sensor value on adafruit.io to the IF Notification channel so I can receive notifications on my cellphone. Although we can set this up to send notifications by SMS, I would rather avoid a heap of text messages so I’ll set up a push notification from the IF app for when the ‘door’ feed changes.

The ifttt.com process is an absolute breeze. Following the seven step process:

Create a new ifttt recipe and choose what “this” is.

We have an incredible number of channels we can connect to with ifttt.com, but here we’ll stick to the Adafruit channel.

Now we can see the types of interactions allowed by Adafruit. We want a trigger every time new data is posted to a feed, so choose “Any new data”.

Select the appropriate feed from the drop-down menu.

That completes the “this” part, so now we choose our “that” (the reaction to the trigger.)

Again, we find an incredible number of possibilities.  Let’s pick “IF Notification”

Not a whole lot of available actions with this channel, but all we need is a push notification.

Now we get to set the details of our notification. Sticking with the default will give us a notification that looks like “door is currently 1.” Or “door is currently 0.” That doesn’t exactly tell us opened or closed, but we’ll leave that complication for later.

And we’re done. Now that you’ve got that recipe running you just need to run our JavaScript application from earlier to pipe the sensor values to adafruit.io.

There you have it. If you’ve followed along, you’ve gotten a nice exposure to the wide range of capabilities the Raspberry Pi possesses and see how we can leverage additional resources to make a “useful” Internet of Things application.

This method, however, is lacking a critical element of convenience. I’ll get a notification every time my office door is opened or closed. I only really care about logging the data in the background and getting a notice if the door is left open while I’m not around.  For that, we’ll need to start down a new path. Next time, I’ll introduce you to a neat IOT platform that makes use of a convenient graphical programming language and is suited for a wide variety of applications.

Wrap-up

This has covered quite a lot in a short span so I’ll leave this part of the connected office build there. Hopefully I didn’t scare you away from the Raspberry Pi; it’s OK, we’ll get through this together. In Part 2, we’ll add some extra intelligence to this office IOT project with Structure and use the knowledge gained in this exercise to connect more sophisticated sensors such as temperature/humidity modules and light meters. Maybe a door sensor is something you want, but I’m sure you can find some use for even this simplest of Internet of Things applications in your professional and personal life.

Tweet your project pictures, questions and comments to @RossMakes. If you’re an experienced Raspberry Pi user, how do you use this in your professional life?

The post Pi Day Geek Out: Ross Makes the Connected Office appeared first on Startup Southerner.

An estimated 2,000 maker spaces existed in the United States in 2015, and the numbers just keep growing. Nashville will soon welcome two more to the fold, and all three listed here serve different segments of the maker community. While the movement itself is at its heart about the making, the maker culture serves the needs of a vast spectrum of goals, from simply learning to become crafty to taking a craft to the market.

Since 2011: For the craftsperson with an eye for business…
FORT HOUSTON

Location: 500 Houston St. Nashville, TN 37203
Facility Size + Equipment Offered: 10,000 sq. ft. A complete wood shop with air filtration and dust collection system. Darkroom. Screen-printing facility. 3-D Print Lab. Metal Shop. Miscellaneous work and desk space.
What Makes Them Different?: Their consulting and fabrication services on the business side of the maker movement. From guidance on operating agreements to demographic marketing, the Fort Houston team is ready to help your hobby to a business. They also offer fabrication services of any scope.

Opening Summer 2016: For the collegiate innovator interested in commercialization…
THE INNOVATION CENTER AT VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY

Location: On Vanderbilt’s campus, next to Olin Hall.
Planned Facility Size + Equipment Offerings:13,000 sq. ft., within the new 230,000 square foot Engineering and Science Building. Prototyping lab and maker space. Collaboration space. Innovators and Entrepreneurs-in-Residence. Global Mentoring Network. Education and venture creation programs.
What Makes Them Different?: Their plan to make the Innovation Center a primary point of contact for all students from all schools and colleges who are interested in innovation and entrepreneurship.  Its alumni and global network.

And sometime soon after: A space for fun…
MAKE NASHVILLE MAKERSPACE

Estimated Open Date + Location: Date TBD. Location TBD.
Planned Facility Size + Potential Equipment Offerings: 3-4,000 sq. ft. Traditional crafting equipment (woodworking, metalworking, welding). Manufacturing (3D Printing, CNC machines, laser cutting and etching). Electronics lab. Fabric play lab. Young maker area. Space for meetings, events, and performances.  
What Makes Them Different?: It’s all about the community. “We believe that making is a radically inclusive activity so we want to make sure that everyone from all walks of life can come and participate.” – Matt Kenigson, president of Make Nashville
(To find out what’s in the plans for Make Nashville, check out this article.)

The post Nashville Makes Way for More Maker Spaces appeared first on Startup Southerner.

Matt Kenigson visits the 2016 Maker Faire Producers Summit.

Make Nashville originally started in 2012 as a co-op to gather makers to share their projects with fellow creatives and create. By 2013, the first Nashville Mini Maker Faire was organized. Now, Make Nashville, with its nonprofit designation in hand, is setting its sights on a big goal: a community makerspace.

We spoke with Matt Kenigson, president of Make Nashville, about where his organization is headed and what the spirit of the maker movement is really about.

What’s the current status of Make Nashville? In 2015, we got our nonprofit designation in December, and the 100 Founders fundraising campaign for the makerspace was a resounding success. T. Scot Clausing, a great benefactor, stepped up after 2015 Nashville Mini Maker Faire to double all of those donations from our campaign. We had a good year.

As far as 2016 goes, we are off to a big start already. Internally, we had our first board retreat and set our five-year strategy as well as our shorter-term tactical goals. We also stood up a number of committees that are now absorbing and focusing the work of the growing number of folks working hard to make Make Nashville a great organization. We are continuing to meet every week and working on the opening of the makerspace as well as our meetings, workshops, events, and partnerships.

Our January meeting, themed around Star Wars in honor of the massive success of “The Force Awakens,” had a record number of show-and-tell participants. It included 3D prints of BB-8 parts, a couple of “Rey Guns” (the blaster design used by Rey’s character in the movie), a 7-foot long star destroyer, an R2D2 unit, and much, much more, including Darth Vader helmet chocolate cherry cordials. Those 3-D printed chocolates are now becoming a workshop scheduled for March 5, in partnership with Nomzilla. It’s really exciting!

We’ve already participated in the Adventure Science Center‘s Doctor Who-themed Wibbly-wobbly Way Late Play Date event, as well as their Engineering Day. Upcoming February and March informal meetings will include learning about stop-motion animation and playing with Blender (an open source 3D content-creation program). In April, we’re tentatively scheduled to take over abrasiveMedia‘s space in Houston Station for Art Crawl.

What do you plan to have in your first makerspace? We are still validating what the community wants, but in general we plan to have space for traditional crafting (woodworking, metalworking, welding) as well as advanced manufacture (3D Printing, CNC machines, laser cutting and etching), an electronics lab, a fabric play lab, a young maker area, and space for meetings, events, and performances.  

Who is this space for? We believe that there are six main kinds of folks who will participate in the makerspace (most members will have overlap):

1. Hobby/Casual Makers: range from crafters who make for fun or to share their creations with friends to large collaborative projects like The Full Scale Millennium Falcon Project.
2. Professional Makers: people who make things for resale, such as craftsmen, artisans, performers, and professional artists
3. Families and other social groups: people for whom making is a social activity; a way to bond with the people they care about; making is a means to a social activity: the end result is secondary
4. Inventors and Entrepreneurs: people looking for advanced tools to allow them to rapidly prototype, create products, or prove a business concept
5. Learners: people looking to gain a skill, gain inspiration, or benefit from the knowledge of the community; for some this is a casual pursuit, while for others this could lead to a job or a career
6. Mentors, Educators, and Community-Builders: people looking to share their knowledge, craft, enthusiasm, and love of making and the maker community; STEAM educators; people with a passion to grow the community.

How is Make Nashville’s makerspace different from the other spaces?  We are different from Fort Houston in that their business model is primarily focused on the professional maker community. They also support many artists, crafters, and the maker community directly and indirectly. We consider them great members of the maker community and have partnered with them on various things including advocating for them when they had trouble with their zoning, working with Metro Planning to help shape what became the Artisan Manufacturing legislation, and putting on the Replication Juried 3D Printed Art Show.  

We are different from the planned makerspace at the Vanderbilt Innovation Center in that they’re primarily going to be focused around specific experiential learning opportunities for their students, with more technical tools and analytical tools that are explicitly useful for specific modeling and industrial tasks…

In short, we’re likely to be a space that is a bit more laid back, a bit more experimental, and where a broader range of projects get worked on.  It’s also a place where some who have some amazing ideas will come to steep in the community and relative lack of boundaries (contractual, intellectual, creative).  

Why is a makerspace important for the community? We believe that making is a radically inclusive activity, so we want to make sure that everyone from all walks of life can come and participate:  All ages, all nationalities, all races, all backgrounds, rich and poor, experienced and inexperienced. We plan to introduce mechanisms for folks who can afford it to help create opportunities for those who cannot to participate. We will also have various internships, volunteer opportunities, and maker-in-residence opportunities to allow folks who cannot afford the membership fee to work in exchange for access.

Fundamentally, we believe that making is a transformative activity, both on an individual level (making transforms who you are) and a social level (making transforms the community, city, and region). Our goal is to encourage more people to make and to encourage people to make more. Makers gonna make.  

See our accompanying article about all the maker spaces in Nashville. 

The post Make Nashville Builds a Foundation for Invention appeared first on Startup Southerner.

“How Soon Is Now?” is a column dedicated to tech startup culture and community from the perspective of a software developer in Nashville, Tennessee. His opinions are his own.

The year is certainly off to an interesting start. Silicon Valley looks to be in a downward spiral with several layoffs, and the media is pumping out article after article calling for “blood in the water” and a “unicorn reckoning.”

Hyperbole sells, but the insane valuations everyone has been calling out for years are beginning to correct themselves—and fast. It’s nothing to celebrate or make light of, as these down rounds in a system built to protect the investors are hurting employees most.

With the correction going on in Silicon Valley, I’m sure there are plenty of folks feeling somewhat vindicated about our situation here in Nashville. Local investors will get the luxury of spinning their capital investments, or lack thereof, as a stroke of genius. Though I’m sure we’ll be sweeping a couple things under the rug, like a company that raised $1.77 million, garnered local awards, scored one of those super-cool oversized checks from Steve Case and still, somehow, managed to criticize a lack of capital on their way out. Or another local media favorite that wouldn’t be out of place on an episode of “The Walking Dead.” It’s not hard to see why investors would turn a cold shoulder to technology.

Tennesseeans are still processing the $200 million taxpayer disaster that is TNInvestco, which managed to make $83 million disappear before a single dollar was invested. A much more reasonable tax credit is in the works for the next phase, but the real problem to solve isn’t about capital at all.

We need a cultural shift, and that shift should be built around our makers and doers instead of the “business elite.”

I spoke with a developer visiting from Boston recently and she asked me what co-working spot to check out so she could connect with local technologists and get a vibe for the scene. I struggled for an answer and bought time describing the great technology community here: frequent meetups on a huge range of topics, companies like Emma that are supporting our scene. None of these really answered her question, and in the end all I could suggest were a couple of coffee shops. Nashville has no shortage of co-working locations, but none of them are heavy on tech-based companies or come to mind as standing out for supporting our technology community.

That conversation helped me realize how physically segmented our startups and technologists are during our workdays. We’re scattered all over town in various office spaces, working from home or out of coffee shops. Slack keeps us connected, and the meetups are great, but developers do have a tendency to segment off by language and framework with little discussion around the business impact our technical solutions provide. Our technology community needs to find an entrepreneurial spirit that brings us all together to support everyone’s endeavors, to celebrate successes, commiserate in failures and, ultimately, work together to build our community that makes us stronger on the whole.

I doubt this dichotomy between technology and business is anything exclusive to Nashville, and it could all stem from our colleges and institutions having entrepreneur programs catered to MBA students. With this schism engrained, a “wait for them to come to me” attitude persists and carries over into our careers and seems clearly on display at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. The halls and meetups at the EC are filled with salespeople, marketers and service providers mingling and passing business cards around. It makes sense that eager entrepreneurs would seek out the EC, but with a lack of technologists around, things go from being about solving problems to being about generating a sales funnel. It’s a big reason why agencies thrive in this town and it keeps our business and technology communities living inside their own respective echo chambers.

In his book, “Startup Communities,” Brad Feld does an excellent job calling out similar situations for startup communities around the country that aren’t working. Feld explains the difference between Feeders (investors, mentors, government, universities and service providers) and Leaders (makers and entrepreneurs). While Feeders are vital to the ecosystem and provide a much-needed service, a startup community must be driven by the Leaders. Unfortunately, we’re short on Leaders in Nashville, leaving the Feeders to run the show. And while I’m sure the cocktail parties and award shows are great, they’re not bringing us any closer to being a community driven by Leaders.

Technologists are going through a time of incredible opportunity right now. Never before has a trade where a degree is moot had labor costs this high and so much potential to disrupt. Never before has the grip of the business elite been this threatened, but it’s feeling like we’re losing that hold. With the funnel tightening on Silicon Valley investments, you can expect the next round to be funded by the powers that be. We’re seeing a similar situation in Nashville, with our accelerator programs sponsored by massive music, publishing and soon, healthcare corporations. The goal no longer being to find new ideas that disrupt, but to maintain control and grow an already massive ecosystem through the fresh ideas of others.

While we’re continually sold on the idea of a STEM shortage, even with no evidence to support it, technology wages have stagnated. The Bureau of Labor and Statistics makes headlines with its 10-year growth outlook for web and software developers, but you’re not likely to find a mention of their predicted decline in computer programmers. And while it makes sense that software development jobs will continue to grow, it will be interesting to see what the correction in the valley does when morale causes a dispersal of talent that could bottleneck a pipeline around the country already picky enough that the average interview process takes 35 days. Meanwhile, we’re still churning out developers with the promise of six-figure salaries and great stock options, conveniently leaving out the bits about executives conspiring to keep wages lower.

I’m all for teaching people to code, as it brings fresh voices, improves diversity and roots out the nonsense. But let’s at least be conscious that the goal of the learn-to-code movement isn’t to bring six-figure salaries to more people, but to increase supply and cheapen labor overall.

The growth that software development has seen in the last decade is incredible. We’ve seen cycles like this before, but with the excitement around technology and sheer number of developers coming into the fold, we need to acknowledge that it’s not enough to learn to code or even be a “10x developer.” We must evolve our attitude toward business and our business sense to stay relevant, especially in Tennessee, where we find ourselves ranked 41st in innovation. We can do better and we will do better, but it starts with acknowledging our failings so we can work towards the solution.

As a software developer with a passion for leveraging technology to find solutions, I don’t think I’m alone in feeling ostracized by the EC. Whether it’s a problem with leadership lacking a technical background, a reliance on investors who don’t understand technology or the lack of desire from technologists to get involved, what’s actually boring is a deadlock that keeps one side complaining about a lack of capital and the other side complaining about a lack of “spectacular deals.”

If it’s not there for us and it’s something we want, then we need to work to find it, foster it or create it ourselves. Let’s work to build the community we want to exist. Let’s focus on solving problems we want to solve, while educating ourselves and our peers. Once we’re successful, everyone else will be knocking down our door to get in.

The post The Cyclomatic Complexity of Nashville appeared first on Startup Southerner.

Audra Harvey, co-founder of abrasiveMedia in Nashville, Tennessee, grew up in a diverse arts community in Edmond, Oklahoma. “I was constantly surrounded by artists of different kinds,” she explains, “so when I went off into the world, I just expected that was normal.”

But when Harvey moved away from her hometown—and eventually to Nashville—she realized her experience of the arts had been anything but normal. She found that, despite Nashville’s reputation as one of America’s most creative cities, artists often struggled to connect with each other, even within their own genres. Connection between genres, then, was virtually nonexistent.

So in 2004, Harvey—with her husband, Justin, and fellow artist Andrew Collins—founded the small, multi-genre arts group to bridge the gap between artistic genres and the artists who participate in them. The initial purpose of the group was to encourage an environment in which one was allowed to create with whatever tools one wished to use, with no rules or requirements.

Harvey’s artists’ collective put on small shows and exhibits for six years, and eventually they began holding forums that paired local artists with individuals working in the field of social justice. “It took a long time to figure out what we were really doing,” Harvey says. “In 2010, we decided that we either needed to quit, or figure out how to make it a thing.”

It was then that Harvey reached out to some leaders in the arts community who helped her identify the group’s mission, and guided her through the process of becoming a nonprofit organization. “I sat down with them and took a lot of notes and basically did exactly what I was told until I knew more of what I was doing,” she says. “And it worked, is working; we’re still growing.”

Of course, growing a successful nonprofit organization has come with its share of challenges. A more recent challenge is the responsibility that has come with the organization’s growth and recognition. “We are beholden to far more people now than when we started,” Harvey says. “If we screw up, more people see it, and it affects more people. That’s something I think about a lot.”

AbrasiveMedia now boasts year-round programming, two artists-in-residence and an active presence in the Nashville arts community. The group hosts fitness, dance and fine arts classes five days a week. It participates in a monthly neighborhood art crawl and hosts regular events both for its own artists and for artists in the community. This year, abrasiveMedia is finishing two long-term projects, including “Th3 Anomaly” from artist-in-residence David Landry.

Landry joined the group in 2011 after proposing to blend fine art with comic book-style narrative in a walk-through graphic novel experience. Landry was inspired to begin this project when he observed the role fine art had taken in the Nashville community. “Very few people, myself included, were as excited to go to an art gallery as they were to go to see the latest Hollywood blockbuster, and I adore fine art,” he says. “Most children dreaded the boredom of having to walk through a fine art gallery. I wanted to change that.”

Four years later, Landry’s project, which consists of 321 paintings in more than 2,000 square feet of gallery space, is open to the public.

The post AbrasiveMedia: Helping Connect Artists to Their Community appeared first on Startup Southerner.

Emily Howard is a young entrepreneur and the founder of Consider the Wldflwrs, a hand-crafted jewelry line produced in Nashville, Tennessee. Since starting up in 2013, Howard has expanded her services to include floral design, hired new staff and is currently working on opening a storefront to the public. Startup Southerner sat down with Howard to talk about her experience starting a small business, and about how Consider the Wldflwrs continues to grow.

Q: How did Consider the Wldflwrs begin? What inspired you to start creating jewelry?

A: Growing up I was always interested in arts and crafts of all kinds. One of my favorite things to do was to alter jewelry I already owned into something I would actually wear. In 2013, I began making vintage necklaces out of old watch parts, hardware and small pieces I would buy at the Nashville flea market. Some of the pieces in my first line were parts of costume jewelry from my grandma’s closet. When I first began selling jewelry online, I wasn’t expecting for it to turn into a full-time job, but after a couple months I was able to afford nicer tools, nicer metals and time to hone my craft.

Q: Tell us about your team.

A: Today we have a team of four people, including myself. I am the creative director. Jordan is our director of communications. We have a production assistant named Carly, and our newest addition, Shannon, is our graphic designer.

Q: How did the floral design services come about?

A: We started doing floral design workshops in 2013 around the time that I began renting a desk in a co-working space. The marriage of jewelry and florals was natural, thanks to our business name and thanks to the space we had to host our first workshop. Sometimes someone from our team teaches the workshops and sometimes we partner with local floral designers. It’s always a fun time.

Q: Your company partners with a community of craftswomen in Honduras, who are learning crafting skills so they can provide for themselves and their families. How do you support this community, and how did your involvement start?

A: Consider the Wldflwrs’ mission statement is to discover wild beauty and encourage thirsty hearts. My family goes on medical mission trips to Honduras twice a year, and during one of these trips I discovered a group of women who had been meeting to knit on a regular basis. They have passion, talent and the will to learn a trade that was easily recognizable as an opportunity. I presented the idea to teach them jewelry-making, and they were thrilled to learn. The average adult education in Honduras is at a sixth-grade level, and getting a job is nearly impossible in some parts. So, being able to teach them a trade to sell handmade goods is priceless. We support them by purchasing supplies for them and guiding them as they start their own micro-business. Our first lessons began in May 2014, and the women and their business has already grown since then. They have named their business Unison Made.

Q: What would you consider to be the most important lesson (or lessons) you’ve learned as an entrepreneur?

A: One of the strongest lessons I keep close is to always know your “why.” I have been taught this lesson in so many different forms, but it is something I always fall back on when I am faced with an obstacle. “When you know your ‘why,’ you can endure any ‘how.’” In branding, they teach you to shorten your “why” to one sentence, but it’s extremely hard to do that when you are passionate about something. Our “why” is to spread hope, shine light and love people. Wild beauty isn’t tamable. We like to say that we design with simplicity in mind because our customers are unique. And they truly are. We don’t want to change them, just encourage them for who they are.

Q: Any new or exciting information you’d like our readers to know about Consider the Wldflwrs?

A: Yes! We are opening up our storefront to the public this month. Our storefront carries the Consider the Wldflwrs line, home accessories, Unison Made’s jewelry line and jewelry from a few other vendors. We look forward to welcoming our customers into our space.

The post From Craft to Career: A Q&A With Emily Howard appeared first on Startup Southerner.