Final Founder Factory to take place next week as Regional Partnership takes over IDEA Week
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The South Bend-Elkhart Regional Partnership has announced that this year’s Founder Factory will be the event’s last edition.
Founder Factory was launched by the regional partnership four years ago in a bid to reinforce the entrepreneurial spirit in the region post-COVID and to commemorate Global Entrepreneurship Week. But the partnership now has a bigger platform with which to promote entrepreneurship.
The partnership announced in August that it would take over planning of IDEA Week in 2025 from the University of Notre Dame’s IDEA Center. “We’re already hard at work planning a fresh and exciting 2025 IDEA Week and Global Entrepreneurship Week that will bring even more reinvention and reinvigoration to the table,” Bethany Hartley, the partnership’s CEO, said in a LinkedIn post Tuesday.
Still, the partnership is ready to stage one more Founder Factory—from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Nov. 20 at South Bend City Church.
“Entrepreneurs, investors, enthusiasts, students, anybody who’s feeling inspired, wants to start a business or is working on a startup, is welcome to attend,” Marty Mechtenberg, the regional partnership’s director of entrepreneurship ecosystems, said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s high-tech or if it’s Main Street. We’re really interested in folks who are pivoting or bringing an entrepreneurial mindset to the work they’re doing so that they can stay competitive in the marketplace.”
Mechtenberg elaborates on who can benefit from attending Founder Factory.
A steady churn of businesses, from small companies offering quality-of-life services to multimillion-dollar high-tech startups, has inspired several cities and counties in the region to make continued investments into fostering an enabling business environment.
Evolving from a handful of workshops in 2020, the event added a pitch competition last year that will also be featured in this year’s schedule.
Overall, Founder Factory focuses on three main pillars.
“No. 1, it is an educational opportunity in the sense that we’re bringing in somebody from outside the region to talk about and highlight entrepreneurship,” Mechtenberg said. “Two, it is direct support for entrepreneurship through the pitch competition. Finally, it’s a chance for entrepreneurs, enthusiasts and investors to mingle, kind of the last startup happy hour of the year.”
Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr, will headline this year’s event in conversation with Amish Shah, CEO of Elkhart-based KemKrest. Bringing in speakers with inspiring diverse experience is crucial for organizers who want to foster representation in the entrepreneurial arena.
“Every single year, we have brought in a speaker with a really diverse background to inspire entrepreneurs who don’t always see people like themselves up on stage talking about the amazing things that they do,” Mechtenberg said. “Caterina started in the late ’90s as one of very few women in tech at that time, and even though she was working in a very high-tech, high-demand field, these lessons are still very applicable, even to a small business.”
When she saw the tickets go live for this year, Rachel Mospan, co-owner of Herstoric Development, said she quickly signed up, following a great experience attending for the first time last year.
“It was kind of a no-brainer for us to say let’s do it again,” she said. “The founder and I found it very valuable last year, and this year, we added a new partner, so we’re bringing her along. When you’re one person in a room networking, you might talk to 10 to 15 people, but if it’s three people in a room networking, we can talk to almost 50 people and find connections who might be interested in getting involved.”
Through Herstoric Development, Mospan and her partners work to restore blighted properties in the historic Monroe Park neighborhood. They are in the process of renovating a couple of old buildings and transforming two empty lots into community green spaces. The developers are working to get in front of possible gentrification as investment continues to pour into downtown South Bend.
“With our work, we’re trying to maintain some of the affordability and some of the history and culture that existed in the neighborhood,” Mospan said. “So networking is really important because that’s how we meet potential investors, how we connect with bankers. It’s how we’ve met our lawyer, our accountant and even people that want to work on our projects.”
Facilitated through a partnership with the local chapter of the Awesome Foundation, a global not-for-profit that gives out monthly micro-grants to projects for awesome causes, the regional partnership hopes to provide support to local businesses through the pitch competition.
The contest will take place on Nov. 19 and the top three finalists will be announced and awarded during the main event the following day.
“They put in their $1,000 and then we put in all the proceeds from Founder Factory to make the pot bigger,” Mechtenberg said. “We are hoping to double the pot, so three entrepreneurs [will get] $2,000 each.”
A panel made up of Elevate Ventures Vice President of Hardware Technology Nick Kuhn, South Bend-Elkhart Regional Partnership President Bethany Hartley and Mechtenberg will review pitch submissions and pick the best 10. The finalists will have about 7 minutes each to present their pitch to the Awesome Foundation, which will pick the top three grant winners.
“A great pitch is a very clear vision of what you’re trying to do, matched with data that backs up what you’re doing and what you would do with an extra $2,000,” Mechtenberg said. “We’ll provide a little coaching for the teams, but it’s helpful if they can have a laser focus on how they can move the needle with their business with this $2,000.”
One of the finalists from last year’s competition, A Bite With Mee, a Korean-Mexican fusion catering business, achieved its goal of buying a food truck and has been contracted to cater for this year’s event.
The three winners will also participate in the regional partnership’s Rooted and Reaching Podcast, which focuses on local entrepreneurship.
“We’re trying to show the depth and breadth of entrepreneurship in the region,” Mechtenberg said.
One of last year’s judges, Vital View Founder Ray Fraser, owners who showed a clear passion for the work they were doing stood out to him during the pitch. While Fraser is not involved in this year’s competition, he said he looks forward to attending next week.
“I’ve seen the growth from Year 2 to Year 3, so I’m excited to see what happens next week,” Fraser said. “Seeing the excitement from students showing up to Founder Factory made me really excited about the next generation of entrepreneurs and why so much of what we’re building here matters because the next generation is watching.”
Each year, about 30 businesses in total are developed at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana University South Bend, Ivy Tech Community College and the other higher education institutions in the area, Mechtenberg said.
Many student businesses evolve from the McCloskey New Venture competition, the IDEA Center’s Race to Revenue accelerator and the Restore Inspire Sustain Educate, or RISE, program for high school students, but those businesses rarely last, Mechtenberg said.
Highlighting the highly successful South Bend-based rScan, a resale company launched in 2021 by a trio of Penn High School students, Mechtenberg said the region provides a useful entrepreneurial launchpad.
“They’re testing the waters, they’re learning how it works, and we would love to see more of them succeed and stay based in our region,” Mechtenberg said. “rScan just got a big grant from the [Indiana Economic Development Corp.] to expand their operations. It’s really cool to see a startup come out of the region and be successful.”
RScan co-founder Rod Baradaran told Inside INdiana Business in September that the company received tremendous support from the South Bend community for its first base of operations and benefitted from the state’s position as a hub for logistics.
When the regional partnership takes on leadership of IDEA Week, Mechtenberg said he expects that Founder Factory will be absorbed into the larger imprint of the weeklong annual event scheduled for April 2025.
“We still want to do something during Global Entrepreneurship Week (in November 2025), but we’re debating on what that would look like,” Mechtenberg said. “Maybe we focus more on the pitch or an awards ceremony. There are different things we’re brainstorming on how we could celebrate entrepreneurship.”
On average, about 150 to 200 people attend Founder Factory every year, but the regional partnership hopes to reach its goal of 250 attendees as this phase comes to an end.
Correction: This story has been corrected. Due to an editing error, the story misstated the origins of Founder Factory. Founder Factory was launched by the regional partnership four years ago.