3 More Reasons Ohio's Got Braggin' Rights

I know you were impressed about the progress being made in Ohio when you read my colleague John Dearborn's blog just a few weeks ago. Maybe you were even a little surprised! After all, it's not entirely intuitive (not yet, anyway) that Ohio's venture capital activity would have grown at double the national average for the last five years, or that the state's Ohio Third Frontier program would have already created more than 41,000 jobs. After so much good news on our progress such a short time ago, it might be surprising that I have three more reasons Ohio should be on rooftops, shouting about its progress. I’m not surprised, because the velocity of Ohio’s growth is accelerating; it’s why we continue to have success after success to talk about. So -- that said -- here are three more reasons why you can brag about progress in Ohio:

• #1 in the country in deals supported by the government. ChubbyBrain’s new report on government funding was just published by FastCompany, and included a look at where the government funding going into company deals was allocated. Ohio was #1 based on number of deals, followed by California and Massachusetts. The fact that California and Boston were second and third on the list shows that the government isn’t funding companies where nobody else is funding them; on the contrary, government funding -- like private sector funding -- goes where the companies are most competitive and promising.
• BusinessWeek’s inaugural list of World’s 25 Most Intriguing New Companies included Phycal and Freedom Meditech, both of which have received JumpStart Ventures investment. Check out the current publication for the profile of Phycal, one of just five companies with a longer writeup. (You don’t want to miss learning about the CEO’s “romance with algae”!) These companies had to compete with global companies on both the originality of the idea and the progress that’s being made in order to make it on the list.
• My own experience at the NVCA meeting in Palo Alto, CA. When meeting with other communicators to be briefed on VC policy and communication issues, the head of marketing of a well-known venture capital firm said to me directly, “What is going on in Ohio? I can’t believe how (they’ve) seemingly come out of nowhere and now, (they) seem to be everywhere.” Given all the “braggin’ rights” we have, you can imagine how I answered that!