MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE — Entrepreneurs Ryan and Rob Weber got their start while studying at St. Cloud State University and never saw a reason to leave Stearns County.
When they sold their company NativeX two years ago it was still based in Sartell, and their Great North Labs venture-capital company has a St. Cloud address along with one in Minneapolis.
They don’t suggest it’s a lot easier to build a successful technology company in a college town more than an hour’s drive from downtown Minneapolis and half a world away from Silicon Valley. They just doubt it’s any harder. “Advantages and disadvantages,” Ryan Weber said.
This doesn’t seem to be the kind of observation that would seem newsworthy, but unfortunately it still is. The idea that Minnesota remains a technology backwater is so hard to knock down that it came up right away in a recent conversation with the Weber brothers about their plans.
“We go back to when we were 20, and we had this idea of Freeze.com in the dorm rooms of St. Cloud,” Rob Weber said. “And the community really supported us up there, and in the Twin Cities. There weren’t a lot of other tech entrepreneurs. But there were people passionate about business and startups.”
