Accelerators can also become a vital local hub for businesses with good ideas in cities without well-established business networks. Linda Olson, CEO of Tampa Bay Wave (no. 3), founded the nonprofit accelerator because she realized there was no local startup ecosystem in Florida at that time when she was working on her tech startup. \u201cI started a meetup group for fellow founders like me because there was nowhere else just to even get together to talk, and it was really impactful,\u201d she says. \u201cOut of that experience, as an entrepreneur, you want to fix things.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Her goal was to build a world-class accelerator in a region that has almost no real density of technology startups, no track record, no capital, but a lot of potential. Since 2008, they\u2019ve hosted companies from 30 different countries, and attracted new talent to the region leading to the creation of thousands of jobs. One startup, Refactr, led by a husband and wife pair, was struggling with fundraising and was on the verge of shutting down when they got accepted to Tampa Bay Wave\u2019s program. Within months of completing the program, they landed significant funding that eventually led to an acquisition<\/a> by British cybersecurity firm Sophos. South Florida is now becoming one of the fastest growing startup hubs<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Accelerators can also become a vital local hub for businesses with good ideas in cities without well-established business…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1157683,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3094],"tags":[51,3134,41252,16,15],"class_list":["post-1157682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-special-project","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/117122846375354212","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1157682"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1157682\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1157683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1157682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1157682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1157682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}