The “Startups and Beyond: Building, Scaling and Staying in Nebraska” Tech Summit session began with an ask from moderator Tom Chapman.
“Founders don’t get many chances to ask you for something,” he told the room. “So when they do, please say yes.”
It was a fitting opening for a session focused not just on startup success stories, but on what it really takes to build, scale, and sustain companies in Nebraska. On stage were five leaders who have lived the highs and lows of that work:
- Karen Borchert, CEO of Alpaca
- Tom Chapman, CEO of Peeq Industries
- Jennifer Lea, founder of Entry Envy
- Kellee Mikuls, former founder of Swish Boom and now Executive Director of Ignite Nebraska
- Tullen Mabbutt, CFO of CompanyCam
What followed was an honest look at what it takes to build and scale a company in Nebraska, and the gaps that still slow too many founders down.
Four Different Journeys, One Shared Reality
Each founder on the panel arrived at their entrepreneurship journey from a different direction—education, e-commerce, childcare, and contractor SaaS. Some companies are scaling rapidly. One founder transitioned from startup life into leading a statewide workforce organization. And since the Summit, another founder has successfully transitioned her business to a new owner.
But despite the differences in their origin stories, their reflections landed in the same place: Nebraska has momentum, but the barriers for founders are very real.
Karen Borchert spoke about building Alpaca, an educator engagement platform now used in school districts across the country, and the constant pressure to stay focused on sales in a market where budgets shift overnight.
Jennifer Lea described how Entry Envy evolved from a personal DIY project into a national subscription business for custom porch décor, and how challenging it is to scale a physical-product startup in a market that tends to adopt slowly.
Kellee Mikuls shared the trajectory of Swish Boom, the on-demand childcare platform she built and ultimately had to shut down, and how that experience shapes her leadership today at Ignite Nebraska, where she works to upskill and place nontraditional tech talent.
And, Tullen Mabbutt reflected on joining CompanyCam when it was just a few dozen employees and helping it grow into one of Nebraska’s fastest-scaling SaaS companies, all while navigating the state’s chronic shortage of technical talent.
Their markets and business models couldn’t have been more different, but the obstacles were strikingly similar: earning early trust, finding funding at the right moments, and competing for the talented workforce who can build and scale a company.
The First Customer Problem
While the first part of the conversation was about what these founders built, it quickly moved into what nearly broke them: the struggle to find early adopters right in their own backyard.
“I think Nebraska’s biggest challenge is that they are not an early adopter of ideas,” Mikuls said. “When you have a startup, they always say, ‘I want to see someone else locally who’s accepted it and then come back to us.’”
For Swish Boom, this hesitation was fatal. The company was ready to roll out childcare as a benefit to employers, a solution to a problem that nearly every business leader was talking about after COVID. They could deliver a verified sitter in sixty seconds. The demand was clear and the business case was strong.
“No one was willing to step up,” she said.
The story is not unique. Mikuls pointed to other Nebraska startups who had to land national logos before local companies would take a chance on them.
“You want to talk about brain drain,” she said. “Companies in this town have the capital to step up and be the first customer. They are going to lose out on great startups, great ideas, and they are going to close like mine, or others that will not even start because they do not have that type of support.”
Lea echoed this sentiment from the perspective of a product based, direct to consumer founder. Nebraska, she said, is excellent at helping founders get started and even reach early revenue. But there is a gap between “proof of concept” and “scaled, sustainable business.”
“People do not understand how much incredible money it takes in the startup space,” she said. “We are great at getting you to revenue, not to profitability. To really scale, we need way more money and support than what this community often gives.”
The Talent Crunch, and Why “Growing Your Own” Matters
If capital and early customers are one part of the puzzle, talent is another.
For Alpaca, the solution has been to grow talent from within.
“The founders of Flywheel used to say my very favorite thing about talent,” Borchert shared. “It is easy to hire twenty software developers. You just start seven years ago.”
At Alpaca, that philosophy looks like hiring baristas, teachers, and recent graduates, then investing heavily in their growth. Their first full time software developer joined right out of the Raikes School at UNL and is now growing into a leadership role.
“We hire completely locally,” she said. “We are in person, in office in Nebraska, and pretty much all female.”
For Ignite Nebraska, the talent conversation centers on what happens when entry-level tech jobs disappear altogether.
“What we’re seeing is that many entry-level tech roles are going away, or the bar for them has changed,” Mikuls said. “Where we add value is helping people build the soft skills and adaptability employers still need, and retooling workers with skills like AI and project management.”
It’s a shift that creates risk for workers trying to enter the field, and a gap for employers who still need people who can communicate, problem-solve, and grow into technical roles over time.
For CompanyCam, the challenge is not just entry level roles. It is the depth and specificity of technical experience required to scale a product that handles millions of images and workflows.
“Hiring technical product managers, designers, software engineers has been really challenging,” Mabbutt said. “We were ninety percent local when I came in. Now we are fifty percent local, and that is going down as we have to go get engineering talent.”
The company’s Ruby on Rails stack makes the local hiring pool even smaller.
“Nobody else is building any big software companies on Ruby here,” he added. “So that instantly makes our ecosystem not as valuable for us to pull from.”
Beyond specific technologies, there is another gap: people who have seen the “messy middle” of growth.
“We have a lot of folks who have been in very early stages,” Borchert said. “But our total number of people who have either sold, developed, built, or product managed from zero to a hundred, from a hundred to two hundred people is smaller. You see fewer of those folks who have seen it and done it and are ready to build it again.”
When Funding is the Difference Between Learning and Losing
One of the most powerful parts of the conversation came when Chapman turned to the Business Innovation Act (BIA), Nebraska’s suite of innovation programs that includes the prototype grant.
In his words, the BIA is “the number one entrepreneurship program in the world” in terms of return on investment.
For CompanyCam, the prototype grant was one of the first real bets on founder Luke Hanson’s initial idea.
“Starting something when you just have an idea is very hard and you have to be scrappy,” Mabbutt said.
That early support, combined with local seed funding and the involvement of Invest Nebraska, gave CompanyCam enough runway to reach a scale where it could attract Insight Partners, a ninety billion dollar global tech investor.
For Swish Boom, the prototype grant funded a different kind of outcome. The company ultimately failed, but the experience transformed Mikuls as a leader and operator.
“The prototype grant was betting on the rock stars of Nebraska,” she said. “It is betting on the people who are willing to take a bet.”
That bet is already paying off in a different way. Today, Ignite Nebraska is on the cusp of a statewide partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services, which has committed to hiring hundreds of Ignite participants into state roles. The state has proposed significant funding to support Ignite’s expansion across Nebraska.
“If I had not learned what I learned by scaling and failing a business that was given that prototype grant, I would not be in this position,” she said.
Lea has not yet received a prototype grant, but she has seen firsthand how the broader BIA ecosystem, Invest Nebraska, and local investors weave together support for founders.
“Everybody is working toward the same goal, to try and help these startups win and stay,” she said. “But that window between getting off the ground and getting to profitability is still huge.”
For Borchert, the value of the BIA is not just the dollars, but the layering effect.
“It is really a layering strategy that makes it possible,” she said. “You might get a smaller check from a fund like Move Ventures. You might get the prototype grant. Now you can build enough technology and start focusing on sales to get to the place where you are ready for Invest Nebraska or Nebraska Angels. It is those layers that helped us get going.”
The Human Cost of Risk, and Why It Matters
Near the end of the session, Chapman took a moment to answer a question himself. It was about retention, layoffs, and what happens when the numbers do not work.
In large companies, he noted, layoffs are painful but buffered. In a startup, the math is more brutal. If you have six months of runway and your current burn rate exhausts it, you do not just report lower profits. You cease to exist.
“In at least one of the businesses, we had to lay people off because we were going to run out of cash,” he said. “You have basically told people, you are betting on me. And I messed up. It is really hard.”
It was a sobering reminder that behind every funding program, hiring plan, and policy debate are people: founders, employees, and families who are putting their time, energy, and reputations on the line for a chance to build something here.
Success Feeds Success. So, What Now?
If there was a single conclusion from “Startups & Beyond,” it was not that Nebraska is failing its founders. Far from it. The state has come a long way from the days when there were almost no venture backed startups. Programs like the Business Innovation Act, Invest Nebraska, and university venture funds have changed the trajectory of dozens of companies.
But the panel made it clear that the next chapter requires more from Nebraska and its leaders:
- More early customers, willing to be the first in line rather than the fifth
- More risk capital at scaling stages, filling the void between early revenue and true profitability
- More experienced operators, who have seen companies grow from one million to hundreds of millions in revenue and are ready to run that playbook again
- More intentional talent pipelines, from baristas and teachers to Raikes graduates and career changers
“Success feeds success,” Mabbutt said. Every win creates people with experience and resources who can turn around and invest in the next wave.
