#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Ann Carpenter, Co-Founder and CEO, Braid Theory
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Weaving Together Startups and Industry
Braid Theory, a strategic advisory firm for entrepreneurs, is proving collaboration works by helping startups enter the marketplace and gain access to their customers. Based in San Pedro, the globally-focused firm is helping to establish an entrepreneurial ecosystem close to the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach. We recently spoke with Ann Carpenter, the Co-Founder and CEO of Braid Theory, to learn more about the firm’s work supporting startups and entrepreneurs.
Can you tell us a little about yourself? What is your background?
Braid Theory started in 2016 and we’re now going on our fourth year, so we’re essentially a startup ourselves.
I previously worked with a nonprofit Incubator called PortTech Los Angeles, where our focus was on the heavy industrial sector and maritime oceans. As the director of marketing, I was responsible for a lot of the programs and outreach and the yearly conference, as well as advising entrepreneurs around their marketing and business strategies. I ran my own marketing and design firm for 20 years before that, and prior to that I worked in aerospace. My role as director of strategic planning for Lockheed Martin was with a small group focused on spinning out intrapreneurship, and we spun out companies that had commercial applications.
In addition to my work with Braid Theory, I’m also the Chief Innovation Officer of Council District 15 for our region. It’s an additional opportunity to build out the entrepreneurial ecosystem in our area.
Tell us about Braid Theory. What is the work you’re doing, and how do you bring together entrepreneurs and other partners to drive market growth?
Braid Theory—unlike the non-profit incubator side—is a for-profit advisory firm, but we’re really vertically integrated. We have coworking spaces, and we have one-on-one consulting like you’d have with an incubator or accelerator program. We also have programs that are closer to the accelerator model and are very rigor-based in terms of getting entrepreneurs to commercialize their solutions.
Everything that we do is to help drive the startups to get into the marketplace and get access to their customers. We take a much more business development role with them. We work in terms of being in more of a partnership ecosystem because we’re this private company and we’re coin operated. Our firm has really deep domain expertise around industrial sectors, around ports and ocean industrial environment as well as in some of the biotech sectors—especially as it relates to biotech beyond human health-related solutions. So the entrepreneurs see us filling in gaps to helping them be successful.
We also track the sectors we work in, identifying technology grant opportunities and government programs and really learning and knowing what opportunities are coming out. It’s also includes understanding the legislative landscape in terms of whether there are any regulations coming up for which an entrepreneur would have a specific solution. We get that deep.
What makes San Pedro’s startup and entrepreneurial community unique?
Since San Pedro is a port town, we don’t really have a history of an entrepreneurial ecosystem. With the Port of Los Angeles and Long Beach in our backyard, you’ve got the shipping industry, you’ve got energy, and you’ve got construction technology. So you have all these needs, and it’s the potential of this customer base and of finding these real world problems for which you have solutions. That’s why we’re here in San Pedro.
San Pedro itself, though, is a hard ecosystem to grow because 80 percent of our community leaves town to go to work every day. There’s not an entrepreneurial ecosystem built yet. We’re kind of growing it from scratch.
The other thing, from Braid Theory’s point of view, is that we’re not place-based. We work with companies from all over the world because our sectors are global in nature. We’re more connected, I think, to a global entrepreneurial ecosystem than a southern California entrepreneurial ecosystem. We always focus on trying to find the best and the brightest to try and figure out how to build them out for success.
Are there any policies at the federal, state, or local level that have helped San Pedro’s entrepreneurial community?
We work with companies with SBIR grants. From a federal standpoint, the SBIR program is really important. It’s important for entrepreneurs to go to the next step for that funding, especially because a lot of our entrepreneurs are very deep tech, which isn’t typically fundable at an early stage before it’s commercially viable from a VC community. I’d love to see expanding out from that SBIR program a lot more resources toward supporting the path to commercialization for entrepreneurs.
There’s also an EDA i6 grant that supports clusters of entrepreneurial ecosystems, and there are a small amount of those being funded. That kind of funding is really critical. It would be great if the program could fund three times the number of projects that it does.
What is your goal for the next year? The next five years?
We’re starting to raise for our own seed fund as part of the next step for our full round of services. We want to be even more active in the investment side of building out the ecosystem.
In five years we want to look back and see that we have built San Pedro and our region into a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem, and that there is enough activity here that we’ll actually have helped diversify our port community.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
Engine works to ensure that policymakers look for insight from the startup ecosystem when they are considering programs and legislation that affect entrepreneurs. Together, our voice is louder and more effective. Many of our lawmakers do not have first-hand experience with the country's thriving startup ecosystem, so it’s our job to amplify that perspective. To nominate a person, company, or organization to be featured in our #StartupsEverywhere series, email edward@engine.is.
