#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Jim Roberts, Founder, NEW (Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington) & Wilmington Angels for Local Entrepreneurship (WALE) Angel Network
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.
Creating a New Hub for Tech Entrepreneurs
Jim Roberts has led the transformation of the once tiny startup ecosystem of coastal Wilmington, North Carolina into an environment on par with cities like Charlotte and Raleigh. This has resulted in national attention and the establishment of Wilmington as an emerging hub for tech entrepreneurs. We spoke with Jim about the importance of community building organizations, his experience leading an angel investor capital network outside of a traditional tech hub, and the impact of a more restricted definition of an accredited investor on startups.
Tell us about your background. What led you to create the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington North Carolina?
I had already started entrepreneur support organizations in Charlotte (2000) and Asheville (2003). In 2008, I went on to work for the North Carolina Department of Commerce in the international trade division in Raleigh and then a North Carolina Biotech Center spinoff org to co-lead an entrepreneurial organization focused on nanotechnology. Eventually, in 2013, I was recruited to Wilmington NC, opening UNC Wilmington's first incubator and the first co-working space in the city. While there, we received an SBA grant for being one of the top 50 incubators/ accelerators in the country.
That experience led me to starting my own independent network in 2015 for entrepreneurs in Wilmington. As an outsider, I knew it would be difficult to establish roots and get accepted into the local networks, so I created my own. Now we hold the largest monthly startup events in business-friendly North Carolina. Even though other cities throughout the state are much larger, we were able to create a really strong startup ecosystem here in Wilmington.
What does the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington do?
NEW is an independent entrepreneur support organization that serves as a community for local startup founders. We focus on five things: events, mentorship, communications (media relations and a newsletter), investor preparations and advocacy.
We work with the Wilmington Small Business Coalition, more than a dozen organizations, to provide a wide range of assistance for small business owners and entrepreneurs. NEW focuses on tech and life sciences startups to grow a new set of higher-paying jobs for our citizens and local college graduates.
We hold free monthly events mostly around sales, marketing and attracting the capital entrepreneurs need. In April of 2023, we held an investor reverse pitch event. We invited five out-of-region venture capital investors to talk about their funds and portfolios, which was a really interesting opportunity and different from typical investor events. We also hosted a talk by North Carolina’s most famous serial entrepreneur who gave a 45 minute MBA-quality presentation on scaling startups. 53 investors traveled to the event and they also heard six local startups present. We held the inaugural “Wilmington Investor Buzz In Event” during the traditional spring social festival called the Azalea Festival, and there were several social activities for our guests to enjoy during their business visit to our coastal community. Many of these investors were from the Raleigh / Durham area, and tend to have beach houses in the area.
We’re also able to do so much for our community when it comes to advocacy on a statewide basis. For example, I’m on the grants committee for NC IDEA and I can help promote their touring educational events. Prior to 2013, no Wilmington company had won one of these $50,000 non-dilutive grants because they didn’t know they existed. It is VERY important for your city to have a representative in the room where these decisions are made. We refer to this advocacy as the “Coastal Corridor” where we attend and support the events of these regional or statewide organizations, and in return, they make an effort to travel to Wilmington to help our startups. These organizations include CED, First Flight Venture Center, NC Tech Association and others who are based in the state capital of Raleigh and Durham, too.
Before the opening of the UNCW incubator, Wilmington didn’t historically have a deep innovation ecosystem. So we put on impactful events for founders—like our Tough Love event, to help give innovators the critical feedback they need on their investor presentations before they meet live with real investors where you only get one chance to make the right impression. Or events to learn about SBIR grants. We also have a weekly newsletter that goes out every Tuesday with news, insights and regional events where founders can meet clients and investors. We also have a newsletter just for our sponsors with insights.
What should policymakers know about community building organizations and their role in developing an innovation ecosystem?
Grants or sponsorships—even an amount of just $5,000 to $25,000 annually—-would go a long way. My first five years of running NEW, we only had $25,000 of total annual sponsorship support. It was really hard to survive as an organization within that period of time. After we were named the number one ecosystem in the USA and number two in the WORLD for small cities under 300,000 people by StartupGenome and StartupBlink, we suddenly had more sponsor support and more people who were interested in being a part of what we were building. So broader financial support, even in small amounts, is really helpful for entrepreneur support organizations especially at the beginning.
We know policymakers don’t love to pick winners or losers to invest in individual startups that may fail down the road. But they should support the entrepreneur support organizations who can provide more broad support to dozens of startups who will end up creating better paying jobs as the companies grow. According to a recent Milken Institute survey, Wilmington is now ranked in the top ten cities in America for job growth and salary growth over the last ten years. Those results are from local startup / entrepreneur growth not incentivized recruitment of companies from other cities moving to Wilmington.
You lead a local angel investor capital network as well. How does this help build capital formation in areas that aren’t typically thought of as technology hubs?
We have the Wilmington Angels for Local Entrepreneurs—the WALE Angel Network. A very important thing that I've learned over the last 23 years of entrepreneurship is that if you actually want to make angel investing happen in your community, you have to move both sides closer together—you have to prepare the entrepreneurs, but you also have to prepare, inform and engage the potential local angel investors.
When I started this work 20 years ago, North Carolina had an angel investor tax credit. We don't have that anymore. But all of the surrounding states around North Carolina replicated our tax credit and then we got rid of ours when the state legislature took out all of the “loopholes” in the tax system and lowered the overall tax rate. So we're trying to get that back desperately. But that's become a problem. So if you don't move the investors towards the entrepreneurs, they always “move the goalposts” further away and make it more difficult with their leverage. We also work to help get our startups selected for investor events like Dig South in Charleston, SC —which boosts their profile and gets them media coverage so that investors look at them and say “Oh, I read about that company in the newspaper.” When I help the startups get local and regional media attention, it makes the investors more aware of the activity in the local ecosystem.
What should policymakers understand about the impact on startups if the thresholds to become an accredited investor are raised?
If you are going to raise the threshold to become an accredited investor from $1 million in net worth to $10 million, that pretty much eliminates my angel network. I am concerned about that—it minimizes the number of people that can participate. We don’t want fewer investors participating. It’s hard enough already. This change could eliminate, at least 50 percent of the investors we have, because they are under $10 million in net worth. I don't know how that's a good thing.
We need more programmatic support for our startups. There’s a statistic from the Kauffman Foundation that 70 percent of startups fail in the first three to five years, but if you provide programming , like the old FasTrac program, 70 percent of startups succeed beyond three to five years, and not many communities are putting on that type of programming. If it was more available through an entrepreneur support organization like mine, you would have a much better chance for the startups to succeed long term. Without consistent financial support of the entrepreneur support orgs, it is difficult to provide the programming.
What are your goals for your organizations moving forward?
To be honest, my goal is to move up in the national and global ecosystem rankings. We love competing with larger cities, which have a lot more resources and larger populations. I would also like to support efforts to keep entrepreneurs and talented employees in Wilmington. If we're such a beautiful coastal town, why would talented people feel the need to move away? And to be honest, that is what's happening right now. Wilmington has the beginnings of a FinTech cluster from Live Oak Bank, nCino, and Apiture. Wilmington now has a large venture fund (Canapi Ventures) but it's only for fintech. Now that we've got ten years of experience of building the ecosystem, we're way down the road. Wilmington now has a track record of helping companies achieve successful exit events—in fact, we've had three successful exits. Once you have those exits, it's easier to prove to new entrepreneurs and attract new startups through what we have to offer that other cities might not.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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