Stories of Technology, Innovation, & Entrepreneurship in the Southeast

About 200 people pre-registered for Tuesday evening’s latest “After Work with ETEC” event that was co-hosted by the East Tennessee Economic Council and the Young Professionals of Knoxville.

Held in the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge, attendees heard a presentation by Knoxville’s Brandon Bruce, Managing Director of the newly minted Market Square Ventures (MSV) group. Much of his presentation focused on gaps that he and others identified as “must fills” in the local ecosystem, although Bruce tipped his hat to his wife at the beginning of his presentation.

Showing a picture of her with Pope Francis, he noted that Tricia Bruce was one of six people named on February 17 as Consultors to the General Secretariat of the Synod of Bishops for the Catholic Church.

Bruce started with the first company he launched. Named Cirrus Insight, it was focused on integrating users of Google into the Salesforce world. Other notable examples, each designed to fill a gap, included:

• The Knoxville Technology Council. Every major city in Tennessee and neighboring states had one; Knoxville did not. He worked with John McNeely to establish the organization.
• 100Knoxville, a program run by the Knoxville Entrepreneur Center that has onboarded its 11^th cohort of Black business owners. Adopted from a program run in Memphis, the program has a goal of growing Black-owned businesses in Knoxville by $10,000,000 in 5 years.
• The Startup Knox website is a collaboration with John Bruck to map the resources available to entrepreneurs and the start-ups in the region.
• The November 8, 2017, effort that led to the region surpassing the number of young people who were simultaneously learning to code as confirmed by the Guinness Book of World Records.
• Managing Director for the third cohort of the “Techstars Industries of the Future Accelerator,” an effort that we have previously said has put Knoxville on a map with much larger and more developed start-up communities.
• Market Square Ventures has five General Partners, including Bruce, and around 40 Limited Partners with a focus on bringing more early stage capital to the area.
• 121 Tech Hub, another collaboration with John Bruck, that provided a co-working site for high potential start-ups. Some six weeks after it officially opened, Bruce says it is busting at the seams with nearly two dozen members.

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