Awesome Inc

Season 3 | Episode 29:

Eric Martin is a Lexington, KY native who graduated from the University of Kentucky with a bachelor’s degree in Finance and a minor in Computer Science. After graduating, he joined Rebuilt Investments to help grow their real estate investing business. He created systems and processes that helped propel the company's growth to complete over 100 transactions in 2019!

Eric recently left his job to pursue an entrepreneurial partnership, Tributary Capital. His new company focuses on wholesaling, flipping, and acquiring rental properties. Tributary is a river or stream flowing into a larger river or lake. Similarly, Tributary Capital refers to having multiple streams of income which we build through acquiring rental property (just like the story about hauling buckets in Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant).

Eric's long-term goal is to grow his rental portfolio to the point where he can live off the passive income and devote his time to doing what matters.

In 2015, the city of Louisville, KY noticed a big problem: half of all fires involving two or more buildings involved an abandoned property. The city recognized the threat to families and challenged the community to make a solution – and they did.

Meet CASPER! CASPER and its suite of sensors constantly monitor abandoned properties for events like smoke detector sirens, break-ins, and floods. When a potentially dangerous event occurs, CASPER alerts both neighbors and emergency services so situations don’t turn into catastrophes.

Better yet, through the CASPER Portal, neighbors and city officials can better understand and address activities happening in vacant and abandoned properties by looking at historical activity data.

Nathan Armentrout, CEO, and founder, with his team of civic hackers, developed CASPER and soon after piloted 10 devices across 15 homes for six months, culminating in over 100 successful tests, two real-life confirmed detections, and zero false positives. Following the success of the pilot, Louisville is expanding the program to more homes to ensure the safety of all Louisville families living next to abandoned homes.

Shane Slone founder of Nursing CE Central has one mission: deliver high-quality nursing CEUs in a convenient, stress-free online environment. 

They provide the required continuing education nurses need in a fast & easy online platform. Every detail has been taken into account to make your experience fast, easy, and hassle-free. The platform never requires tests and your certificates are automatically at the completion of each course. 

We also understand that the #1 reason nurses seek continuing education is to satisfy the board of nursing requirements. We ensure that all of our continuing education meets the board of nursing standards for our accepted states. 

Brian Raney shares what started his vision of creating a startup community in Lexington, KY. 

In 2009, a few college friends came together to bring to life an idea. They believed in the potential for Lexington to be a creative, innovative, welcoming community that helped anyone and everyone pursue their definition of “awesome.”

This has meant many things over the years (remind us to tell you sometime about Awesome Wedding Engagements and Awesome Airlines), but today it means building the tech and startup community in Central Kentucky.

Awesome Inc was founded on the basis of the "give-first" mentality and has grown to be the epicenter for anything related to technology or startups. We strive to make Lexington a better place to live and work, one Oreo at a time.

Our Mission: To help people pursue their definition of Awesome 

Our Vision: We do that by growing the tech and entrepreneurial community in Central Kentucky

Our Method: Grow our community by providing the resources, connections, and a space to make it happen.

Brian shares his lessons learned and the struggles that he faced early on (over a decade ago!), which shaped our community into what it is today.

Some things are changing in house and we want you to stay In the know! 

Long story short, we've got some fun and new stuff in the works. We're excited to share more of what our awesome team, startups, and community are doing to make Kentucky the best place to live and work.

Ian Gerard, the CEO and product designer of Adder talks about his company making outdoor advertising engagement easy. Adder is a specialized real-time, real-world data analytics platform for out-of-home and word-of-mouth advertisers.  Their advertising and audience measurement tools bridge the gap between digital and physical ad spaces and help brands invest directly in their community.

Ian Gerard is a lifelong entrepreneur with a passion for stories, space, place, and time. Before Adder, Ian surveyed and mapped construction sites as a geospatial data specialist with Multivista, a startup that became a subsidiary of Hexagon and Leica Geosystems during his time with the company. In 2015, Ian kickstarted his first venture, a community farm focused on providing fresh, local food to the economically disadvantaged. During that time, he learned a lot about building communities and providing value to them. Since then, he's been working to bring modern data science to age-old industries while protecting everyone's right to data privacy.

Enable.Ai is a social media analytics solution making cutting-edge machine learning and natural language approachable to business users. It provides better performance metrics by identifying real moments of engagement and delivers insights on how to build better content for your audience. 

Brian comes from the Enterprise software world, having led efforts at recognized brands like Johnson & Johnson, Burton Snowboards, and Colgate-Palmolive. Eric has worked in startups for over 20 years including exits at Tech Republic and Telapoint.

Jake Miller is CEO of Toggle Health, a med-tech company that aims to dramatically improve surgical workflows by providing surgeons with a wireless, sterile controller to access their digital world without having to leave the sterile environment. Jake has 25 years of product development experience, 20 of which were focused on launching new businesses & startups in the healthcare space for companies such as Target, Walgreens, & Humana. He holds a B.A. in Chemistry from Bellarmine University and an MBA from Vanderbilt University. Jake is experienced in lean launch methodology as a mentor at both the LaunchIt & XLerate Health Accelerator programs. Jake is on the board of Louisville-based New Roots, working to create affordable access to farm-fresh food.

Mac Wilkinson is the founder and CEO of Moolathon. Moolathon is a social fundraising platform and fitness tracker. It gives charities, teams, and groups of all sorts the ability to raise money and awareness for a cause with the miles that a user may run or walk.

This episode contains a recap of the experiences of three individuals who participated in Startup Weekend Lexington 2019. 

Logan Jones is from Ashland, Kentucky and currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky where he recently graduated from UK. He works at Awesome Inc and also works to expand the business he started in 2017, KY Elevated Drone Imaging. Logan is the Producer & Co-host of the Middle Tech Podcast, and he is passionate about entrepreneurship, digital media, and building relationships.

Isaac Mesiner is a Senior Application Developer at Zudy, building custom web application solutions for enterprise businesses. He is a proud ’17 graduate from Georgetown College where he studied Computer Science and Business. During college, he had the opportunity to intern at Awesome Inc which connected me to the Lexington tech and startup community. That experience sparked an interest in entrepreneurship and attending all the great events Awesome Inc puts on like 5 Across and Startup Weekend!

Clay Harrison is a mechanical engineering student from the University of Kentucky with a drive for business and a passion for learning. Clay has worked across the industry and across the world. Most notably, Clay has interned with Toyota in positions from production to R&D, at Common Ltd. in Lodz, Poland, and at Badger Technologies!