Our guest today, Megan Elliott has a diverse path that took her all over the world before landing her in Nebraska, where she's now the founding director at the Johnny Carson Center for Emerging Media Arts. The program aims to be the premier destination in the world for creative young pioneers who use technology to innovate and solve human-scale problems, entertain audiences, and tell breathtaking stories that stimulate, provoke, and inspire. 

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Our guests today Andrew Prystai and Billy Martin set out in 2019 to create an event platform for discovering and sharing local events. What they didn’t know, is that they’d run into a buzzsaw in the form of a global pandemic that would shut down the event industry entirely. In March of 2020 things looked pretty bleak for them but then something unexpected happened. Here is Andrew and Billy to tell their COVID survival story.

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Ava Thomas is the face of the Journal Star and Lee Enterprises which is the parent company of the Journal Star the Omaha World Herald and 350 other publications across 26 states. She’s someone who took a part time job in college and turned out to be so good that she climbed her way to the top of the organization almost unintentionally, which is a testament to how much people like working with her. She brings value and life into the communities she works with and plays an integral role in helping us get our news everyday.

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Our guest today, Brian Ardinger, has a keen eye for what’s around the corner when it comes to technology and he’s been on the front lines for much of the innovation that has happened in the state. He was responsible to helping bring the first Paypal offices to Omaha, he started the Nmotion startup accelerator which has produced countless success stories and now he’s helping lead Nelnet into the future as their Director of Innovation. His path has taken him everywhere from Hong Kong to Silicon Valley, but something about Nebraska has always brought him back.

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Our guest today Taylor Monks is only 26 years old but he’s already the founder of a fintech company called BasicBlock that has received 4 million dollars in funding to date. Rumor has it that another massive round of funding is in the works but we legally aren’t able to talk about that yet on the show. Taylor went from a rebellious adolescent to a tech entrepreneur wooing esteemed silicon valley investors almost overnight and today we try to find out just how that was feasibly possible.  

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Bart Dillashaw is an under the radar silicon valley transplant. He spent the first part of his career as an attorney rubbing shoulders with Mark Cuban and Elon Musk and learning about corporate law at some of some of the most innovative tech companies in the country. You wouldn’t know that he has a heavyweight resume when you sit down with him because in person, he’s the definition of Nebraska Nice.

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Being a career politician is a tough job. You have to pick sides on issues, you’re always in the public eye and you can’t always make everyone happy. It takes lifetime of putting yourself out there and hard work before people will trust you enough to lead. Our special guest today Gov Pete Rickets knows all about hard work as his father Joe Ricketts came up from humble beginnings to start something called a self directed brokerage that would eventually become TD Ameritrade. That’s right, the same TD Ameritrade that was acquired by Charles Schwab in 2019 for 26 billion dollars. But before all of the politics and fanfare the Ricketts were just your typical Omaha family.

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If you said 50 years ago that one day cows would wear computers that monitor their health, people would think you were crazy. Well that’s exactly what Vishal Singh is doing with his massively successful agtech startup Quantified Ag. It was a long road that led Vishal to Quantified Ag and it starts when he and his family moved from New Delhi India to Nebraska at the age of 8. 

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Our guest today doesn’t need much of an introduction. Tom Osborne was born in Hastings Nebraska and rose from humble beginnings to build the University of Nebraska into the greatest college football program of the 90s and if you weren’t around in the 90s to witness it, it was pandemonium. At game time the state would become a ghost town because every single Nebraskan was glued to their TV. Some fans would even mortgage their homes to follow the team. Tom has a way of leading and growing young people.

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Our guest today paved the way for Nebraskan startups to successfully raise funding. You see, in 2011 Nebraska ranked dead last in venture capital deals with exactly 0 so this was a big problem. Mark proved that innovative ideas could happen here and he did it an e-commerce startup you might have heard of called Hayneedle.

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This show is produced by Grindstone.

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