1 Million Cups has finally arrived in Rochester. The inaugural edition of 1 Million Cups Rochester took place this morning at 9AM. The event will be held the first Wednesday of every month, at 9AM, in the Bleu Duck Kitchen event space. 1 Million Cups is a national, educational event for entrepreneurs that is based out of the Kauffman Foundation.

This week, we speak with COVR Medical, a life science startup based out of the Mayo Clinic Business Accelerator. COVR Medical was built within the Mayo Clinic Emerging Entrepreneur Program, a partnership between Mayo Medical Ventures and the Mayo Clinic Business Accelerator. The COVR Medical team created medical garments that raise the standard of care and improve patient privacy by covering the groin area during surgery and other medical procedures. The startup was established in 2014 and is currently gearing up for commercialization. The team recently won the professional division of Walleye Tank, Rochester’s first life science business pitch competition.

This week, I got to sit down with Iowa native and current Rochester resident Ryan Utterback and learn about his journey building and growing Pure Rock Studios. Pure Rock Studios is a music lesson and entertainment center in northeast Rochester that custom fits lessons to fit the needs of its students. Utterback and his team of fourteen professional musicians place an emphasis on live performance, if the students want to gain this experience. Utterback himself is a professional drummer. He spent several years studying and working as a musician in Hollywood and plays in the local country band County Line Drive.

This past week, the Rochester entrepreneurial community got to host our good friend Pete Kane and his group Silicon Valley Artificial Intelligence (SVAI). SVAI is the largest artificial intelligence (AI) community in the Silicon Valley area. Members of the group made a special trip to Rochester to strengthen the relationship between their strong AI hub and the engrained medical and research community in Rochester.

This week to continue our discussion about wet lab space in Minnesota, I spoke with Abraham Algadi, the Executive Direction of the Worthington Regional Economic Development Corporation, and Dr. Randy Simonson, a veterinary microbiologist and serial entrepreneur in Worthington, Minnesota. Worthington is a diverse community of about 13,000 people in the very southwest corner of Minnesota. The community has strong animal health and agricultural roots and is developing an animal health-focused wet lab to support their already entrenched biobusinesses and growing number of entrepreneurs.

This week I got to sit down and talk with Rochester resident Sunny Prabhakar about The Commission, a young professionals group in Rochester.

This week I got to sit down and speak with Rochester resident Roo Yori. This year, Roo competed on the NBC show American Ninja Warrior as the K9 Ninja. During the show, he wore a shirt with the message “Adopt a Dog,” championing for shelter dogs everywhere. Roo has been a dog advocate in Rochester and beyond for several years. He entered the national limelight with his rescued Pitbull, Wallace, when the pair became disc dog sensations. Roo founded the Wallace the Pitbull Foundation with his wife, Clara, to aid shelter dogs and the people dedicated to them. Roo’s is a fantastic story of how one person, with some help of course, can get their message onto a national level. And he does all this while working a full-time job as a lab technician.

This week’s podcast is all about Global Entrepreneurship Week, a world-wide celebration of entrepreneurship, which included seventeen events last week right here in Rochester. If you missed out on the week, you can catch up with what happened by checking the Rochester Global Entrepreneurship Week website or searching for the hashtag #gewroch on your favorite social media site.

This week’s episode comes straight from the “Start Something” series from Rochester’s Global Entrepreneurship week. This informational session was about getting started with the small business community. The event featured three Pakistani entrepreneurs from Minneapolis sharing their stories: Arif Altaf, Seema Altaf and Caldoun Abuhakel. This event was sponsored by the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation.

This week, I got to do a special roundtable podcast discussion with some local entrepreneurs to talk about the things that no one wants to: failure, fear, and the struggles associated with entrepreneurship.