Starting, growing, and cultivating are all skill sets Krista Covey has mastered over the years. Her professional career began in commercial finance where she managed an extensive lending portfolio. She also started and grew her own finance business that she profitably exited before working for other lenders in Florida. Her path in finance led her to a position as the Economic Development Manager for the Pasco Economic Development Council where she managed a micro-loan fund for early-stage and small businesses that could not access traditional sources of capital. It was there that she discovered her love for working with and supporting entrepreneurs.
“I just loved it. I loved the bottom up approach to economic development and working with entrepreneurs. I love seeing them reaching their milestones. That’s truly where I get my warm fuzzies. When my entrepreneurs come to me and say ‘Krista, we just made this big sale!’ or ‘We got this new opportunity!’ That’s truly what I love about the work that we do,” says Krista.
Krista did a lot to grow and cultivate the ecosystem of Pasco County. She started two innovation centers with incubators in the Tampa Bay Area, started the SMARTstart Business Incubator program (which more than doubled in size and expanded to two locations within a year), coordinated an Entrepreneur Assistance network to provide free help for small businesses, and managed the Economic Gardening program for established high-growth businesses (among other things).
The Economic Gardener
If you look at her extensive resume of credentials, you’ll notice that she’s certified in “Economic Gardening.” After diving into her career, it’s evident that Krista is the epitome of an economic gardener. Economic Gardening is the belief that you should “grow your own” entrepreneurs. It’s understanding your community, the assets that are already there, and the individuals that spur growth. It’s knowing who the job creators and problem solvers are and where the economic opportunities are within your own community and then getting people connected and working together (sounds like entrepreneurial ecosystem building, right?).
“It’s essentially a bottom up approach to economic development. Traditionally economic development can sometimes mean that you are recruiting companies from outside the area that you represent. So if I’m in Florida, I’m recruiting companies from everywhere except for Florida. But really I’m just stealing another communities’ assets and resources and bringing them to my space. It costs taxpayer dollars, is a really long sales cycle, and there’s no guarantee that it’s going to work. There’s a much better approach to economic development in my mind where you can grow your own.”
The concept goes beyond just growing new entrepreneurs and startups. It works to support what Krista calls “Second Stage Companies.”
“In economic gardening there are different programs to serve different companies at different stages. So it’s not just about growing your own but it’s also serving them throughout the life of the company so they stay in the community as well. Traditional programs we’re familiar with like acceleration and incubation are great and really important but there’s this other layer of programming to support what I refer to as second stage companies as well. They’ve typically been in business for 5 years, have a C Suite, are scalable and sustainable. How do we continue to help them?”
Her New Garden in San Antonio
After six years of growing and cultivating the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Pasco County and loving it, Krista was ready for a change. She was recruited to San Antonio to help build a community for entrepreneurs in the life sciences and biosciences and technology and support the existing work that was already being done.
“I felt like the community that I was serving had grown at a stage where it wouldn’t fall apart. So I felt like the timing was really good,” explains Krista.
Krista is the Vice President of Economic Development and Operations for VelocityTX, a separate entity under parent nonprofit TRTF (Texas Research Technology Foundation). In 2016, TRTF sold a large portion of land on their research park to Microsoft. Wanting to be good stewards of the money, TRTF decided to build the innovation center to continue to offer more opportunities for successful startups in San Antonio.
“That was really the birth of Velocity. I was asked to come build the Velocity program.”
VelocityTX is a hub where entrepreneurs can access capital, mentors, executives, scientists, deal flow, specialized manufacturing, and other resources that will help them grow. Its campus occupies six acres and building one’s redevelopment (where our summit will be), has just completed.
TRTF invested $220 million in the project with the hopes of energizing the biotechnology industry in San Antonio. The super hub will have an accelerator, incubator, and investment fund, 25 offices, eight labs, and classroom space for biomedical job training. The company also plans to add more on the six acre footprint with a $750,000 grant and another tax incentive from the City of San Antonio that will turn into a three-building “innovation center” for tech, life sciences, and other businesses. This will hopefully reshape the East Side and bring more restaurants, commercial development, and housing to the area.
During construction of VelocityTX
As for the VelocityTX offerings, Krista has been hard at work listening to the needs of the community and writing programs to support them.
“We have an Incubator program for companies that need office space. We also have an ideation program (Velocity360). We have a myriad of other great resources to help startups in San Antonio. We’re launching a 16- week health accelerator this year called the Human Health Accelerator focused on biotech companies. We also have Velocity Growth, a program for second stage companies. Companies that might have been in our portfolio that we’ve invested in or they might be companies that want to continue to grow and scale. We provide services like executive round tables.”
Coopetition
There is no lack of support for entrepreneurs in San Antonio. In fact, one the ecosystem’s biggest challenges, according to Krista, is the duplicitous nature of a crowded ecosystem where everyone wants to collaborate.
“We’ve got a lot of people who just love to work together, it gets really crowded sometimes.”
But that’s a good challenge because collaboration is actually one of San Antonio’s strengths. In fact, one of the best things that has happened in Krista’s ecosystem building career is the Entrepreneur Support Organization that has been developed.
“I love our ESO partnership. We have these Entrepreneur support organization luncheons where everyone we can find that is supporting entrepreneurs in some way will get together once a month and talk about our challenges and opportunities together even though we have different programs - it’s almost like ‘Co-opetition’. We’re all friends and we all work so well together. I think that that really does so much good for our ecosystem. I’d say that’s probably one of the best things. I’m just really proud of the collaboration that happens here in San Antonio.”
Coopetition. What a great word! It’s crowded out there, but nobody is really choking anyone out. Instead, they all work collaboratively. It’s one thing our Spring Summit attendees should expect to see. In fact, our Summit theme is “This is What Collaboration Looks Like.”
Why She’s a Member of SCN
Krista is currently our Summit Host, but when she’s not planning a Summit, she serves on the Membership committee and has been a member for four years.
“I really feel SCN serves an important role of supporting the individual ecosystem builder. I truly believe that when I’ve gone to summits when I have interactions with SCN members I am truly engaging with my people. We all speak the same language, we can all talk about the real issues. There’s no explaining the work that we do, we just dive right into the issues because we’re all in the same boat.”