A new online platform developed by finance professional Joseph Alioto maps Wisconsin’s tech and venture capital scene by providing useful data and drawing connections between various ecosystem stakeholders. Alioto, who has held various positions with Rexnord, Baird and St. Louis-based Emerson, launched the “MKE Tech Map” platform last week. By crowdsourcing information on the platform,
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Joseph Alioto[/caption]
“Outside of the question around who’s getting funding, just understanding what different stakeholder’s priorities are and what they’re interested in doing is a beneficial amount of information at the earliest stages of entrepreneurship,” Alioto said.
However, Alioto says the platform is not just for startups and tech companies – any stakeholder, from grant organizations to law and accounting firms, should place themselves on the map.
“My overarching ethos with this is that it's radically open,” Alioto said. “If somebody feels they are relevant to the tech and entrepreneurship community, then they should feel free to use this as a resource because improving visibility across the board is useful.”
Alioto borrowed the idea for the platform from I TEN, a facilitator of tech and startup ecosystem resources in St. Louis. When Alioto moved back to Milwaukee, he realized Wisconsin lacked a similar resource, he added.
“You can go on here and understand relatively quickly in whatever city you’re in, who down the road from you can you talk to that would be relevant to whatever you’re working on,” Alioto said.
The map is named MKE Tech Map simply because Alioto is based in Milwaukee. However, the goal is to map Wisconsin’s entire venture capital and tech ecosystem so that platform visitors find it useful no matter their location.
Alioto says MKE Tech Map’s current form is only the beginning. With a little bit of collaboration from the ecosystem, he hopes to make it a visual tool that shows stakeholder connections, including a function to group them more easily.
“I would love to understand in the long-term how far Milwaukee, Madison and Wisconsin’s impact spreads,” Alioto said. “It would be cool to understand how many countries Wisconsin has impacted through investing or building companies that now have other entities elsewhere.”