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Back in 2010, when then-TEDCO interim executive director John Wasilisin was flying back to Baltimore from Austin, Texas, he couldn’t stop thinking about how his trip made him feel like “something was missing” in Maryland’s ecosystem.
Wasilisin had just spent a long few days attending myriad events in Austin and St. Louis, Missouri, where he met many entrepreneurs and established relationships with various players in their business communities. Both cities had a growing reputation for being “hotbeds” of entrepreneurship, but there was something about his time in Texas that fascinated him.
He spent the entire plane ride home thinking about how Austin not only lauded the stories of entrepreneurs who achieved rapid success but also celebrated the journeys of those who’d failed on their first several attempts before ultimately bringing their ideas to fruition.
“I realized that we weren’t doing that in Maryland,” Wasilisin said. “We had a very disjointed ecosystem. There was no kind of central player, hub, platform or forum to bring us all together. If an entrepreneur flamed out back in 2010, they almost had a red scarlet letter on the back of their shirt.”
That’s why in November 2011, he and his team organized TEDCO’s inaugural Entrepreneur Expo. It took place at the BWI Airport Marriott in Linthicum Heights — and it was a huge success.
Now, after a break during the pandemic, the event is returning for its tenth year. The 2024 Entrepreneur Expo takes place on Wednesday, December 4, at the Renaissance Baltimore Harborplace Hotel.
Showcasing resources from across the state, the expo is chock-full of workshops, roundtable discussions, exhibiting companies and pitches. The daylong event features 1,000-plus of the region’s top entrepreneurs, business owners, angel and venture capital investors, legislators and influencers.
The expo’s origins
Wasilisin said, once he gave his team his vision of the expo, they ran with it. The first expo included four programming tracks where attendees learned about topics ranging from mentoring and advising to technology transfer and commercialization to financing.
It also included several speakers who had already been extremely successful. But none of them reached those points without overcoming major strife, a crucial theme Wasilisin aimed to bring to the fore.
“They would be mesmerized by those entrepreneurs telling how they got started,” Wasilisin said, “and the coolest thing is entrepreneurs always start out with, ‘It was hard. We failed more times than we succeeded,’ which I think was very important for entrepreneurs to hear because if they failed, they thought it was over.”
That inaugural expo attracted a few hundred people and was well received, beyond expectations. Wasilisin had only planned on running one expo, but he reconsidered after many participants left asking when the next one would be.
They were eager to come back thanks to the natural friction created by putting so many early-stage founders in the same room as mid- to high-level players in the Maryland ecosystem.
“What I found out quickly after the first one was the most exciting things are the collisions in the hallway going from one session to the next,” Wasilisin said. “All of a sudden, there’s all kinds of networking going on. A lot of that success in life is connection and relationships.”
For the next decade, the expo served as one of TEDCO’s flagship annual events celebrating Maryland’s entrepreneurial community. It’s been held in Baltimore, College Park, Montgomery County, Columbia and many other places around Maryland in an effort to include as many people across the state as possible over the years.
The expo never truly left
Throughout the pandemic, TEDCO fought to keep the spirit of the expo alive.
At one point, CEO Troy LeMaile-Stovall was scheduled to speak in Baltimore at a TEDCO Talks — a series featuring interviews with thought leaders in economic development from across Maryland and beyond. But he couldn’t attend because his family got sick.
So TEDCO’s chief development and marketing officer Tammi Thomas stepped in to deliver the presentation, and the audience was extremely receptive to this format. That inspired TEDCO to take its Entrepreneur Expo on the road for “pop-up” events that served as “mini expos” over the last three to four years.
These smaller gatherings of 50 to 60 people instead of hundreds not only allowed TEDCO to maintain the essence of the expo but also resulted in more intimate interactions for everyone involved.
“The spirit of the expo never died, it just got reinvented,” LeMaile-Stovall said. “It allowed us to tap deeper into those ecosystems that we couldn’t have done with the broader expo that we’re going to do here in December.”
In September 2022, TEDCO collaborated with Sen. Ben Cardin’s office to create a Tech Fair that included the biggest players in the space to help underinvested companies get their attention.
Nine small companies got a chance to interact with officials from Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook and many others to learn about how to build their businesses. TEDCO then held an investment meeting at the end of 2022 with the companies in its portfolio to allow them to share their progress and discuss ways to accelerate growth.
These are just some of the ways Maryland’s innovation ecosystem relies on TEDCO each year.
LeMaile-Stovall stressed that the Entrepreneur Expo — no matter how it’s executed — is about spotlighting people in the Maryland ecosystem.
“It’s important that we see this as less about TEDCO and more about the ecosystem and our entrepreneurs,” he said. “It’s about the celebration of innovation and entrepreneurship for the state and being able to provide a platform for a company to tell stories of their successes.”
There aren’t any ways to measure how many jobs are created as a result of the Entrepreneur Expo, but it’s clear the event hosts a myriad of connections that eventually lead to more jobs for the state — advancing TEDCO’s primary mission of economic empowerment.
“While it’s impossible to have a metric for it, I put my whole career on the line that this is a worthwhile endeavor because we’re giving people the opportunity to even be successful to create those jobs,” Wasilisin said. “We want to hire the people who pay taxes in Maryland and start their families here.”
In the long term, LeMaile-Stovall believes this revival will be used as a springboard to build upon moving forward.
“I’m excited about the bar that we’re setting again, given what they’ve done in the past,” LeMaile-Stovall said. “This is a different ecosystem, but it’s building off what we have done and will continue to build up. So, it’s not about ignoring the last nine expos, but setting the bar for the next ten.”