Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Chris Heivly, Executive Director, LaunchBox Digital (Part 7)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What is your own background? How did you arrive at this point?

Chris: Thank you for asking. I’m an entrepreneur. I’ve done four or five of these things. I’ve had successes and I’ve had failures. My biggest success is that I was one of the founders of MapQuest.

Irina: I love MapQuest.

Chris: Doesn’t everyone love MapQuest? I’ve been doing this for 15 or 20 years. Interestingly enough, after MapQuest, I ran a venture capital fund for a large corporation – a large $6 billion company – that wanted to use a venture fund as a means to stay more current as one of their growth strategies. So, I got to understand a bit more about ventured-backed business and how that worked, that entire supply chain, if you will.

About a year or year and a half ago, I’d been reading a lot about other accelerator programs, and I said, “You know what? I think our area could really use a program like this.” So, that’s how my personal interest came. As I started that, we had a chance to work with the LaunchBox partners, who decided they wanted to move this from Washington, D.C. down to Durham. It all aligned itself perfectly.

A great little story that I’ll add is two of the LaunchBox partners were very strong supporters and players in the Obama campaign. When he came to office, they took very senior roles [with the government], which prevented them from continuing with the LaunchBox.

One of our founders is Julius Janikowski. He is now the chairman of the FCC (Federal Communications Commission), a pretty major role. He’s in charge of the Internet, among other things.

Sean Greene [interviewed as part of this series] was a LaunchBox founder, and he’s now with the Small Business Administration.

With their departure from LaunchBox and their senior executive roles in the administration, we had an opportunity to reformat LaunchBox to what it should be. And we thought Durham was a great place to do it. I was here in the Raleigh-Durham area. So, we were able to pull these two things together.

Irina: Where did you grow up?

Chris: I grew up in Philadelphia. I’ve also lived in Washington, D.C. We birthed MapQuest in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, of all places. Then I spent 10 years in Chicago before we moved here for warm weather.

Irina: Thank you, Chris. I love your insights. I hope we’ll get to work together on helping early stage entrepreneurs.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Chris Heivly, Executive Director, LaunchBox Digital
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