Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Dr. Tom O’Neal, Executive Director, University of Central Florida’s Business Incubation Program — Orlando, Florida (Part 5)

By guest author Irina Patterson and Mridula Velagapudi

Irina: How many people work at the Venture Lab?

Tom: There are about 15. And it’s a free service. Again, the universities and the counties here pay for the staff at the Venture Lab. And I use the Venture Lab here a lot to help with the same kind of stuff for our intellectual property tech transfer office.

Irina: What percentage of businesses are software or IT businesses among your entrepreneurs?

Tom: If you combine IT, digital media, simulation technology, and telecom, probably about 40 percent or more.

Irina: What are your challenges?

Tom: [Capital is one.] We work all the time, and we still are not where we need to be. We have a venture capital firm in our incubator. We try to help them become more familiar with our companies and things like that.

We have our little angel investor group. We help them run their meetings and host their meeting so that they can make investments in incubator and non-incubator companies; we are helping them to become more active.

So, we do that now and but there is still not a critical mass of funding. We keep trying, but we haven’t found the secret to make that better yet.

Irina: Thank you, Tom. Being based in Miami, Florida, I am particularly interested in the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Florida. I appreciate every opportunity to learn about tech entrepreneurship in Florida and help in any way I can. I see my interviews on this Silicon Valley–based blog as part of my help to Florida entrepreneurs and investors.

But I believe that even greater results could be obtained if we could collaborate through 1M/1M and provide Florida entrepreneurs with strong business development education and access to Silicon Valley channels for customer acquisition and financing. If we do that, I think that in three to five years we will see a great impact on the entire Florida entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Business Incubator Series: An Interview With Dr. Tom O’Neal, Executive Director, University of Central Florida’s Business Incubation Program -- Orlando, Florida
1 2 3 4 5