StartupAZ Newsletter: Issue 14
Earlier this month, we held our annual StartupAZ Collective retreat among the pines in Flagstaff. It’s become a tradition to welcome incoming cohorts to the StartupAZ Collective and celebrate those who’ve braved the path before them.
It’s ironic that retreat can mean to pull back or withdraw, because this retreat has shown us year after year, that the AZ startup community is doing anything but shrinking away.
Since our first retreat in 2016, we’ve grown from 16 founders to more than 50. And if we count the number of supporters who made the trek up north this year, we’re near triple digits. Just six years ago, this was all a vision and it has grown into an experience that now involves local economic councils, Arizona’s three major universities, investors, and some pretty spectacular speakers.
And this growth is just a slice of the bigger picture growth of the AZ startup ecosystem. In fact, according to the latest data from Greg Head’s Gregslist, we’re hitting new records across the charts — the number of jobs created, amount of funding secured, and of course the number of new companies. Some of these stats are highlighted below in this month’s “By The Numbers”.
Speaking of growth, during the retreat, we had a chance to catch up with Ryan Miller, CEO and co-founder of Peerlogic, a conversational intelligence tool for dentists. He is one of the most recent startup founders to join the StartupAZ Collective in the “Growth” cohort. In this “Collective Conversation,” he talks about the impetus behind Peerlogic, the company’s growth since launch, and some challenges they’ve had to overcome along the way. See the interview below.
There may not be much on the horizon for summertime events, so here’s a look at where we were this past month.
#yesPHX Summer Social — The #yesPHX crowd packed the house at the W Scottsdale for the annual Summer Social, an informal gathering to celebrate the community.
Plug and Play Silicon Valley Summit 2022 — Phoenix was well represented at this Silicon Valley event in which Plug and Play introduced the 250+ batch startups from 17 of its industry-focused innovation programs. StartupAZ, GPEC and other Valley leaders were in attendance.
City of Chandler’s “Voices of Chandler” — Diana Vowels moderated a Q&A session with Brian Bair, chairman and CEO of Offerpad. He shared how he took the business from startup to IPO.
StartupAZ Collective Annual Retreat — Our annual retreat to welcome the newest cohort members brought together some of the Valley’s top startups and those who are just getting going. We also had guest speaker, Salle Yoo, former chief legal counsel for UBER.
Ryan Miller, CEO and co-founder of Peerlogic, took tech-driven sales tools for granted. Being in channel sales for many years, he leaned on tools like Gong and Salesforce. It wasn’t until talking to his wife about the sales and customer engagement process at the dental practice where she worked that he realized the industry was seriously lacking innovation in that area. He and his co-founders got to work and the result was Peerlogic. But building this pioneering technology hasn’t been without its challenges. In this Collective Conversations, Ryan shares what they had to do to make Peerlogic a reality and how the growth has been since.
Watch the full interview (or check out the Q&A).
Don’t miss the next newsletter! Sign up here.
