North Canton Resident to Spend Two Days on a Bus Brainstorming Start-Up Company Ideas

It might be one of the nerdiest road trips you’ve heard of, but Scott Meier is OK with it.

The North Canton resident will get on a bus Tuesday in Cleveland with about 25 other entrepreneurs and head to Austin, TX. Everyone on that bus, for the following 48 hours, will kick around ideas for start-up companies and pitch those ideas to judges, advisers and angel investors once they get to the South by Southwest Conference. There, judges will pick just a few ideas to turn into reality.

Meier, founder and owner of the company Scribblewerks, said the trip will ultimately benefit Stark County, which is rife with technology-driven people such as himself and companies looking to show people technology is a viable investment.

“There are several other guys just like myself (on the bus); We want to leverage the knowledge we’ve been exposed to and bring it back to Stark County,” Meier said.

The bus will stop in Pittsburgh and Indiana to meet others who run start-ups. They’ll see Facebook’s new offices in Austin, and Meier also looks forward to visiting AlphaLabs of Pittsburgh; SproutBox of Bloomington, Ind.; and Tech Wildcatter in Texas.

You can follow Meier as he updates Twitter throughout the trip, too.

Last year was the first year for the Startup Bus, and it consisted of only one bus traveling from San Francisco to Austin. This year, Meier said he and 400-500 others applied to be on the Startup Bus that departs from Cleveland. Other buses take off from New York, Chicago, Miami and Silicon Valley.

That means the competition to pitch ideas is that much steeper. Those judges could offer the team funding to make their start-up business happen.

“We could basically have start-up capital to move on a new company,” Meier said, adding they also could buy the idea from them.

Stark County entrepreneur Jeff SKI Kinsey also will be on Cleveland's Startup Bus. Kinsey is founder and entrepreneur at Main Street Stark, a business incubator that helps entrepreneurs hone their ideas.

Kinsey sees the Startup Bus as a way to not only create jobs throughout the country, but expose people to the idea of start-ups and technology.

"There is just tremendous talent all across the country," Kinsey said. "Northeast Ohio has no shortage of talent, and this will be an opportunity for us to compete with the best of the best."

Kinsey will update the Main Street Stark page and Twitter via his MainStStark account throughout the trip.

Meier said the Akron-Canton area is a perfect area to bolster technology and start-up companies, as it’s close to New York and Chicago or a short flight to Boston. He hopes the trip and what comes of it will help shine some light on the great companies that already are in the area.

“There are some really talented people in the Canton area who are just flying under the radar,” Meier said.