TiE Meeting

About a hundred people attended at Hilton Garden Inn Downtown. Oddly enough, I didn't see a garden at the "Garden Inn".

Widely diverse audience, not just a bunch of old white men like me. Richard Herman moderated an excellent panel featuring Margaret Wong, Phil Alexander and Hiroyuki Fujita. Each talked about their business and gave their educated opinion on the barriers to building new businesses in Cleveland, and some ways to overcome those barriers.

One thing we entrepreneurs can do is to teach or at least try to convince the politicians that it is a good thing to encourage foreign entrepreneurs to create and grow their companies here in Cleveland. This being a primarily political decision, it's a huge educational problem. The politicians' CONSTITUENTS need to be convinced that it doesn't matter if your CEO is Chinese or Indian: the company is here in Cleveland and you have a job. Unless the constituents are onboard and tolerant of foreign CTOs and CEOs, then we can never be a world class city again.

The current political climate that is focused on bringing back jobs for the iron-age workers is a barrier preventing us from moving to the next phase of growth in the information / medical care / materials science / polymer / sensor industries.

When Beachwood extends a hand to the Israeli tech community, and Cleveland says it's not a high priority to invite foreigners here, who wins? Beachwood.

Who loses? You.