A Startup City Reboot

New Writer Follows Her Predecessor’s Lead

Madison Magazine

Monthly Innovations column, October 2019

Last month was Brennan Nardi’s final go-round with this column. It was her column, created after she left her position as editor of this magazine in 2015. Nardi, my friend and former boss, tried to hand me the key and slip out unnoticed. But I couldn’t let that happen. What she’s done here is no small thing.

I feel like I can say that with authority because I’ve just reread everything she wrote on Madison as an entrepreneurial city, including the 45 Startup City columns she has written since January 2016. But I also looked back at the four related feature stories she wrote between 2013 and 2015. For one of them she flew to Austin, Texas – that Weird™ entrepreneurial leftie hipster “island” landlocked by a notoriously red state. (Remind you of anywhere?) She examined why Austin had become a startup hotspot after Silicon Valley’s bubble burst and asked experts if the same thing could happen in Madison.

“Maybe,” she wrote.

Continue reading here….

—Maggie Ginsberg is an award-winning freelance writer in Madison, Wisconsin