Chandra Briggman, who recently took over as president and CEO of Activation Capital, moved to Virginia from Boston, where she worked for another nonprofit dedicated to supporting entrepreneurship. “My interest in entrepreneurship started pretty early,” she says. One thing driving that interest was her father, who always talked about wanting to start his own business but never did. “My dad never started a business, but it was important for me to hear that to start me on my journey.”
After operating startups of her own, she began working to support aspiring entrepreneurs in following their dreams. “I realized that while I could make an impact with a business myself as an entrepreneur, I could make a substantially bigger impact if I helped manufacture, if you will, entrepreneurs at scale.”
Activation Capital has been providing social, knowledge and financial capital to tech clusters in Virginia for 20 years. Their portfolio includes the Virginia Bio+Tech Park, Lighthouse Labs, the Dominion Energy Innovation Center, and grant programs for Ecosystem that support entrepreneurship. “We grow tech entrepreneurship by providing a number of resources to help educate and accelerate tech entrepreneurship across the state,” Briggman says.
She believes that the ability to solve problems can be an entrepreneur’s greatest asset and that the way women see the world uniquely suits them to be particularly good at solving such problems. “I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs spend a lot of time and money because they have an idea in their head but never verify whether anybody else had [already solved] that problem,” she says.
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