Think Big Festival delivers

Last week’s Think Big Festival, an IQ-boosting, entrepreneur-empowering, anything-is-possible two day high tech summit/party in Coeur d’Alene, was a success by every measurement.

While it was certainly a stellar achievement for Nick Smoot of Innovation Collective, the Think Big Fest’s bigger paydays await. Attracting some of the highest profile technology minds on the planet who share their stories and ideas is merely planting or germinating seeds for tomorrow’s businesses and business solutions. Not all will grow, but those that do could find fertile ground here in North Idaho.

And nobody would like that more than Ryan Arnold.

Arnold is a close friend of Smoot. In fact, the two co-founded Innovation Collective several years ago, with Arnold’s MBA background and Smoot’s smarts and sizzle combining to create something dynamic in the young men’s hometown. Their goal was centered around helping create great jobs in the tech sector right here, so our region’s best and brightest needn’t leave North Idaho to find worthwhile careers and raise families. That goal hasn’t gone away, for either of them.

After helping entrepreneurs in the Spokane area the past couple years, Arnold has come home. He’s the vice president of business development for Hart Capital Management, Inc., which is opening an office in downtown Coeur d’Alene.

Even though Smoot and Arnold went their separate ways to pursue similar dreams in different fashions, nobody is more happy about the Think Big Festival’s success than Arnold. Stopping by the newspaper offices Tuesday, he applauded his friend for the extraordinary work Smoot is doing on the entrepreneurship front throughout the region and for the Think Big Festival in particular.

Arnold is far from alone in that admiration category. Julian Guthrie, a Spokane native and award-winning author and journalist in San Francisco, was a Think Big moderator over the weekend. She had this to say to Press reporter Ryan Collingwood:

“Growing up in this area, Coeur d’Alene was a very, very different place. It’s really neat to see what’s happening here today. It’s a changed place, other than the natural beauty. All of this ingenuity of innovation. It’s pretty remarkable.

“There’s things going on here now that are better than some of the things going on in the Silicon Valley.”

Let that sink in for awhile as Smoot and Co. begin putting together next year’s Think Big Festival.

We can hardly wait.