As I grow older, local politics seems to be more important to me for some reason that I cannot fully explain just yet.  Many of my friends couldn't care less as long as Calipari is recruiting good recruits at UK or their daughters are progressing along in softball.  You could have said the same about me as early as last October. (Ok not the Calipari part but you get the point.)  Perhaps it is because I failed to raise money for my company that I've become interested in local politics.  One of the reasons why I couldn't raise money was because the deal could not get done in Louisville.  There is exactly one firm here in Louisville that is large enough to fund a company with $15+ million and they met with me under the preconception that they were not interested in funding a video game.  The other reasons why I failed to raise funding are outlined in my post to the Ages of Athiria community. 

When I heard that the three candidates for Louisville's Mayor position were coming to the Venture Club, I immediately registered for what eventually became a sold out event.  It seems that I am not the only one interested in hearing how the next mayor will work to create jobs and empower small business.  I wasn't left wanting for more answers when the meeting was done and now that I've let the experience simmer for a day, I'm blogging about it for others to read. 

For the rest of this post, I'm going to comment on my Twitter stream that I produced while I was in the room and they were speaking.

[Twitter] The Venture Club meeting is packed. Sold out. Press everywhere. Should be interesting.

The turnout was the largest event I had ever been to for the Venture Club.  There's been a few big ones but this one had a different feeling to it with all of the press lined up in the back of the room.

[Twitter] Candidates coming on stage. Introductions for Heiner, Fischer and Green. Fischer up first.
[Twitter] Fischer's idea; an Innovation center. Focused on getting the ideas here. No mention of how to fund those ideas once they are here.
[Twitter] Good speech. Needs to connect the dots on how his innovation center leads to successfully leading a company to market.

Prior to the meeting, I had read Fischer's and Heiner's web sites and Facebook pages.  Prior to this meeting I would have said that Fischer didn't know how he was going to fund and retain the ideas once he got them here.  I'm of the mind that we have plenty of good ideas here in Louisville and he is correct in stating that getting the business off the ground is difficult but funding comes before offices and after ideas.  Projects like Y-Combinator are essentially doing the same thing except that they have connected the funding sources to these fledgling companies to help them get to market.  Fischer's opening remarks didn't reflect the latter part of that statement.  Thankfully, his later comments filled in the gaps.

[Twitter] Jackie Green is up now.
[Twitter] Green just made the claim that the Mayor's office owns all the ideas and it's up to him to sort them to identify the good and bad ideas.
[Twitter] Somehow planting trees and watering them leads to our future. Quality of life key to attracting investment in Louisville.
[Twitter] Average speech. Unfortunately in today's day and age Green's meandering presentation style means that he doesn't stand a chance Nov 2nd.
[Twitter] I think there was an overall idea in Green's speech but I had to dig for it.

I shuddered a time or two during Geen's opening remarks as the central planning alarms went off in my head.  He stated that we needed to figure out what the good investments were and only fund the good ones.  It was up to his office to figure out what needed to be funded and to work to get those ideas funded while discarding the other ideas.  He then went on to talk about how alternative energy usage and things like tree planting made for a better quality of life that would help keep employees and businesses located in Louisville.  This also included something about improving our education system but by this time, his opening remarks were all over the place that I lost track of the point he was trying to make.  I thought about it a bit and figured that quality of life improvements in the environment and education would lead to being able to produce and execute better ideas for future companies.  I think.

[Twitter] Heiner's up. Can tell he's a professional politician. Has more energy than the other two combined. Not sure if that's a Good Thing(tm).
[Twitter] Heiner just pitched elecric vehicles and public wifi infrastructure.
[Twitter] Heiner's suggesting renovating closed down buildings and turning them into small business incubators.

In contrast to the other two gentlemen, Heiner is a politician.  He's the guy that's been doing this whole getting elected thing longer than any of the others.  He's clean cut, energetic almost to a fault and has the requisite silver tongue that Green doesn't have and Fischer's pragmatic approach doesn't need.  I remember sitting there contrasting the three candidates.  Three more different candidates probably couldn't be found.  Heiner's opening statements were straight from his web site talking points.  He made sure that he mentioned the Louisville job market stats from his site and then offered a few suggestions that seemed off the cuff.  Electric vehicles, public wifi and renovating boarded up buildings were three ways he said the Mayor's office could help small businesses.  His entire focus is on making sure that when Louisville makes the short list for a Fortune 500 relocation that we roll out the red carpet for that company to get them to come here.

All in all I was impressed.  Each of the candidates are different and their views varied but they all came across as genuinely caring about the Louisville job market recovery.  The three of them were pitching to a group of small business/venture capital/angel oriented people and each of them held their own weight through a solid showing.  This post is getting a bit longer than I thought it would so I'll post it in two parts.  Opening statements today and questions and answers tomorrow along with my closing thoughts.

Additional Reading:
My Original Unaswered Post to Hal Heiner.