The story below is from our March/April 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
New RAMP director Lisa Garcia helps foster the growth of entrepreneurs from tech professionals in the region.
Dan Smith
New RAMP director Lisa Garcia helps foster the growth of entrepreneurs from tech professionals in the region.
Editor's Note: You can listen in to more of this feature and Lisa Garcia thanks to our podcast! Our third episode's final segment with Lisa Garcia details more about the incredible ways RAMP helps our region. Listen to the podcast now, or the individual segment below.
Mary Miller, a towering figure in the region’s business community for many years, says her replacement as director of RAMP could hardly be better prepared for the job of helping turn technology genius into business acumen. RAMP, the Regional Accelerator for startups, was founded in 2017 with funding from Roanoke City and Virginia Western Community College.
Lisa Garcia started her career interviewing people as a news reporter and now she coaches technologists and scientists on using interview skills to identify potential markets for their inventions.
She might still be pounding a newspaper beat (she was a crime reporter for The Roanoke Times) had she not had a baby. The news is in the blood of many, and Garcia has been surrounded by it. Her father-in-law was a reporter for the Franklin News Post in Rocky Mount at one time and her daughter, Brooke Stephenson, is an engagement editor for Cardinal News, an online publication in Roanoke.
But her evolution was just beginning as she freelanced for a while before joining the Community Foundation of the New River Valley in the early 2000s and began taking steps that led to the director’s chair at RAMP Regional Accelerator in Roanoke recently. She is also vice president for entrepreneurship at Verge, the umbrella organization.
The progression of the Lynchburg native who lives in Blacksburg was natural for a woman who took slow, careful steps toward the director’s chair.
Miller says, “Lisa is a great contributor and knowledgeable about getting a company off the ground. She is an expert at coaching companies in this methodology and excels at customer discovery, a critical skill throughout the life of a company. Her background as a reporter has made her fearless in speaking with others, and she can put it to good use in teaching and coaching.
“She is engaging and interested in others and this region; we are lucky to have her at RAMP. Beyond her specific knowledge of helping companies develop, at her core is a ‘provider.’ She is action-oriented and driven to provide for others, and she is a great connector and brings valuable resources together. She is a super person and driven to make a difference, she is my kind of person.”
Dan Smith
Most recently Garcia has been helping coach university faculty and graduate students who have developed their innovations inside university labs. They often have some background in business as an instructor with the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program. The goal is to develop business and entrepreneurial skills, taking university teams “through intense programming,” says Garcia, who is 55. The goal is “to find a product and market fit.” Research faculty jobs and academic environments are not structured like business, so taking intellectual property from inside a university to market has specific challenges, she says.
RAMP is five years old and already has an impressive track record in helping to build and grow companies that remain in the Roanoke or New River Valleys. Garcia has been a coach and instructor for the past four years. “It is exciting to get to see the leading-edge companies grown here, to influence incredible entrepreneurs … and to work with smart, interesting and grateful people.”
Garcia says she has worked with companies that have come through programs like RAMP in other parts of the country “and they said ours is the best.” RAMP and Verge’s mission is to serve GoVirginia Region 2, which consists of a significant portion of Western Virginia.
RAMP, she says, “is part of a larger eco system and the only one directly connected with a technology council. The coordinated impact of the Roanoke Blacksburg Technology Council (RBTC) and the RAMP program provides a soft-landing place in the region for innovative technology companies … and it helps make a lot of collaborative partnerships. There is a tippler effect, like compound interest.”
Initially, the companies working with RAMP receive $20,000 of “non-dilutive” funding, which works like a grant. The Virginia Innovative Partnership Corporation (VIPC) supported the companies with a scholarship grant during the most recent cohort, for a total of $100,000 in funding. In the past, the regional leaders, such as Miller, raised money to fund the $20,000 grants.
Garcia says that these tech entrepreneurs often “think the only thing they need is money. It’s not true,” she says. “They need a lot more than that.” They get that “more” even after they exit the facility in the Gill Memorial Building on Jefferson Street in Roanoke. “We are still in touch with those that were with us at the beginning,” she says. “There is no formal cutoff date.”
Garcia is the daughter of an electrical engineer father and a mother who was a teacher. Her husband, Kurt Stephenson, teaches agriculture and applied economics at Virginia Tech and their son, Ty Stephenson, is with the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection.
She wears brightly colored head scarves because of the rare condition alopecia universalis, which left her without hair. Former University of Tennessee quarterback Josh Dobbs had the condition and gave it a high profile. She explains that “2020 was a rotten year. A friend was murdered and in 2019 I had lost a lot of folks. My husband was ill and needed surgery. My dad died and my hair started falling out. It was all gone in 90 days.”
On first sight, most believe she has cancer, she says, and the loss of hair “was very traumatic. This is an auto-immune condition, and the system attacks the hair follicles.” But the condition has not affected the general health of this woman who is an avid hiker (“not so much recently because of the new job”).
Garcia says her “greatest joy is seeing companies grow in the region, providing opportunity for jobs and the lifestyle here that are high quality. … I do enjoy it.”
Marry Miller concludes: “She is a great talent, and I am glad she has my old role. She will make RAMP better and help the region reap the benefits.”
The story above is from our March/April 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!