Wes Garnett reminisces about the early days of Delaware’s startup community

It’s been nearly two years since Delaware tech community leader Wes Garnett left Wilmington for Madison, Wis., to run his health IT startup, Kurbi. But he hasn’t forgotten about his hometown.
In an interview with local pub Madison365, Garnett spoke of his time founding Wilmington’s first coworking space, The coIN Loft, and the state-backed Start it Up Delaware.

“We had been traveling a bunch going to Baltimore and D.C. and New York trying to find other young people like us who wanted to do things that we wanted to do,” Garnett says. “For us, it felt a little weird to go to other cities when we live in the heart of our own city. So, we said, ‘Let’s try to do something to bring everyone who looks like us, feels like us and thinks like us into one building.’ That’s essentially what we set out to do and it grew over time and it quickly became what start-ups represented in our city.”