Page 39 - Innovation Delaware 2021

why DELAWARE
Entrepreneurs share how Delaware, with its strong infrastructure of support groups and easy access to power players, has helped them innovate and thrive.
INNOVATION DELAWARE 37
FTRAFFICCAST
or TrafficCast, the decision to open a national operations center in Delaware came down to connections.
One of the company’s largest contracts involves providing traffic data to Sirius XM, which in turn delivers that data to drivers via their dashboards.
“Part of the requirement for the contract was that we had to have two national operations centers,” says CEO AL MCGOWAN. “We already had one at our founding location in Madison, Wisconsin, and we set up another one in Pennsylvania, just outside Philadelphia. But as I got to understand what the opportunities were in Delaware and got
to know Rob [Herrera] and his crew at [co-working space] The Mill, I realized that was an environment that was much better to do business in.”
Through his friendship with Herrera, McGowan
was able to connect with decision makers at the state,
city and county level, and was impressed by the ease of accessing
those resources. “So we made the decision to move our operations center into Delaware, especially considering the environment that Rob had created at The Mill, which had a lot of energy and cross- pollination of ideas,” McGowan says.
Moving to Wilmington also had recruitment benefits for TrafficCast, he adds: “The Mill and Wilmington was an area people preferred to come to, rather than travel to a suburban office park or deal with the higher cost of Philadelphia.”