Five Teams Win Awards in Wind River Startup Challenge

Six teams pitched their business ideas May 22 in the hope of receiving part of the Wind River Startup Challenge’s $30,000 seed fund. Five of the competitors each walked away with a piece of the pie.

The Wind River Startup Challenge is a collaboration among the University of Wyoming’s Office of Research and Economic Development, including IMPACT 307 and the Wyoming Small Business Development Center Network; Central Wyoming College; and the Wind River Indian Reservation’s two sovereign nations, the Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho tribes.

The five winning teams were:

-- Native FX Art and Design, Eustace Day -- custom art designs that include T-shirts, logos, signs and murals.

-- Timber Beast, Eugene Coulston -- manages natural resources while producing local timber products.

-- Dancing Rain Consulting, Harmony Spoonhunter -- digitizing records, creating websites and providing data management for businesses and tribal programs.

-- Goose’s Kitchen, Leslie Spoonhunter -- a food truck with a rotating menu of high-quality and Indigenous dishes.

-- The Monahooboo Hut, Hannah Nicol -- a food trailer featuring comfort food and specializing in chicken fried steak.

“I’ve never done a business pitch, let alone know how to properly run a business. But in the experience, I gained so much knowledge in the business side of things, and I’m going to apply it to my business to be running a big, Native-owned sawmill,” Coulston says.

The challenge was launched as part of a grant received by Wyoming’s Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research at UW and funded by the National Science Foundation.