Come kickoff our weekly Thursday Gathering, and connect with your community here at Venture Café St. Louis! Venture Cafe is a great place to network, BUT it is also FULL of surprises. Join us This Thursday for an engaging activity that will encourage you to get acquainted with the space in a new way. Using the RIDDLES as clues, explore the space and learn how else it can help you. We provide the space, complimentary beverages, and all the vibes for a socially engineered evening of improving the human condition through innovation. All you have to do is bring YOURSELF and a business bestie or two.

Meditation calms the body, mind and soul, and is a quick and easy way to relieve stress. Anybody can do it! Have you ever wanted to try meditation and didn't know where to begin? In this short session, Angela Liebermann will show you how you can use meditation and mindfulness techniques to calm the body, allowing you to RESET and re-enter your day with new energy.

Hosting a panel of seasoned entrepreneurs, Founders Unplugged is a fireside chat style conversation about the lessons learned from the frontlines of business growth. Hosted by Emily Hemingway of TechSTL, the Founders will share stories from their entrepreneurial journey, wisdom from the frontlines, and tips on how to navigate the startup process. Each month a different lineup of local entrepreneurs will take the stage for what is bound to be a rich and entertaining look at what really happens along the road to scale! February Founders: Doug Spencer, BoldXchange Emory Reignz, Grab My Bag

This month we are featuring Sistas’ Pop Gourmet Butter Toffee Popcorn. After you stop by the bar to grab your glass of wine, make sure to stop by Sistas' Pop table to meet one of the co-founders, learn more about the brand, AND taste their best selling products! ABOUT SISTAS’ POP Established in 2017 as a home-based business venture by two sisters, one who had a heart sweet as toffee and the other one, a popcorn connoisseur. The sisters set out to develop a superior gourmet butter toffee popcorn product that represented the both of them and their love of community. Sistas’ Pop wants to expose popcorn lovers to a taste that would POP in their hearts. Our goal is to deliver a product which is mouth-watering and tasty for all popcorn lovers. We use coconut oil and mushroom popcorn kernels because they produce a large round pop that does extremely well for our gourmet butter toffee coating which will ignite one’s taste buds. We pride ourselves on using 100% butter which distinguishes us from other popcorn brands. And for a bolder statement, we add real freeze-dried fruit to some of your seasonal flavors. Now, that’s POPPIN’!

How much do you know about the inventions from Black INNOVATORS in St. Louis? What about Black inventions that have made the world what it is today? Join us for Innovation Trivia: Black History Edition! Team up with a mixture of newbies and VenCaf vets to test your knowledge of all things Black innovation and creation where you claim bragging rights and win cool prizes. May the most correct answers WIN!

Come kickoff our weekly Thursday Gathering, and connect with your community here at Venture Café St. Louis! We provide the space, complimentary beverages, and all the vibes for a socially engineered evening of improving the human condition through innovation. Join us!

Come kickoff our weekly Thursday Gathering, and connect with your community here at Venture Café St. Louis! We provide the space, complimentary beverages, and all the vibes for a socially engineered evening of improving the human condition through innovation. Join us!

Are you interested in attending Venture Café but don’t know how to “break the ice” with new people? Join us this Thursday for an interactive, low pressure activity that will help you CONNECT, LEARN, and SHARE with other professionals in the innovation community. Using the traits that make us unique, you will be encouraged to step outside of your social silo and challenged to leverage the Gathering to gain a new friend and build your network. We provide the space, beverages, and vibes. All you have to do is bring YOURSELF and a desire to improve the human condition through innovation. Yep! It’s that easy.

Venture Café is all about improving the human condition through connection and innovation. What better way to CONNECT than by adding your own story to the conversation? Visit our Happen Story station and be interviewed by our very own Ebbi Young, to share more about your journey to Venture Café, your challenges along the way, and how you hope to impact the world from where you stand! **Please note that all interviews will be video recorded and added to the Venture Café St. Louis website and social media platforms to showcase your awesomeness with our GLOBAL network**

Starting your Venture comes with its challenges. The obstacles are myriad, the journey is arduous, and success is not guaranteed. That said, there’s no such thing as innovation without failure, and there is no such thing as failure without trying. Rather than have your earnest work and creativity be done in vain, try succeeding with and in community. Join us in our Goals & Challenges activity where you brainstorm with others solutions to seemingly intractable problems. Come find belonging through collaboration, and turn impediments into incredible opportunities!

We appreciate your constructive feedback, VenCaf Community! It’s why we modified our programming to include QR codes leading to our survey during Thursday Gatherings, and emailing our survey to Café attendees the day after. The more reviews we receive, the better curated experience for you and our ecosystem. Join us as we aim to expand our reach with an interactive survey activity. How does it work? We will display a content prompt we want your opinion on, and tally the remarks for stratification. Questions will range from simple asks such as “Are you excited for Venture Café next week? Why or why not?” to more open-ended inquiries such as “Do you think St. Louis is doing enough for sustainability ecosystems, and how can Venture Café assist in its viability?” As the night goes on, watch the results to these questions unfold in real-time!

Being a first-timer can be difficult. You’re entering a space that you have never been, surrounded by folks you may have never met. Let our VenCaf team provide a soft landing for you with VenCaf 101! This quick presentation will provide a brief history of Venture Café, and prepare you for your first Gathering by detailing what to do, where to go, and what to look out for. While designed for new attendees, there’s plenty of communal insight that VenCaf veterans may benefit from, so feel free to stop by when class is in-session!

Second time for the year and you guys are still making it feel like the first with your attendance and interaction! Serendipitous Collisions kicked off our February Gatherings and during it, we showcased two very important people amongst the sesssions and networking icebreakers we hosted this week so let's get into what you might've missed!

This Thursday, we went back to the roots of Venture Cafe and hosted Corporate & Community Partnerships! This gathering was a focus on our like-minded and fellow innovative organizations that have been supporting us throughout this last year alongside new partners that we hope to continue creating, and flourishing in this ecosystem. Let's get into what you might've missed!

Wow! That's the only word I can use to describe this Gathering! Our community came out in full force yesterday to support the newly created venture between us and TechSTL. It was a packed house all night with so much happening that if you weren't there you definitely missed out! Let's get into, COLLIDE: Artificial Intelligence.

Fresh into the new year and we're already starting off strong VenCaf Community! What am I referring to? Oh only us hosting the creator and founder of Phollio, Chris Ransom! Want to know more? Well let's dive into what you might've missed at Community Activations!

If you haven’t been to Venture Café in a while, you HAVEN’T been to Venture Café! Just don’t expect it to be the old Venture Café, rather, look for how in touch this group is with current realities in innovation. And if you don’t see what you need… step up to J.P., Christian or Ebbi and tell them how you can help them bring it! I am certain they will accommodate.

Welcome BACK VenCaf Community! It's 2023, and it's going to be a year to remember! We gotta' set out best foot forward right? I hope you all had time to recharge, renew and restore your passion for innovation during this small break. Kicking off 2023, we are going to be doing this just a tad bit differently here at Venture Café but, let's get into that and what you might've missed with Serendipitous Collisions!