Well, perhaps Frito Lay isn't shaking in its boots yet, but West Virginians do seem to make some mean salsa. Two of the most award-winning salsa suppliers are Maggie's Salsa of Charleston and Blue Smoke Salsa of Ansted. Magdalena De La Cruz Cook-Garcia, founder of Maggie's Salsa, has been honored by the WV chapter of the U.S. Small Business Administration as young entrepreneur of the year for 2009 and will be honored at an event at Tamarack on June 17. Robin Hildebrand, founder of Blue Smoke Salsa, was named WV entrepreneur of the year in 2000 and 2004.
In addition to making great salsa, Maggie and Robin represent an important trend in the U.S. and one that West Virginia sorely needs to develop more fully: women and immigrant entrepeneurship. According to the Kauffman Foundation, a large non-profit foundation focused on understanding and promoting the role of entrepeneurship in our economy, women and immigrants start new companies at a far higher rate than white males.
Maggie's story provides an interesting path towards entrepreneurship and shows her enthusiasm:
Highly educated and skilled immigrants are even more central to the U.S. high tech economy. A study by Duke University and University of California-Berkeley found that 25.3 percent of technology and engineering companies started in the United States from 1995 to 2005, at least one key founder was foreign-born. Nationwide, these immigrant-founded companies produced $52 billion in sales and employed 450,000 workers in 2005. The majority of these immigrant entrepreneurs came from India, United Kingdom, China, Taiwan, Japan and Germany.
Robin's story is equally interesting and driven by personal motivations:
If West Virginia is ever to pull out of the cellar in terms of economic growth, income and opportunity, it will be on the backs of entrepreneurs. And in order to have enough entrepreneurs in our state to make it happen, we need to recruit and encourage women and minorities - in addition to people from all categories - to consider West Virginia a "great state to create." While we recruit natives to "come home to West Virginia," we'll need to also throw out the welcome mat to new folks who would like a beautiful, low cost, high qualtiy region in which to start and grow a business.
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