Entrepreneurship going strong in Columbia, report finds.

• Position: Zverse

When John Carrington founded 3D design and manufacturing company Zverse in Columbia in 2013, the business's location presented both challenges and opportunities.

While the University of South Carolina provided a readily accessible talent pool and the greater Columbia area's quality of living appealed to recruits, raising venture capital and navigating the technology startup terrain posed difficulties, Carrington said.

"Most of the investors here are what you would call angel investors and typically come from the real estate world or law or medical (fields)," Carrington said. "There's not a lot of technology investors, people who have grown technology companies. (And) it is a bigger challenge to recruit somebody who may be prone to work in technology startups to come to Columbia because technology startups most of them fail at some point, and you can't just walk down the street and find another one."

Leaning on a co-founder with experience in taking companies public and emphasizing his startup's creative atmosphere, Carrington overcame those early obstacles and built a business that he says now retains homegrown talent and while recruiting hires from cities such as Atlanta and Raleigh.

"It's been pretty easy, in many cases, to get individuals to say 'OK, I can buy into that. It looks like a good place to live,' " he said. "Columbia has been a good place for our company."

ZVerse's success was highlighted in Monday's release of the 2018 Midlands Regional Competitiveness Report. The fifth annual report (.pdf), an initiative of nonprofit entrepreneurial organization EngenuitySC that culls federal data, found that Columbia ranked third among 10 Southeastern cities facing similar economic competitiveness challenges in entrepreneurial and business environment, an improvement of six spots from its ninth-place ranking in that category in 2017.

"I think we're doing a really good job supporting out startup community, and I think there's a conclusion to be drawn that we're doing a really good job providing resources to sustain companies,"

EngenuitySC executive director Meghan Hickman said.

Columbia's entrepreneurial ranking one of five indicators used to measure regional economic competitiveness benefited from the inclusion of a revised metric, establishment growth rate. But it would have jumped without the new calculation, said Doug Woodward, University of South Carolina economics professor and director of research at USC's Darla Moore School of...