Venture Cafe St. Louis quietly halted operations this week. It became apparent that the non-profit abandoned it’s role as a meeting place for the St. Louis tech ecosystem when both of its websites returned a logo and a contact email address instead of displaying the Thursday meet-up activity that the Venture Cafe has as it’s primary function.

Executives, board members and mentors have not responded to 4thEst8 requests for interview, both at the St. Louis level and at the CIC Venture Cafe Global Institute in Cambride, MA. But financial data from 2019 point to financial stress prior to Covid lock-down – and 2020 pulled the plug on all of the in-person events that Venture Cafe St. Louis was funded to provide since its formation in July 2014.

The latest financial data obtainable by the 4thEst8 comes from 2019 and was originally dug up by Propublica – a New York based non-profit devoted to investigative news. You can see IRS Form 990 HERE.

In 2018 Venture Cafe St. Louis was running at a profit: bringing in $2,038,801 with expenses of $848,712 – netting $1,190,089. A year later revenue dropped to $860,944 while expenses rose to $1,200,533 resulting in a net loss of $339,589. Contributions and grants plummeted that year, although VenCaf started pulling in revenue through program services – it didn’t make up the difference. Meanwhile, the company had a buffer of more than $900,000 in assets as it entered 2020 – and had to pull the plug on all in-person meetings.

Throughout the pandemic lock-down the VenCafSTL tried to redefine itself. It threw itself into online meetings, while continuing to put out its weekly newsletter – a list of ecosystem participants that ran in the thousands. That ended this week: no newsletter, and the two websites (venturecafestl.org and vencafstl.org) both returning a simple page with nothing but a logo and one email address to contact.

Executive Director Tyler Matthews declined a request for comment. We did reach, through LinkedIn IM Matthews’ predecessor, Travis Sheridan. This morning Sheridans LinkedIn profile showed him as the current co-chair for the CIC Venture Cafe Global Institute, something he quickly backed away from saying he had ended that relationship and ‘needed to update his profile.’ He referred us to Whitney Kenter, as the current board chair for Venture Cafe St. Louis, who did not respond to a request for interview in a timely manner for this article. Calls also went out to CIC (Cambridge) media contact Maria Dominguez, who doesn’t have her voicemail set up and whose email auto-responder says she will be out of the office until the 13th. We reached out to a half dozen other people associated with the St. Louis operation, and the national organization, to no effect.

In addition to Sheridan (who says he is no longer associated) the 2019 IRS document lists the following board members for Venture Cafe St. Louis:

  • Dennis Lower
  • Dedric Carter
  • Whitney Kenter
  • Mark Stallion
  • Angela Masching
  • Scott Leiendecker
  • Bill Donius
  • Maxine Clark

Note: Sheridan’s LinkedIn profile now says his association ended in April, 2021.