N2Tec Institute

John Meyer, co-founder of 9 Clouds, a Sioux Falls, SD-based new media company, was nominated by Business Week as one of the Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs for 2010.  Meyer won the nomination out of hundreds of candidates selected byreadersand evaluated by BusinessWeek.com reporters.  The candidates had to be no older than 25 and have a business model that held promise for a sustainable and successful business.  Meyer and his brother Scott participated in N2TEC Institute's 2009 Technology Accelerator Program and received a $15,000 grant that helped them launch their business.

Meyer, a South Dakota native,  started his first company at age 22  to do search engine marketing while he attended Luther College in Iowa. After college, he went to work for Accenture (ACN) in Minneapolis.  Then in 2009, Meyer and his brother were accepted to the N2TEC Accelerator.  This was the opportunity he was looking for to come back to South Dakota and launch a business.  The goal of 9 Clouds was to help companies in the mid west become more Internet savvy and to take advantage of the marketing opportunities that social media tools offer.  They launched the business in June 2009 and today they have a staff of five, an office in Sioux Falls, and more than a dozen active clients, including retailers, professional firms, and colleges such as South Dakota State University and Lehigh University.