Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
the magic comes from a few dozen entrepreneurs deciding that the success of the greater startup community is worth their investment of time and energy.
Brad Feld • Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
Emerging companies need certain common inputs—for example, infrastructure, specialized legal and accounting services, suppliers, labor pools with a specialized knowledge base—that reside outside the company. Companies in a common geographic area share the fixed costs of these resources external to the company. As more and more startups in an area c
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External economies of scale lower certain costs; meanwhile, network effects make co-location more valuable.
Brad Feld • Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
Turns out that, earlier that week, a local startup had decided to shut down and the “wake” was the startup community’s way of showing these young, fragile entrepreneurs that it was okay to fail—that the honor was in trying.
Brad Feld • Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
Today, we are in the midst of a massive shift from the hierarchical society that has dominated the industrial era to a networked society that has been emergent throughout the information era.
Brad Feld • Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
The idea that people are always more important than institutions is fundamental to creating a healthy startup community.
Brad Feld • Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
Many people approach business as a zero-sum game: There are winners and losers. This is stupid and counterproductive in the context of a startup community. Startup communities are often a tiny fraction of what they could ultimately become. As a result, there is a huge amount of untapped opportunity. Approaching it as a non-zero-sum game is much mor
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The emergence of hackathons, new tech meetups, open coffee clubs, startup weekends, and accelerators like TechStars stand out in stark contrast. These are activities and events, which I will cover in depth later in this book, that last from a few hours to three months and provide a tangible, focused, set of activities for the members of the startup
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Think of your startup community as a lean startup—one that needs to try lots of experiments, measure the results, and pivot when things aren’t working.