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

In the physical world, much of this energy, activity, and innovation occur in small geographic regions, which I call “startup communities.”

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.

Entrepreneurial leaders are charismatic. People want to be around them and are inspired by them. I don’t believe that people motivate other people; rather they create a context in which others are motivated. Some entrepreneurs are spectacular at creating this context, and when they lead by example, many other entrepreneurs rise to the occasion. Thi

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.

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.

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

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

I strongly believe that startup communities can be built in any city and the future economic progress of cities, regions, countries, and society at large is dependent on creating, building, and sustaining startup communities over a long period of time.

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.