I woke up this morning and going through my weekly feed, I saw Brad Feld’s post on “Startup Communities: Creating a Great Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in you City.” He makes a call out for any feedback or ideas, and for anyone that knows me, I could go on about this for longer than you probably care to listen. Anyways, what started out as a few bullet points, ended up being a useful spew of thoughts, so I figured I would share. These are in addition to what Brad already has listed:

*Be sure to read Brad’s post first here (I challenge you to contribute as well!)

Principals of a Sustainable Entrepreneurial Community
- Need a megaphone (Geekwire, Greenhorn Connect, SPN, SiliconFlorist, etc) – having an outlet that can help celebrate all things good happening in your community is an amazing moral booster as well as a tie to the outside world that might be on the fence or just looking in on the startup world in curiosity. It turns out that humans are naturally attracted to stories of risk taking, adventure, disruption, success, and failure. These megaphones are important in communities to help share these stories and pull in those adjacent to the real movement that might be able to help out in a big way. More than anything, these syndicates make startups seem “cool” which naturally feeds the ecosystem.
- Speaking the same language (See our model below) – Naturally, everyone will have a different perspective, but without a model that everyone can agree upon about how people see and address the ecosystem as a whole, no one can communicate clearly about what their goals and hopeful outcomes are for anything but the “stage” that matters most to them. Eg. Most investors view the statup world as starting with a team that has an idea. In my mind these prevalent models miss the most important issues – where do good teams come from? Where do capable entrepreneurs come from? and leads to the right questions we should be looking at in a holistic view – how can we help identify and create more capable entrepreneurs? How can we help identify and create more capable teams? Startup Weekend has developed a model to help standardize these discussions and it has been magical in terms of getting everyone from  studnents, teachers, gov. officials, CEOs, CTOs, Designers, VCs, etc. to have more productive conversations about how to address the opportunities that exist within a community. Is the model perfect? Certainly not, but is it is certainly the most useful one we’ve ever seen when it comes to influencing the “community building” conversations.
- It’s about building more capable teams. THE number one reason for startup failure is co-founder/team issues. All the most amazing tools like LEAN, MVP, Agile, and Customer Development are useless if you give them to a team that was doomed to fail from the start. The biggest problem that any VC, Angel, Incubator, or Accelerator has to deal with are team issues, over and over again. Why? Because no one likes to talk about the most difficult things in the honeymoon days of launching a startup. Startup Weekend has proven that these issues are repetitive and addressable in the co-founder dating phases. Sometimes the most obvious questions are unanswered, and every ecosystem player would benefit by knowing that every team had started by tackling these questions early on. Eg. Who’s the CEO? Will you vest your founder’s equity? What’s your real runway? Is your spouse supportive of what you are doing? Will you really jump off the cliff and make this a FT job? At what point do we jump or fold? What is the consequence if one of us doesn’t jump? What experiences/skills are you missing as a co-founding team? Who’s going to do the talking in our meetings? Who’s responsible for following up with the mentors/coaches that give us advice? **The catch, these quesitons can’t be answered or addressed in theory or in a classroom. These questions have to be asked in real scenarios, with every new team.

 

Myths About Entrepreneurial Communities
- Grouping, aka, segregating is good. NO! Our educations systems have been built on the premise of separating people from different backgrounds, and this mentality has poured into the rest of our lives from economic zoning that formalizes these silos to incubators that never interact with anyone that doesn’t carry a specific degree, and it is stifling.  Certainly there are some efficiencies when creating buildings for these institutions, but you must look at the very nature of where good ideas and teams come from. Think, ancient agoras, where people from all backgrounds and walks of life shared ideas, debated, and created the future. Kauffman had an alarming statistic about how low the % of FT500 founders are that had extensive experience in the industry they ended up in (not necessarily started out in), but great innovation often requires a fresh perspective and is the combination of many ideas and often unrelated backgrounds…. User groups, university courses, and hackathons are great for skill building, but the really innovative and disruptive ideas and teams are born when you start mixing individuals with complementary yet completely different skill sets and ideas.

How to get started
- Community Startup Summits – gather your local leaders. Most are type A personalities and each has an opinion of what is needed, but it is possible to get everyone to join forces and agree on what the most promising opportunities are for your community.
- Electing a representative – There has got to be one voice, an un-official representative of the grassroots community who can be responsible for helping to identify the problems and opportunities and also follow up on the progress as people elect to tackle specific things.
- Empower & celebrate leaders – The most amazing community leaders come out of no where and begin mainly as event leaders. Most often they are right out of college or someone in a transition period in life. They are people with a tremendous amount of energy and passion that have been given an opportunity. There are ways to help welcome more of these individuals and empower them to take the lead on something. Especially with a little guidance, their energy can be harnessed and directed in incredibly powerful ways, even if they zero experience. It can be as simple as, “yes, you can do that, and here are the people and the ways that we can help” is enough. This is perhaps the most powerful lesson I have learned with Startup Weekend.
- Build the “How to win” guide – Make a guide that include the top 3-5 of these four categories: Events, People, Startups, and Physical Locations. It’s like a cheat sheet for newbies. If you can create an open sourced handout or something that can be posted on websites that gets updated a couple times a year, this resource can be absolutely invaluable to give to anyone that has contact with potential new or incoming entrepreneurs into your ecosystem. Everyone’s goal should be to get as many people integrated into your community as possible, and to make it a welcoming and pleasant experience. Sure, the wheat will separate from the chaff and not everyone will make it, but in the end you are left with a larger community of passionate people, potential co-founders, and future supporters of whatever you do…. Remember when you felt like you were either an idiot or completely mental your first time around? Yeah, well it wasn’t easy, was it? How great would it have been to find your “tribe” a little bit sooner, so you could justify more easily those crazy voices in your head.

Measure the right things
- Don’t Sell Out – To yourself or your supporters. Working with governments or big corporations, you can quickly get sucked into the black hole of designing programs around meaningless KPIs, especially if they are funding you. As a community leader, you need to set expectations with them early and remind them often why they are doing this. This is an educational role you must assume, because at the end of the day, you want to help your supporters hit their metrics so they can take it back to their supervisors and get a nice bonus so they can double down next year, but your program cannot be sold out to highest bidder or to make a quick buck.
- Two metrics that everyone should think about tracking/pushing for:
1) # of Stories that hit media (any and all types of media) – As much as I hate to admit it, anyone in media has an unyielding power. The more stories that are generated in your community, the better. Stories of success are always great, understanding the failures, and diving into the lives of the entrepreneurs behind the scenes are all things that we can never hear enough of. The more we read about the stories of other entrepreneurs, especially those you have access to in your community, the stronger the culture around startups will be, and when the day comes for your launch, you want to make sure you have the biggest fan base and megaphone behind you as possible.
2) # of people making real or actionable change in their lives. Eg. taking risk, moving to the “next step,” etc. This is both quantitative and qualitative, as it tells the volume and eludes to the quality of the programs at each step. Startup Weekend has recently taken a step back and re-evaluated the metrics we want to track in the future. Using our “ecosystem map” model, our goal is to have as many people move from one step to another, whatever that step may be for that person. We are tracking this via self reporting surveys after the weekend, and it is incredible to have something as tangible as saying we have helped X number of people move from the “Discovery” phase to the “Startup” phase in their entrepreneurial journey. It is also incredibly helpful in understanding why others may not be progressing as easily. This same apporach could be taken as a whole along the entire ecosystem. Afterall, it is a funnel, and each step will see higher attrition than the previous, but if we all have an understanding of our inputs and outputs align with the rest of the community players, we can have a more holistic approach and a better answer about how to reach our end goal – more successful, high growth startups…. Ultimately, this drives the ultimate metrics your local government and big corporations want to see: job growth & successful companies using their products.

Think Global
- You’re not alone in this movement – Realize that entrepreneurs, companies, and governments around the world are all having the same conversations about how to build a better entrepreneurial ecosystem. Any question you’ve asked has probably been addressed elsewhere. Leverage this real fact and plug in with these people. I know for a fact that nearly every single Startup Weekend organizer is involved in these type of discussions locally just due to the nature of the program. We have a facilitator network of people flying around the globe to share their experience and learn from others thinking about the same things. Make sure you plug into the bigger picture here and collaborate and learn from others that are doing things well. Get on a plane to go see Brad in Boulder, come see us in Seattle, meet up with the Startup Weekend organizers in Bogota, Ulan Baatar, Khatmandu, Delhi, Kuala Lumpur, Moscow , Cairo, Tunis, or Gaza. Better yet, invite someone from somewhere completely different to visit your city and give their perspective. It’s not going to be politicians that answer these tough questions, and you don’t need a PHD to start creating real change and learning from others. If you are having this conversation in your own little bubble, you’re missing out on one of the most important conversations happening on the planet today.