This week I’ve been bouncing around entrepreneurship events in Ohio, listening to startup founders and investors talk about the challenges they’re facing in growing startups in Ohio and elsewhere right now.
The Series A crunch, a lack of support from local and state governments, and a lack of educational resources all came up as prominent challenges in discussions. But a common thread through much of the conversation was this question: How can we create a healthy and productive startup ecosystem that resembles Silicon Valley or New York or Boston in Cleveland/Boise/insert-your-locale-here?
Tech stars co-founder and early-stage investor Brad Feld literally wrote the book on building communities and video chatted (from Boulder) into a panel discussion Thursday night at Cleveland’s City Club to share his insight. At the core of his philosophy is the idea that startup communities must be initiated and led by entrepreneurs themselves. Investors, governments, nonprofits, universities and big companies, meanwhile, still play an important role, but it’s as “feeders” to these entrepreneurs.
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Starting a grassroots movement isn’t easy, especially when your back’s up against a wall and you’re desperately in need of funding, Feld acknowledged. Not to mention that you’re busy enough trying to make your own company work. His advice to entrepreneurs? Just start doing things.
Matthew Marcus is a guy who “just started doing things” that led to the formation of the Kansas City Startup Village, which now has nearly two dozen startup residents. Google installed Google Fiber in the house that he and a few other startup founders were running their businesses out of in the fall of 2012, and a series of serendipidous events followed.
“Entrepreneurs have the passion and the energy to lead the effort,” he said during his keynote at the Ohio Venture Association’s annual summit on Friday. “The best part is you don’t have to answer to anyone. There’s no president of your startup community. There’s no hierarchy. It’s organized chaos.”
A big part of the growth of the community came from small, impromptu gatherings of entrepreneurs, he said. One Million Cups, a project of the Kauffman Foundation that brings entrepreneurs together over coffee for an hour a week, was also a huge catalyst.
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Other communities that have undergone similar makeovers in their startup scenes have been lucky enough to be spearheaded by entrepreneurs who have already achieved their success and want to pay it forward – like Mark Suster in Los Angeles or Tony Hsieh in Las Vegas, for example.
A Cleveland founder shared an idea during an investor panel on Friday about how nice it would be to have a group that represented the startup community and organized opportunities for companies to present at trade shows and relevant events across the country. The panel responded with: “Sounds great; let us know when the first meeting is.”
My takeaway from this week is that startup communities are a test of patience. They take decades to build, and each is at a different stage in the development cycle. In Ohio, our institutions are churning out great talent and ideas, and a strong group of nonprofits, incubators and government programs are funding companies at the earliest stages. Maybe taking the next step to attract the attention of pre-Series A funding that’s missing from the region will require entrepreneurs making some noise. And “doing some stuff.”
[Image credit: Flickr user osseous]
