I’ve Been A Bad Feeder
Guest Post By Jesse Anderson – NNSDG – (Founder)
I run a software developers group in Reno, NV called Northern Nevada Software Developers Group. Within the contexts of Startup Communities, our group acts as a feeder, but unfortunately we haven’t been as welcoming to entrepreneurs as we should have been. Conversely, some of our guest entrepreneurs haven’t been as good at consuming our material as they could have been. What follows are some observations and pointers to help make industry groups better feeders and entrepreneurs better users of such resources.
We get a wide range of entrepreneurs that attend our meetings. Unfortunately the vast majority of these entrepreneurs only attend one meeting. During that meeting, they make a feverish pitch for their newly minted company which typically motivates one or two developers to get more information, but many pitches often result in no interest at all.
I didn’t quite know how to put this issue into words until I read Startup Communities. The mantra of “give before you get” really applies to our situation and having entrepreneurs blow in and out after one session certainly doesn’t have any “give” to it. In the group members’ and my view, most of entrepreneurs are only showing up to get a few warm bodies on a project. They aren’t there to learn something or foster any sense of community. Meanwhile, I’m spending time, effort and money to engender a sense of community for developers and I want entrepreneurs to be a part of our ecosystem.
This pattern of “get before giving” has led me to be less accommodating to the entrepreneurs at our meetings. In most situations I’ll allow them to do a short pitch, but I’m often not very encouraging of their ventures and am generally quite standoffish. Over time this behavior stifled entrepreneurial interest and the experience has taught me that I need to be much more inclusive and welcoming to the entrepreneurs that attend our meetings, no matter their intentions.
I started inviting entrepreneurs to speak to our group in the hopes that it would help inspire more entrepreneurship both within the group and the community, but our meetings haven’t been well attended. I think this bears out Startup Communities’ point that there are entrepreneurs, and then there’s everyone else. I’ve come to understand that our role as a feeder is to encourage entrepreneurship and the commingling of professionals with entrepreneurs seeking talent.
My perception of the startup ecosystem has of course been colored by my own experiences. Having been one of the first full-time employees of a local startup I know the trials and tribulations of working at a young company. Long story short, the company failed and the experience didn’t exactly motivate me to want to join another early stage startup. Since then I’ve often dissuaded others from joining startups in the hopes of saving them from having to experience the same end result. I’d like to believe that I’m protecting the group members, but I’ve learned that I need to let everyone make their own choices. The fact is, their individual startup experiences will ultimately differ greatly from my own. So, if a group member wants to hear my stories, I’ll open up and tell them, but I’ve ceased trying to actively persuade them.
Expecting startups to fail is a failure on my part and is a perception I need to change. It’s not easy to walk away from a failure you’re a part of and for a long time I was embarrassed about my own startup failure. Young startups fail all the time, many of them for reasons that are impossible to overcome, but in my case I felt I should have and could have done something about it. Becoming comfortable with the the natural life-cycle of the startup ecosystem is something I need to work on and attending various events like startup wakes, open coffee clubs and hackathons will hopefully put me on the right track.
Industry groups are an important part of the feeder ecosystem. As a group, we can add a lot of value to our startup community, but in order to do so it’s vital that we check our preconceived notions at the door or we’ll never be the best feeders.
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CU-Boulder Mobile Apps Challenge
One of the elements of successful startup communities is a vibrant ecosystem of community events. From first time entrepreneurs to professional investors these events must engage the entire entrepreneurial stack. Whether it’s hackathons, open coffee clubs, or accelerators these events help foster community engagement and drive startup communities. We have many such events here in Colorado, but we’re beginning to see an emergence of events within the collegiate level. The CU Boulder Mobile Apps Challenge is one such event.
For the past two years, the Mobile Apps Challenge (MAC) at CU-Boulder has been a great playground for Computer Science students who are interested in developing applications for mobile devices. The competition not only allows students to sharpen their technical skills but also cultivates in them the entrepreneurial spirit. Erudio, an iOS app that helps students better manage their school schedules, won first place out of twelve submitted apps at the last year MAC and is now available on the App Store. Its two young co-founders also started their own mobile/web consultancy firm called Monospace Ltd while finishing their undergraduate years.
Continuing the tradition, the Computer Science Undergraduate Advisory Committee (CSUAC) proudly announces its 3rd annual Mobile Apps Challenge. This two-round event will be happening on March 15th and April 12th with the participation of student teams from across Colorado including CU-Boulder, Colorado State University, University of Colorado at Denver, and Colorado School of Mines.
If you’re interested in competing prospective teams can sign up at http://goo.gl/BMrqn. For more detailed information, please visit http://csuac.com/tagged/
Event Rehash: Communitech
Guest Post By Anthony Reinhart – Communitech – (Writer)
(Photo: Anthony Reinhart)
It wasn’t a long time, but it was certainly a good time when Brad Feld dropped by the Communitech Hub Thursday.
Feld, the 47-year-old Foundry Group managing director, TechStars co-founder, author, marathoner and all-around good guy from Boulder, Colo., was on his first visit to Waterloo Region.
Over about six hours at the Communitech Hub, he toured the space, met entrepreneurs, spoke about how to build a great startup community and helped judge a sold-out Startup Smackdown before returning to Toronto for an early-morning flight out.
Feld left us with much to mull over and plenty to be proud about, which I’ll expand on here in due course. For now, I’ll leave you with what he told me at the end of a long day.
Q - So, what did you think of your day here?
A - I thought Communitech was awesome. I had a great day here.
I didn’t really know what to expect because I hadn’t been to Waterloo before, and I thought the community was extremely vibrant.
There’s a huge amount of people who are working on the right kinds of things, and the energy level is off the charts, which is really, really fun to see.
Q - Did anything in particular stand out from what you usually see in startup communities?
A - I think the concentration of all of the different activities, including the accelerator, the university incubators, co-working space, event space, a bunch of entrepreneurs, the community space, is very powerful.
You see it in some other places, and it’s starting to appear in a more structured way in Chicago at 1871, or in D.C. at 1776, those two buildings. But this is a really mature example of it; it feels really built-out and not just well-organized, but extremely well-run.
It was nice to see, because I think there are a lot of people who aspire to have this at the core of their startup community, but it’s very hard to do, and it’s clear that this has been a lot of hard work over a number of years.
Q - So if you got home and (your wife) Amy asked, ‘How was Waterloo?’, what would you say?)
A - I’d say I had a great time.
I would tell her that I spent the entire time inside one building, so I didn’t really see Waterloo, but I saw Communitech, and I thought it was really cool.
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Engaging Women in Tech
Guest Post By Lesa Mitchell – The Kauffman Foundation- (Vice President )
The book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City clearly states the need for inclusiveness as a basic tenant of a good startup community. Since the pipeline of women with STEM degrees has been bursting at the seams for years (except in engineering) one would think these women would be spilling over into our startup community events and activities.
Not so much.
I recently attended an awesome maker/tech event hosted by Zach Kaplan (Inventables) and Brian Fitzpatrick (Google) called ORD Camp in Chicago. It was an amazing example of a Startup Community in action. I noticed something different about this event that I thought was important to share – the guys tried hard to engage women in their vibrant tech entrepreneurial ecosystem. In 2009 when they launched the event they had only 6.6% women participants, but this year that number went up to 26%.
It is not unusual for me to get calls from organizers across the country who are thinking hard about what they can personally do differently to engage women in their tech community. So my advice is simple – learn from Zach and Brian’s work. Before and during the event they took what I would call extraordinary measures to make sure women not only attended, but were fully engaged in leading sessions. I would call this work heavy lifting not for the shy or uncommitted. It is important to note (I am a witness) that many times female entrepreneurs and STEM leaders are invited to events but back out at the last minute. Entrepreneurs are super busy so this isn’t unusual, except the problem here is that there are already so few of them in the STEM areas that when they don’t attend, it leaves few women and you end up having a guys event.
The extraordinary measures these guys took in planning were as follows:
- They invited way more women than they thought would show up, knowing
shrinkage would happen.
- They hired a well known “sitter service” located close to the event and
publicized this to all invitees/attendees. The previous year, women that
canceled, named “sitter problems” as a reason. One man had also
noted this problem so they realized this service may benefit a large
number of attendees.
- They posted a detailed no harassment of any kind notice on their invite. As many in the tech crowd are aware, they are not the first to take this overt action. Tim O’Reilly led this charge for his events a couple of years ago so these guys followed suit. And I mean detailed – do not do this kind of thing with examples. This provides a strong positive signal to women (especially when there are late night events with alcohol).
- They put women on the advisory board to help select and encourage other women to attend once they were invited.
- They made sure that a number of the women attendees were going to come prepared to lead discussions and demonstrations. The young women from Google who led a demonstration of physics and food science was amazing.
- They alerted local police that women and men would be leaving the building late at night.
Feedback from attendees:
This was an un-conference, so at the event, I posted the “how do we get more women into tech” on the wall and waited to see if anyone would vote on it as a topic. They did. Then to see who would show up – a lot of people showed up. Note – six years ago I did this at another well known event and three people showed up in the room all women and one guy. This time we had a large group show up and it was 50% men. I opened the conversation with an overview of all the above observations and asked for ideas about what we were still doing wrong and what we could do more or less of to get more women into the tech/maker network. The women in the session provided the following feedback:
- “I almost didn’t come here because I hadn’t been to this before, I never heard of anyone that had attended, I don’t know any of these guys running it and it looked so crazy I was worried about what I was getting into showing up by myself.”
- “I am too busy to go to something that looks like it involves late night boozing with people I don’t know. If I didn’t know other people who had attended and told me it was amazing, I never would have showed up. If you think the 1950′s are over you are wrong, the young tech guy crowd still treat women as second class citizens and I don’t want to spend a weekend having to shout to get a word in the conversation.”
- “I work at (insert well known company) as an engineer and attended last year, I learned a lot here and it has created a broader support community for my work. This year I nominated other women to attend and then followed up with them to make sure they understood the purpose of the event and what to expect. They all showed up! I hate being separated into the boys and girls clubs so I am doing my job of bringing women into what have been predominately men’s fields, but actually finding women engineers is hard.”
The session was not only productive because of the honesty of the participants, but also because they came up with great ideas about specific things happening on the ground in their city and what they could all do (both men and women) to bring more women into the pipeline and into leadership roles. Bless the men that took an hour and attended this session and are carrying out their acts of support today.
If you really want to engage women (and that is the topic of this post) in your startup community – it requires an effort.
According to Zach, ORD Camp is a meritocracy and they knew there was a large pipeline of highly qualified women in the community that weren’t being represented. They needed to get these women involved in the same way they needed to get leaders from the Ruby community AND the Python Community from companies like Google, Facebook, and Apple. This wasn’t about lowering the bar for women it was about getting women involved that earned the right to be there.
Look around at your next Startup Community event/program and see if the majority of the faces are all men. We know there is a large pipeline of highly qualified women, so if you don’t have many at your event and you want to change that – you may need to change what you are doing.
If you are organizing events focused in an area that is already devoid of women in the pipeline – you need to find a woman willing to be your co–organizer so that right up front it is obvious that this isn’t an all male event. I personally think this is vastly more important in the middle of the U.S. than on the coasts simply due to the small number of women tech entrepreneurs. CA, Boston and NY already have a lot of women leading or co–leading startup community programs/events/gatherings and they have been working hard at this for years.
Hats off to all of them.
-Lesa
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How To Break Into The Startup World
Guest Post By Aaron O’Hearn - Boston Startup School - (CEO & Founder)
Startups are very unique work environments with very bright, yet very blurry futures. Their appeal is clear: working at a startup is like building a house, you can see the change you make on a daily basis. One wall today, a roof tomorrow,and eventually, a home. While their appeal may be clear, the rest of it maybe isn’t so certain. In fact, the only thing that is certain is change. Your boss could say, “We just switched business models” and you need to be able to adapt,and adapt quickly. It’s no surprise that startups look for very unique traits within people they are looking to hire. Only a certain kind of individual can thrive in a
culture of change. So, how can you not only enter the startup community, but succeed in it?
Meet the Team
No, not virtually. Go to networking events, ask your friends for intros, join a weekly meet-up, get out there and stop hiding behind the computer.The best way to find out if a startup is hiring, is to meet the team and make a connection. Resumés get lost, so make them understand why they need your specific skill-set on their team. Then, find something you can do for them- create a sales pipeline, write a one-page marketing plan, build an app that will help them capture leads- and send it over. The proof is in the pudding.
Have a Passion
Sounds cliché. It is. But startups are built on passion. And it doesn’t mean you have to be passionate about building Twitter for Iguanas, or whatever the startup you’re interested in joining actually does, but rather how do your passions align with their business. It could mean being passionate about enterprise sales, or designing amazing user experiences, or engaging with customers. Where do you see yourself fitting in?
Failure is OK
Once you land the interview, don’t be afraid to share your stories of failure. Entrepreneurs aren’t afraid of failure, they stare it in the face everyday and defy the odds. So if you have failed, then it means that you have learned. Perpetual learning is crucial in a constantly changing environment and a key tenant of startup philosophy.
Find the Bar
If, after having nailed the interview, you find yourself working at a startup, then you quickly need to identify the bar and then you need to understand actions must be taken in order to surpass it. Productivity beginning day one is a must on a small team. Successful startup employees are growth-minded. They are able to identify problems that haven’t even occurred yet,understand the next steps that need to be taken, and push forward to drive action. Pushing yourself to learn everyday, to do something better, and to understand a problem completely will not only allow you to find the bar, but forget that it even existed.
Do you feel overwhelmed yet? Good, you should. The truth is that it’s extremely difficult to align all of these different components and merge them into one meaningful career road map and path forward. The skills, network, passion, drive; all of them combined are difficult to attain, especially when pursuing the startup path alone. A program like Boston StartupSchool is one way to find a path into the startup world that focuses on connecting you with the surrounding community. Even if you have all of the other pieces in the puzzle, it is often the team and the community behind you that lifts you to the next level. So, above all else, when on the startup path, find a community of people that inspires you. A community filled with people as crazy as you are. A community of startup nerds.
- Aaron O’Hearn
www.bostonstartupschool.com
@BOStartupSchool
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Feld’s KC FiberHouse Competition
Last year Google ran a competition to determine which city would become the beachhead community for their revolutionary Google Fiber network. Although hundreds of cities applied, Kansas City was chosen as the winner and midway through the year the gigabit Google Fiber network became available to several neighborhoods in Kansas City. A gigabit connection is roughly 100 times faster than what the average U.S. consumer is currently receiving from their ISP. This incredible leap in data transmission has led many individuals within the KC startup scene to wonder how they can leverage Google Fiber within the startup ecosystem.
Enter Benjamin Barreth. Late last year after Google launched Fiber in KC, Ben had an idea to transform a typical suburban home into a rent free, co-working space for young startups. He cashed in his Roth IRA and purchased a small 3 bedroom home on State Line Road in what is being called the KC Startup Village. Ben named his creation Home for Hackers and last year at the Thinc Iowa conference spoke with Brad about his plans and the concept itself. After thinking on the idea for some time, Brad decided to hop on board and have a little fun. So this past Monday, he bought his own house in the KC Startup Village, partnered with the Kauffman Foundation, and is currently running a competition to select up to five individuals that will be allowed to live rent free for up to one year in what we’re calling Feld’s KC FiberHouse.
Sound intriguing? If so, here are the specifics.
You can apply online at Feld’s KC FiberHouse Competition. Applications will be accepted up until Friday March 22 (applicants must be at least 18 years of age). A panel of judges that includes Brad Feld, David Cohen of Techstars, Lesa Mitchell of the Kauffman Foundation, and Scott Case of Startup America Partnership will select up to five individuals to live in the home for 1 YEAR, RENT FREE!
If you’re an entrepreneur interested in FREE RENT, 1 GIGABIT CONNECTION SPEEDS and FREE RENT! Go to Feld’s KC FiberHouse Competition and apply now.
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Emigrate To Innovate For U.S. Economy
Guest Post By Sarah Spear – Arch Grants – (Executive Director)
Starting a new company can be challenging. Throw in the trials of starting that company in a new country and it can be an exciting, albeit scary experience. For communities here in the US trying to create entrepreneurial climates, easing those challenges will bring more skilled people into the community. Immigration of entrepreneurs into the US can pay off (literally) in both the short-term and the long-term. I’ve been an immigrant entrepreneur abroad and learned a lot in the process.
In 2008, I co-founded PharmaSecure. I was living in India, working with NGOs as a Clinton Fellow, and saw firsthand the problems of counterfeit medicines in emerging markets. That’s when I met my soon-to-be business partners who were working on technologies to wage war on the counterfeit drug trade. From there, our company was born.
I grew up watching my dad start and grow his company. I wanted that same spirit of entrepreneurship. With PharmaSecure, I was able to experience that for myself. In our business, my partners and I saw that a solution to counterfeit medicines lay outside the pharmaceutical industry. I knew that we could be flexible in a way corporations couldn’t; to effect change in emerging markets, a startup was the way to go.
Just like immigrants coming to our shores, I faced language barriers and assimilation to new and foreign ways of doing business. In India, there are additional issues in starting a business. My biggest hurdle was the foreign perspective on women in business. On one particular occasion, I attended a meeting with a potential strategic partner, accompanied by two of my male direct reports. Once we completed the obligatory exchange-of-business-cards ritual, we sat down to our discussion. Throughout the entire first half of the meeting, our potential partner addressed his remarks to my male colleagues. He then stepped out of the office to take a phone call. When he returned, he exclaimed to me, “I just noticed your business card. I didn’t realize you were the CEO!”
I bring those experiences and understanding of the challenges of immigrant entrepreneurs with me to my current position as Executive Director at Arch Grants, a nonprofit organization that gives non-dilutive grants to early stage ventures.
In 2012, the Arch Grants startup competition brought in hundreds of entries with four of the 15 grants going to entrepreneurs from outside the United States. (And our $1MM competition for 20 grants of $50,000 each is open through Feb. 1 if you want to check it out.) One of Arch Grants’ success stories is Dr. Arnoldo Müller-Molina, founder and CEO of simMachines. Arnoldo came from Costa Rica; he was seeking a place that would embrace the risk inherent in startups. He explored Germany and Japan and chose St. Louis because Arch Grants understands that startups sometimes fail and we embrace that risk.
Arnoldo’s first and one of his toughest challenges as an immigrant entrepreneur was getting to the US. He needed an E2 visa but the process is laborious and doesn’t always work. We had the fortune of donated services from attorneys at Polsinelli Shughart and Stinson, Morrison, Hecker which were a huge benefit for Arnoldo that enabled him to secure an E2 visa. And that hard work is already paying off. simMachines is now partnered with three other startups in St. Louis that are paying for its service. Arnoldo has met investors and connected to influential executives in numerous industries. He’s just one of what we hope to be hundreds of new entrepreneurs we help bring to town as we build St. Louis’ startup scene.
It’s not just a theory that immigration boosts the economy. Last summer, the Simon Chair of Economics at Saint Louis University released a paper, The Economic Impact of Immigration on St. Louis. Citing U.S. Census data, Strauss says increasing the number of immigrants coming into St. Louis will raise employment, grow incomes, boost real wages, reverse declining home prices and lower unemployment rates.
Arch Grants hopes this research and information is useful to people who understand that only turning inward for growth is the surest recipe for failure (people like Brad Feld and Richard Florida). We plan to use it to help grow St. Louis.
Startup communities are naturally energetic and inclusive places for immigrants to land that help immigrants to grow accustomed to their new surroundings. Immigrants also benefit communities like ours by introducing diverse perspectives and practices that they bring from their experiences. But it’s more than just diversity. Bringing more immigrants to a community can also mean greater inclusiveness and more jobs for the local community. The more embracing a community, the more people will want to be a part of that community, which translates to more people who will join that community, which will then bring more jobs into that community. Paving the way for foreign-born entrepreneurs to establish their startups in the U.S. adds much-needed innovations, skills, and jobs to the domestic economy. Providing a welcome reception to those who come ensures a continued pipeline of entrepreneurs like Arnoldo who are now making a difference in the US.
Sarah Spear is the Executive Director of Arch Grants, a global startup competition for early stage ventures. A former Clinton Fellow, Spear was also co-founder and CEO of PharmaSecure before coming to Arch Grants. She holds a BS in Chemistry from Gordon College and an MBA from The Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine.
WSJ Accelerators Heartland Series: Boulder
This week, the WSJ Accelerators program is running a special discussion called Heartland USA. In it, they are exploring the development of startup communities in five cities: Boulder, Colo.; Memphis, Tenn.; Washington, D.C.; Omaha, Neb.; and Portland, Ore.
Monday is Boulder day and there are a number of guest contributions already up, including:
- Pete Sheinbaum (LinkSmart): Boulder: The Tech Industry’s Best-Kept Secret
- Carly Gloge (Ubooly): Communities Are Essential for Startup Growth
- Niel Robertson (Trada): Crowdsource Your Business, Any Time, Anywhere
- Chris Moody (Gnip): The Boulder Startup Scene: A Guiding Light
- David Cohen (TechStars): Boulder is for Startups
Today, at 3pm EST, I’ll be participating in on online discussion called Ask The Accelerators and with Scott Case (Startup America Partnership CEO) and Marc Nager (Startup Weekend CEO). Join us as we talk about how you can create a startup community anywhere in the world.
Entrepreneurs As Community Leaders Who Just Do: The Story Behind Walkabout NYC
Guest Post By: Jake Cook – Digital Wax Works – (Founder)
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjschuck/
New York City company, Harvest, makes beautiful and useful software for companies looking to easily track time and invoice. In the spirit of “just doing something”, cofounders Danny Wen and Shawn Liu, hatched Walkabout NYC as the annual Friday afternoon event following Internet Week. For one afternoon some of the world’s most revered startups located in New York open up their spaces and various founders speak on different topics in a casual setting to standing-room only crowds – all for free.
To date, companies like Behance, Tumblr, Vimeo, OMGPOP, Etsy, and Meetup have all participated. I had the chance to ask the Harvest cofounder, Danny, on the story behind Walkabout NYC and tips on how you can pull off something similar in your city to help build connections in your startup community.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjschuck/
1. How did the idea for Walkabout NYC come about?
Prior to launching Harvest, Shawn and I ran a web design and development studio. From those early days, we never turned down an offer to see the workspaces of other companies in our industry. We found visiting these workspaces to be tremendously inspiring as those experiences often helped us think about how we wanted to build our business and workspace.
Aside from these informal visits, we also had the good fortune of going to various organized studio tours, whether it’s for artists or spaces (like Open House NY). Beyond just seeing the spaces, it was about the conversations people would have when they visited one. It was an opportunity to see behind the scenes. From those experiences, we felt compelled to create an event similar in spirit for our community of technology companies.
2. What advice would you give other startup community leaders trying to pull something like this off?
The first year we launched Walkabout, we only had 15 companies that participated (compared to 80+ companies the following year). We started small, but made sure we involved some of the most fitting and high-profile companies in the city early. For example, here in New York, community driven companies like Meetup and Etsy were quick to support us in the effort and this allowed us to go out and invite more companies to participate. Before long, companies were emailing us to express their interest in participating and helping. So I think it’s important to involve other community leaders early and this will ensure the event gets momentum and gets off the ground.
When we define the purpose of the event as getting people to offline, to have in-person interactions, to talk about how a company works, their culture and process, it’s in many ways an easy sell. It’s naturally an exciting thing to be a part. Companies benefit from telling more people their stories, in person. The community benefits from being inspired by all the behind the scenes stuff they normally don’t have access to. We’ve even had several instances, including here at Harvest, where companies have hired people they’ve met from hosting the Walkabout event. Ultimately, it’s about bringing people who have similar interests together under the backdrop of open doors.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjschuck/
3. The Harvest team built a gorgeous app for this – was it helpful for participation? Any chance this can be available as a platform for other communities?
Thanks! For this year’s Walkabout, we wanted to build a much better experience on the web and for mobile devices. Since Walkabout is an event to celebrate technology and the people behind it, we wanted to make sure we pushed our own adoption of technology for everything that is supporting the event. Since we were starting fresh, it was a good opportunity for us to experiment with new techniques and technologies.
We decided to create the site from a “mobile first” approach, where we can focus on getting the mobile experience right first, before we considered the “desktop” experience. This led us to make design decisions which favored simplicity, and things naturally expanded into a desktop version. It was an educational experience for us to build the platform and incredibly rewarding to see people navigate their way around the event using just their mobile phones.
Another important aspect of building a more serious platform for this year’s event was to get a better control of attendance. In our previous years, the big question participating companies were asking for was “how many people will show up to my office?” With an RSVP system in place, not only could we send them a list of people that would be attending their way, but they could also define how many people they can allow.
So in the end, it was a win/win for both the “walkers” and the participating companies. The platform helped people decide which companies they wanted to visit and the companies were able to provide a better experience because they knew how many people were coming and at what time.
We haven’t made any plans to make this available for use with other communities yet, but we do plan on using our platform again for another Walkabout event tailored for our customers that we’re hosting this coming Fall.
4. How did you get other leaders to participate?
We’ve been building our technology company here in New York for the better part of the last decade, so we’ve gotten to know some great people along the way, like Scott Belsky from Behance. Frankly, there wasn’t anything special we had to do to convince Scott or anyone that participated to do the event. We explained the idea and purpose of Walkabout and people naturally want to latch on to the opportunity to share their stories and ideas with the community. It really is a win-win situation.
5. What effect has this had on the startup community in NYC?
The major effect is that people are really more aware of who’s around them now. Companies in New York are mostly unmarked from the outside. There are no signs and banners that say “Company X” is here like you might see in other cities. Those that have visited companies now know for example “oh that building houses Skillshare” as they walk down just another street in Soho.
Beyond just knowing about the physical locations of companies, you realize people who have met during the event stay connected. They end up joining companies they visited because they liked what they saw or they stay in touch with each other to further discuss fragmentation in mobile because that’s the presentation they saw at MLB digital.
Ultimately, connections are made and knowledge is shared, and that’s a great thing.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trashrockx/
6. What do you see the tech community scene in NYC becoming? How are connective tissues being formed within the community?
The ecosystem is continuing to grow and support itself. On any given day, people have several options for events to meet people, to hack, to learn and all of that is just going to continue to grow.
7. Any unexpected connections as a result?
I believe connections, when it comes to people, are meant to be unexpected. Whether it’s finding co-founders, jobs, office space, etc., things like Walkabout are here to facilitate precisely more of those unexpected connections.
Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/trashrockx/
Anything else you’d like to tell us?
In October of this Fall, we’re producing another Walkabout event. This time, instead of focusing on technology companies which produce products (which is what we’ve done so far), we’re going to focus on the services side of design and technology. Think of it as WalkaboutNYC Agency. We’ll be collaborating with leading independent design and technology agencies to help people see how the most creative and technology forward work is created. For us, it’s an exciting way to showcase many of our customers who are in this exact business. They’ve done an amazing job creating campaigns for top-notch brands and companies, and to be able to meet the people behind the work — that will be very exciting.
About Harvest: Based in New York City, Harvest let’s businesses beautifully perform two essential business functions: Tracking Time and Invoicing. Both of which helps ensure startups don’t violate Brad’s #1 rule of startups (“Never Run Out of Money”).
Jake Cook is a cofounder at Digital Wax Works and a volunteer for StartupBozeman. Follow him @jacobmcook.
Additional Photos from WalkaboutNYC:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/trashrockx/sets/72157629842739830/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tjschuck/sets/72157629998543952/