Jul 17 2012

Just Get A Group Together For Coffee

I was in Missoula a week ago to run a marathon. On the Friday before the marathon, I gave a talk for a few hours to about 60 entrepreneurs who were part of the Montana Programmers Meetup along with some folks that are driving the Startup Bozeman initiative. I usually don’t do anything before a marathon, but I had a ton of fun and think I’ll start doing startup communities events on the Friday before marathon weekends I travel around the country.

My talk covered my core principles on how to build a startup community, something I’m calling the Boulder Thesis. I also gave a bunch of actionable suggestions, including descriptions of some of the activities, such as Boulder Open Coffee Club, that are key parts of what goes on in Boulder.

One of things I say over and over again is “just go out and do stuff.” Imagine my joy when I saw a post from Rob Irizarry, who was one of the key instigators of getting me to do a talk in Missoula, post about Leveraging the power of Metcalfe’s LawIn it, Rob talks about how he turned a request to meet with two of Montana Senator Jon Tester’s aides  (Alison O’Donnell and Pamela Haxby-Cote) to talk about Startup Bozeman into a larger group coffee club type meeting.

Awesome Rob! The startup community in Montana gets me one more time this summer on August 4th for Big Sky DevCON. I’ll be calling in but this time talking about Startup Metrics, which is another book that I’m working on with my Foundry Group partner Seth Levine.