Startup Communities

5 Questions with Ian Hathaway, co-author of The Startup Community Way

01. What is “The Startup Community Way”?

The Startup Community Way is a book I co-authored with Techstars cofounder Brad Feld. It’s a collection of frameworks, principles, and action points that guide and inform practitioners and observers about the key characteristics, behavioral patterns, and basic function of startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems. Our thinking is supported by the science of complex adaptive systems, which explains the behavior of inherently unpredictable, emergent phenomena. We apply insights from systems thinking and community-building across many contexts to enable better engagement and more productive outcomes for entrepreneurs.

The Startup Community Way: Five Lessons for U.S. Policymakers

This article originally published on the Center for American Entrepreneurship Ideas Blog

My new book with CAE Advisory Board member Brad Feld published yesterday. The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem is essential reading for entrepreneurs, community leaders, policymakers, and other key stakeholders looking to entrepreneurship as an engine of innovation and economic growth. As more cities, regions, and nations embrace entrepreneurship, it is widely recognized that the environment in which a startup operates plays a role in the likelihood of its success. For this reason, the topic of “entrepreneurial ecosystems” has begun to play a bigger role in many economic policy agendas.

The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

After three eventful years, I’m excited to say that my new book—The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem, with Brad Feld—is officially available to the public today! It’s my first book, so this is a new feeling. It’s hard to put into words how grateful I am for the experience. I learned so much in the process and developed a large number of meaningful relationships along the way that will last a lifetime. It wasn’t always fun; writing a book of this nature is really hard work. But it was worth it.

I believe that Brad and I have created something that will be useful to many people, not just in entrepreneurship and community-building, but far beyond. Our book is not the final say on the topic of startup communities; it’s the beginning of a conversation. There is more work to do and many other voices to hear from. Like with startup communities, the work is truly never finished. But, I believe we have provided a solid foundation from which many people can benefit and build upon for years to come. I’m proud of our work.

The Measurement Trap

Mariana Mazzucato is one of my favorite economic thinkers. She’s an academic economist who rejects market orthodoxy and presents her arguments, persuasively, to the masses—a gift that many in her field don’t possess. Mazzucato’s overarching argument is that (a) the state’s role in driving innovation, and therefore economic growth, is much larger than is reflected by market reward mechanisms, and (b) a primary reason for this lopsided arrangement is the flawed way we value a range of inputs to production.

On this latter point, Mazzucato argues in a recent New York Times Op-Ed:

Essentially, only something with a price is valuable. This approach overvalues goods and services with a price tag — which in turn make up a country’s gross domestic product, the driver of public policy. This has perverse effects. A coal mine that spews carbon into the atmosphere increases G.D.P., and so is valued. (The pollution it causes is not taken into account.) But the care given to children by their parents at home doesn’t carry a price, and so is not valued.

Since I have the topic of entrepreneurial ecosystems at top of mind, I immediately went there after reading this quote. It reminds me that what gets valued in entrepreneurial ecosystems tends to be the tangible factors that can easily be counted, like the amount of investment capital or the number of startups, instead of the intangible factors that more fundamentally drive system value, such as social capital or tacit knowledge.

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The Geographic Concentration of Venture Capital(ists)

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Last week, The New York Times published an article arguing that a “wave of venture capitalists is heading to quieter, less-expensive locales, where they are helping fund start-ups.” The article supported this claim by pointing to three venture capitalists who left Silicon Valley and launched funds in other places. One of them, Mark Kvamme, left Sequoia Capital to found Drive Capital in Columbus, Ohio; but that was back in 2013.

I don’t doubt that some venture capitalists have left The Valley to start funds elsewhere. However, The Times is massively overselling the reality. It is already well-advertised that venture-backed startups (the recipients of venture capital) are highly concentrated by geography. However, venture capitalists (the ones investing in startups) are concentrated by geography even more. Let’s take a look at the data.

Call for Input: Local Policies to Support Economic Development via Entrepreneurship

This is a call for input for a brief survey on local policies or programs to support startup community development. I use the term "policy" loosely to mean actions not just by governments, but also by additional actors involved in provisioning "public goods" or funding for local entrepreneurship (e.g., economic development agencies, foundations, chambers of commerce, non-profits).

A Second Nobel Prize in Startup Communities

Last year, I wrote about Elinor Ostrom, an American political economist, who was awarded the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for her work on cooperation and collective action. Ostrom studied how rural communities self-organized to sustainably share scarce natural resources in the absence of formalized governance structures. In her Nobel acceptance speech, she described her work in the following way:

“Carefully designed experimental studies in the lab have enabled us to test precise combinations of structural variables to find that isolated, anonymous individuals overharvest from common-pool resources. Simply allowing communication, or “cheap talk,” enables participants to reduce overharvesting and increase joint payoffs, contrary to game-theoretical predictions.”

In other words: we tend to cooperate with people we know, trust, and frequently engage with, while we find it easier to defect or play zero sum games with people we don’t. This thinking is central to building healthy startup communities (or ecosystems), where the flow of ideas, talent, and capital are made possible by informal norms and relationships built on trust, reciprocity, and stewardship. For that reason, I awarded her the Nobel Prize in Startup Communities (credit goes to Victor Hwang for originally connecting Ostrom’s work to startup communities/ecosystems).

Platforms versus Pipes

One of the biggest challenges facing startup communities (or ecosystems if you prefer) is the inability of “feeder” organizations—such as governments, economic development authorities, corporations, and universities—to engage with an entrepreneurial mindset. The reason is simple: startups and startup communities are organized through networks. Feeders are structured around hierarchies.

If You Want to Better Understand Startup Communities, Read These Three Women

I’m working hard on The Startup Community Way this week with my co-author Brad Feld. As we’re polishing up the meaty part of the book—which draws on a wide range of theory, empirics, frameworks, and just some really brilliant thinking on the part of the many impressive shoulders this work stands upon—a few names keep coming up in the references we’ve assembled.

Three of these names I want to talk about today are intellectual giants in the areas of entrepreneurship, geography, and cooperative social systems. Their work collectively intersects in a way that explains a lot about why startup communities exist. If you want to understand startup communities, you should know their work. Two of them I consider friends, so not only do I get to benefit from their insightful work, I also know there’s a kindness and generosity behind their ideas. The third is not someone I knew, and sadly she’s already passed. But, I think a lot of her work and I’ve written about it already.

All three are women.

How Change Happens

I recently picked up a copy of How Change Happens: Why Some Social Movements Succeed While Others Don't, a book out last year by Leslie Crutchfield. I immediately became interested in the title because of my upcoming book The Startup Community Way, which will be out later this year. That interest came from the fact that our book (I’m co-authoring it with Brad Feld) is really about a special type of movement-driven social change—one built around local entrepreneurship. How Change Happens is the product of many years of research by Leslie and her team studying a wide range of social movements in the United States—from gun control, to same-sex marriage, to smoking, to drunk driving, to acid rain reduction, to vaccination, and beyond—and systematizing why some succeed while others fail. Dissecting these major movements case-by-case, Crutchfield and her team were able to uncover some interesting patterns about what works and what doesn’t. As I was reading the book, I had in the back of my mind “how do these social movements apply to building startup communities?” I’m glad I did, because it helped crystalize a few ideas I in my head.

How to Build a Successful Startup Ecosystem in your City

Techstars recently launched a Startup Ecosystem Development offering, which is designed to work alongside of communities around the world to help them build a more vibrant environment for entrepreneurship. The program has been in an R&D/beta-launch phase the last couple years, but the first official program will take place in Buffalo, New York over the next three years.

Yesterday, to introduce the program and answer questions about what they’re up to, Chris Heivly (who leads Ecosystem Development at Techstars), Brad Feld (author of Startup Communities and a Techstars co-Founder), and Eric Reich (chairman of 43 North, the startup support organization in Buffalo that is partnering with Techstars to lead the effort) participated in an hour-long segment on Crowdcast.

I embed the event below and encourage anyone interested in the topic to give it a listen—it’s definitely worth your hour and is full of wisdom and insights from these three.

Robert Noyce, Mao Zedong and Lessons for Startup Communities

In 1957, a group of eight Silicon Valley executives lead by Robert Noyce resigned from famed Shockley Semiconductor to start a rival in Fairchild Semiconductor. This sort of thing happens all the time in Silicon Valley today, but at the time, it was a watershed moment that sent reverberations throughout the industry. The Traitorous Eight, as they became known, changed the course of innovation forever by injecting the region with an entrepreneurial ethos that continues to this day and has made Silicon Valley the envy of the world.

Around the same time, nearly 6,000 miles (~10,000 kilometers) away, a very different type of revolution was taking place in Communist China. In 1958, Communist Party Chairman Mao Zedong launched the Great Leap Forward—a wide-sweeping series of economic and political reforms aimed at transitioning China from an agricultural economy to an industrialized one, and at consolidating power around the socialist regime.

So, why on earth am I linking the Great Chinese Famine with the essence of Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial spirit and with startup communities today?

The J-Curve of Startup Community Transition

In The Startup Community Way, my upcoming book with Brad Feld, we explain that startup communities must be viewed through the lens of complex adaptive systems. Such systems are characterized as having many elements (people and things), interdependencies (connections between them), feedback loops (actions lead to reactions), and as being in a constant state of evolution (never at rest).

We make the effort to explain the complex systems framework and tie it to startup communities because the nature of these systems requires a very different type of engagement than we are used to in most of our professional and civic lives. Complex systems require different skills (diversity v. expertise), mental processes (synthesis v. analysis), tactical approaches (experimentation v. planning), and goals (right conditions v. right outcome), among other factors we discuss in the book.

One of these prominent conditions in complex adaptive systems that I want to talk about today is Basins of Attraction. In neoclassical economics, it is assumed that the the economy (also a complex adaptive system) is moving towards a point of stability—an equilibrium. This is done for reasons of simplifying mathematics, but it also has the impact of making many economic predictions unreliable.

Instead of a single point of stability, Basins of Attraction takes the view that there are many such potential “resting places” and that a complex evolutionary process will determine which of these wins out. Basins of Attraction in complex systems—like startup communities—can be thought of as a sort of center of gravity where things can get stuck. Critically, they can get stuck in “good” or “bad” outcomes.

The Rise of Global Startup Investors

Recently, Brad Feld and I have been working hard on The Startup Community Way, a book on how to harness the complexity in the entrepreneurial age. It’s a follow-up to Brad’s, 2012 classic: Startup Communities. We completed a chapter that documents the growth of startup activity globally over the last decade—from startup deals to investors to startup programs—but recently decided to scrap it from the book. But, we wanted to put those data points to use, so I’ll publish some of them here.

(Note: if you want a comprehensive look at trends of venture deals, see Rise of the Global Startup City: The New Map of Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital, a report I published last September with my friend and colleague Richard Florida. It covers a decade of venture capital deals across more than 300 global metropolitan areas that span 60 countries.)

Here, I’ll document the rise of three types of investor groups: venture capital firms (from Seed through later-stage VC), corporate venture capital groups, and a third group for accelerators and incubators. These groups have been pre-populated by PitchBook, my source in this analysis.

Startup Communities Are Not Like Recipes, They are Like Raising Children

I’ve often heard people say “building startup communities (or startup ecosystems) is not about the ingredients, it’s about the recipe.” What they mean is that a focus on the individual people, institutions, and resources will provide only limited insight or success, and that what matters most is how these things all come together. While integration versus elements is the right concept, a recipe is the wrong analogy.

New Evidence on Fostering Productive Startup Communities

Last week, Endeavor Insight (the research arm of Endeavor Global) teamed up with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to publish a new report on fostering productive startup communities. The report was authored by Rhett Morris and Lili Török of Endeavor, and I think it is one of the best pieces of empirical work I've ever seen on startup communities.

Startup Communities Revisited

Startup Communities Revisited

Writing a book is a very hard thing. It's one of the hardest things I've done professionally. It is the nonlinearity of the process that makes it so difficult and the sheer perseverance that's required. It's remarkable to see how different the content is today compared with where it was on day one.

Part of the process means writing a lot of words that no one will ever see. I have written literally tens of thousands of words—several complete chapters even—that will never see the light of day. I was going through one of those today and decided I will publish it here. It is a brief summary of Brad's book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, meant to be a refresher for those familiar with the material and to quickly get newcomers up to speed. I also added layers of my own context, data points, and interpretation.

The Follow-On Funnel

Two weeks ago, I published a study for the Center for American Entrepreneurship titled America's Rising Startup Communities. The study looked at the growth and geography of venture capital first financings across U.S. metropolitan areas between 2009 and 2017. One of the biggest questions that's come out of that work is: "what's happening beyond first financings?" This post is the first of at least two that will begin to address that question. Here I will look at national trends, and in a later post, I will examine geography of follow-on investments.

The New York Yankees and Startup Communities

Startup communities are examples of complex adaptive systems. This means many things for understanding and influencing their behavior, but today I want to focus on two concepts: non-linearity (the sum is greater than the parts) and synergistic integration (interaction between the parts matters a lot). To make my point, I’ll draw on an example from my favorite sport.

The North Star

In the last couple of weeks, the subject of Canada as a rising startup and tech hub has been seemingly everywhere in my news feed. Much of discussion about Canada has focused on Toronto and Vancouver, and to a lesser extent Montreal (where Techstars is opening a new accelerator, one year after launching in Toronto). And that’s for good measure—these are far and away the leading hubs of startup activity in Canada.

But, I’d like to talk about another northern star that shouldn’t be left out from the discussion: Kitchener-Waterloo.