On entrepreneurship – CGW's Blog

Lessons on entrepreneurial ecosystem building

The entrepreneur-boosters of Boulder were always adept at packaging their story.

Over my years organizing while reporting on startup communities in the U.S. mid-Atlantic via the news org I founded Technical.ly, I understood a cohort of entrepreneurs and investors told a compelling story for their swath of Colorado. They packaged processes (an ever-evolving accelerator program called Techstars) and developed an outsized stream of software companies, alongside that state’s evolving economy.

Among the messages coming from their work that I personally believe in: “Quantity based approaches operate on the assumption that averages, not outliers, drive system value. That is incorrect.”

A “more of everything approach doesn’t work. Instead, an economy that is more accessible and dynamic requires a complex system of overlapping networks that rewards emergence and expects low probability events that have outsized reruns. The trouble is that economies and local policies are typically run by people motivated by linear progress.

That message is neatly described and navigated in The Startup Community Way, a 2020 revision with researcher Ian Hathaway of a 2012 book initially written by Brad Feld, an investor-organizer most associated with that Boulder, Colorado startup community and Techstars. Feld’s initial book became a common starting place for “entrepreneur ecosystem builders,” and he is a prolific writer and speaker, introducing and crediting himself with concepts, including the phrase “startup communities.”

This edition is the right place to start, and I enjoyed it. Given Colorado’s statewide economic story in the Mountain West, and Feld’s position, this book has particular authority and insight. Keeping with his “give back” mentality, working with many hands, the book includes a dozen or so page-length essays from contributors and longtime collaborators across the United States. Hathaway injects the growing research on the importance of entrepreneurship.

Their success lifts a tide that helps many boats, including places and subjects important to my work. I thank them for it. As per usual, outside my own journalism and organizing, here on my personal blog, below I share my notes for future reference from a book I enjoyed.

This is what a robotics ecosystem looks like

A robotics ecosystem connects education to workforce training to entrepreneurship and industry. Many parts and components fit in, overlap and even compete but contribute to a shared goal.

While out there, I filed a story on driverless freight company Aurora, and on a new mural series.

That’s what I got to in a panel discussion I led on the main stage of the Pittsburgh Robotics Discovery Day last Thursday. Below watch video of the panel.

Builders Live @ Global Entrepreneurship Congress

The Global Entrepreneurship Congress was held in the United States for the first time since its founding back in 2009. This time in Indianapolis was a chance for me to get a sense of both a global conversation and a particularly American version.

I also got to host a pair of live recordings of Builders Live, Technical.ly’s regular conversation series on ecosystem building. Find my recap stories, and one of those interviews below:

Entrepreneurship is bipartisan

Informed by reporting I’ve done, I’m keen on making the case that entrepreneurship engagement and tech workforce support are bipartisan issues.

I led a workshop session on the topic at the Young, Smart, Local conference. Find my slides here. Below is the session abstract I roughly followed. (After the daytime conference, there was an evening reception, at which I am depicted below with my friend and collaborator Damon McWhite, photo by Sana’i Parker!)

How we evolved the Technical.ly mission over time

Mission statements are a post-war business phenomenon now considered a must.

A 1994 Wall Street Journal story reported “fifty percent of big companies have mission statements now, twice as many as five years ago,” saying they are “fast becoming the latest management mania.”

Update: I wrote about how to put mission into action here, and we’ve covered the importance here too.

What must have first been our closest attempt at a mission statement was “Covering the community of people who use technology in Philadelphia,” which we sometimes shortened as a tagline to “A better Philadelphia through technology.”

When we expanded to Baltimore in 2012, we widened our scope to “Better cities through technology,” which adorned our site for the next several years. It also spoke to the very wide scope we took in those early days, when there was limited formal engagement between fledgling tech communities and wider cities. We hosted computer trainings and coding bootcamps; We facilitated early city council hearings in both Philadelphia and Baltimore on the issues of entrepreneurial engagement, and we hosted early civic hacking and tech, data and innovation policy events. We were very deep in the subject matter.

Over time then our lean mission statement got bulky. Here’s language we used by 2015, when we hosted a big team onsite about the topic:

Technical.ly is a sustainable community acceleration organization focused on how technology makes cities better. We value entrepreneurship, creativity, inclusion, flexibility, transparency and those who do, act and create, whom we highlight through news and events. Our team members are public community leaders who pursue new thinking, cherish local communities and are willing to ask challenging questions in order to get better answers. We use communication as a means for conflict resolution and community betterment. We have high standards for ourselves and others and consider professional goals to be personal ones as well.

That resulted in this mission statement we used for Technically Media, as we were publishing both Techncial.ly and Generocity: We convene the smartest people and organizations in industries that matter to help local communities thrive in the future.

We updated it in 2017 with this:

Mission: Technical.ly grows local technology communities by connecting organizations and people through reporting, events and services.
What we do: We provide original editorial, expert programming and tools which improve recruitment, marketing, community cultivation and economic development. We serve technologists, entrepreneurs and people who care about technology’s local impact.
Company: Our team members are public community leaders who pursue new thinking, cherish local communities and are willing to ask challenging questions in order to get better answers.

In 2018, we fashioned a mission statement for our event series Philly Tech Week, and that resulted in tweaking our vision: “We believe in better workplaces that create more equitable communities.”

Then following pandemic disruption and refinement in our first strategic vision in 2021, we came to this:

Mission: Technical.ly is a news organization that connects and challenges a community of technologists and entrepreneurs invested in where they live.
Vision: We believe innovation should come from anyone anywhere — to ensure all communities thrive.
Values: Welcoming, Connective and Challenging

Blue Ocean Strategy

Business case studies focus on companies. That’s all wrong. The more effective unit of assessment is the “strategic decision.” Companies change because people and external factors shift. Better to take specific moments to assess who, why and how did leadership get it right.

That’s the foundation of what most interests me about popular business book and concept Blue Ocean Strategy, written by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne. The original 2005 book’s origins are with a 1997 article on “value innovation” in Harvard Business Review. I read the updated version published in 2015.

It’s easy to criticize the careerism of business books like these. Smart management researchers uncover some findings, group case studies and give it cute branding to sell books and lead to a career of consulting and public speaking. It all has a very packaged feel. Yet I have gotten genuine value from many such books once they’re put in the proper concept: Pick from them what helps you and don’t feel required to follow it all.

The big headline of the book is that too often when facing a strategic decision, leaders follow the pack because it feels safe. Their assessment says this is all wrong. Rather than a crowded “red ocean;” Distinguish yourself by turning to open “blue ocean.” In some sense, many other business metaphors — such as Jim Collins’s “Big Hairy Audacious Goal” (BHAG) and the “Queen Bee Role” and “making the donuts” — give similarly productive advice: Fall in love with the problem not the solution, and, rather than following everyone else, uncover what you’re the best in the world at.

The advice is good enough, though, that it can help. A friend advised me it was return to Blue Ocean Strategy. I read it, translated it into a mini-workshop my leadership team, and it helped push us forward at an important juncture.

You might rightly benefit too. Pick up a copy. For my future reference, I’ve shared my notes below.

Notes from the 2016 book ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’ by Robert Gordon

The “special century” between 1870 and 1970 was not an economic transformation to repeat. It was an anomalous period of exceptional change super-powered by the remarkable inventions of the Second Industrial Revolution not to be repeated.

So argues Robert Gordon in his influential, academic and deeply researched 2016 book The Rise and Fall of American Growth. It is one of the better respected contributions to the conversation how quickly will quality of life continue to advance. Technological advances tend to not reverse, so his point is not that we’ll regress but that we’re due for a long period of languishing growth and advancement.

For millennia until the 1750s, there was very modest rates of economic growth. Then the First Industrial Revolution ushered in slightly faster growth, which setup the second, which we most commonly call the Industrial Revolution of the mid-19th century. That spurred the fastest advancement in quality of life in human history. By the 1970s, progress slowed. The third, technological revolution only resulted in a short-lived return to high grow in the decade 1994-2004. That was the lone answer to economist Robert Solow’s famous 1984 quip: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.”

In his book, Gordon argues we’re unlikely to repeat the rate of gains of that special century. It’s an interesting addition to the familiar techno-optimist versus techno-pessimist argument. Below I share some of notes from the book. It is dense and thorough, so it’s hardly light reading, but I devoured it. It’s an important addition to the economic literature. I recommend reading it.

Notes from the classic 2001 business book “Good to Great”

Data can point to commonalities of companies that go from being just good to being really great.

Published in 2001 as the middle in a trio of business books written by Stanford University’s Jim Collins, Good to Great is a classic of the genre. Though I’ve heard it cited many times, I only just read it earlier this year. The concept is a likeable one: Collins and a team of graduate students sorted through lots of data to find very similar peer companies, some of which accelerated into greatness and others which only treaded water. Then they sorted through to find what’s similar. Lots of stuff like this happens today — like this popular Medium post.

Twenty years later, the book still has value, even if many of the companies have faded from their greatness and it’s always easy to tease a business book. At its most simple, Collins introduces a simple framework that I’ve played with for my own company (his “hedgehog concept” is a way to communicate: What is that your company can do better than anyone else in the world that can drive financial success?)

A respite from Philly Tech Week kickoff rainouts

Those closest to me are familiar with this painfully, long-running inside joke: these elaborate outdoor Philly Tech Week kickoff events I organize always happen with comically poor weather. Philly Tech Week is an annual, open calendar of events on technology, entrepreneurship and innovation that I help curate with my company.

That string of rainouts changed in May 2019, when an afternoon shower gave way to warm sunshine.

A beloved events producer of mine turned to me that afternoon and proclaimed: “We have turned a corner and won’t have any more rained out kickoffs!” Given that that 2019 edition was something of a dry-run for 10th annual Philly Tech Week to take place in May 2020, that seemed like a thrilling prediction. In 2020, we would have the largest, best-planned, most interactive kickoff ever, with the help of perfect weather, as I had always envisioned. This memory made me laugh out loud this week because, last month, I hosted the second consecutive all-virtual Philly Tech Week due to the pandemic. Fatima, you were right, no more rainy outdoor kickoffs!

Continue reading A respite from Philly Tech Week kickoff rainouts

A few notes from my conversation with Guy Raz of ‘How I Built This’

For Technical.ly’s postponed, all-virtual Introduced conference, I closed out the day interviewing Guy Raz, the influential podcaster behind ‘How I Build This.’ He has a new book by the same name.

For those interested in economic development and entrepreneurship, the conversation is worth a listen. My colleague Stephen Babcock put together a nice recap, and here are a couple points I took away: