For the last 15 years we’ve been debating and experimenting with how to grow a startup community. From events to co-working to funding, we’ve tried thousands of ideas. One area that’s under-served is getting potential founders off the sidelines. I believe there are significantly more would-be founders that can build successful companies than are doing so. We need to increase the starting of startups.
Here are some questions we’re asking about how to activate potential founders:
- What’s holding potential founders back from starting a company?
- What’s needed from an education, skills, funding, and community perspective?
- How do we elevate entrepreneurship in the city to make it more top-of-mind?
- How do we get more people thinking about entrepreneurship in high school or college?
- How do we get more people with existing careers working on side hustles that could lead to a startup?
- How do we get existing companies to embrace local startups?
The rise of remote work due to COVID, especially in the startup world, has removed one of the traditional push backs: how are you going to find the talent to scale? Talent is more distributed than ever. While founders can also be anywhere, it behooves our community to have them here to create jobs (some of them, anyway), grow wealth, and give back. Plus, it’s more fun face-to-face. Let’s have the founders be local and the team be anywhere.
While we love when entrepreneurs move to the region, the most opportunity to grow our startup community is getting potential (Read more…)