Feeding the Full-Stack Entrepreneurial Community
How to rethink the role of local government and economic development organizations in entrepreneurial communities.
In his book “Startup Communities”, Brad Feld talks about the roles of leaders and feeders in an entrepreneurial community. Entrepreneurial communities work when entrepreneurs lead the way by building companies and organizing community activities. It’s when the feeders (everyone that does things that are inputs into the entrepreneurial community like lawyers, investors, incubators, government) try to be the leaders, things break down.
The other side of the table (the feeders)
In the last ten years, I’ve made the transition from being an entrepreneur building tech companies, to an entrepreneur building grassroots community, to an entrepreneur investing in other entrepreneurs, to an entrepreneur inside an economic development corporation tasked with leading the next stage of growth around our city’s entrepreneurship and innovation initiatives in Edmonton, Canada.
I’m an entrepreneur leader turned feeder that wants to rethink what it means to be a feeder in an entrepreneurial community.
Like many entrepreneurs I know, we’ve spent countless hours in local and regional ecosystem discussions as part of policy roundtables, leading industry associations, and sitting on far too many advisory committees. I’ve seen three provincial innovation strategies and two national strategies release to great fanfare and then ultimately stall. I’ve read pages and pages of strategic plans on entrepreneurship ecosystems from around the world.
If I were to take all the entrepreneurship and innovation policy documents and processed them through a keyword algorithm, I’d get the following:
-Double down on start-ups and angel funds
-Double down on scale ups and venture funds
-Double down on research and development
-Double down on industry clusters
-Double down on facilities and broadband
-Double down on regional networks and portals
It’s not that I believe that any of these strategies is incorrect. They’re all needed. The problem I see stems from the thinking that picking one strategy over another is the magic bullet to grow an entrepreneurial community. There is no magic bullet.
The full-stack entrepreneurial community
In the startup world, ‘full-stack’ gets applied to full-stack developers and full-stack marketers. When you’re full-stack, you have specialized knowledge across all stages of software development or product marketing.
Fundamentally, feeders need to think more ‘full-stack’ when it comes to our understanding of entrepreneurial communities as they shape supporting policies and programs.
This is what a typical innovation ecosystem map often looks like:
One thing is clear — on the feeder side, we make this far too complicated.
It’s no wonder we can’t figure out what to do or where to focus. Then policy makers get distracted by shiny objects (state-of-the-art facilities) and chasing flavour-of-the-day trends (like apps!). It results in beautifully designed strategic documents on entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems. Most plans are focused on short term outcomes and vanity metrics which ultimately fails over the long term. And then it all repeats with every political leadership cycle.
As feeders, how can we simplify this approach?
One of the first projects I’ve been working in my new role at EEDC is simplifying our view of the entrepreneurial community in Edmonton.
What are the key ingredients needed that will be the same 10–20 years from now? How will our community endure as the forces of disruption — exponentially evolving technology, resource market volatility, globalization of talent — exert pressure on our startups, corporations and organizations? What’s working that we can scale up? What’s not working that we can wind down? Who are the leaders and feeders that could use more horsepower and resources?
After many hours of white boarding, brainstorming, and pitching, here’s the simpler way we’re looking at our entrepreneurial community in Edmonton:
People + innovation
First and foremost, it starts with good people. People with talent, skills, and ideas. Google calls them “smart creatives” — people with the engineering and entrepreneurial mindset who can use technology to solve problems in any industry. In Edmonton, the caliber of talent that comes to and from our schools are already some of the very best in their fields globally — machine learning, computing science, nanotechnology, medicine, engineering, and the arts. Edmontonians have built companies like Swype, BioWare, Stantec, PCL, Addicting Games, Investopedia, Catalyst Theatre, Innovative Trauma Care, Famoso, Running Room, Login Radius, Jobber and TestFlight. We’ve discovered vaccines for Hepatitis B and C infections, technologies to extract bitumen from the oilsands, new techniques for sustainable waste management, and we’ve even solved chess and poker.
So how can we ensure that we have the capacity to output wave after wave of these kinds of people in our community long-term? How can we better support education (from K-12 to post-secondary to continuing education) and make sure they’re working in sync as part of our entrepreneurial community?
Community + collisions
Entrepreneurship is a team sport. You’re mad if you think you can build something incredible all alone. It takes a team and it takes a community. In Edmonton, community is baked into our city’s core brand values — open, courageous, inventive, cooperative. “What are you making? How can we help?” is the mantra of the Make Something Edmonton initiative. Over 40 community meetup groups have self-organized at Startup Edmonton around topics like design, technology, media, and open data. Monthly hackathons, coding workshops, and design shows happen every month. We’re home to one of the best university incubators in the world at TEC Edmonton and a 243-acre campus at the Edmonton Research Park that’s home to global companies, early stage startups and Alberta Innovates. Our public library even has a maker space and rents out Arduino kits and subscriptions to Treehouse so anyone can learn to code.
In a world where money follows founders, things like community, place, opportunity, and smart people, can factor on one’s choice to build a home base. What opportunities are there for collisions to happen between smart people? How do teams form? How do teams experiment and build momentum? How do we build teams around teams to provide mentorship, support, capital, and networks? How easily can teams access other markets? How do we remove barriers to team building through better policy?
Leadership + growth
Some cities prioritize start-ups over scale-ups, or vice-versa, as part of their strategy. But why choose? The third ingredient has to do with experienced entrepreneurial leaders. Not just founders, but leaders who can scale up key management functions inside startup companies and who can drive new sources of growth at enterprise companies through continuous innovation.
In Edmonton, we have entrepreneurs with exits working on their next startups like Granify, Teach Me, and Mitre Media. We also have more entrepreneurial leaders and executives becoming active feeders through the Executive-in-Residence program at TEC Edmonton, EO Accelerator Program, A100 and U of A VMS mentoring groups, TEC Venture Angels, and Level Up at Startup Edmonton. Collectively, we’re seeing more peer-driven activity focused on optimizing team formation, increasing the velocity at which startups grow into scale-ups, and the endurance of mid-to-large size enterprises in our community.
While simplistic, this model captures the ingredients and forces at work that drive our entrepreneurial community. It doesn’t pick a cluster or technology to focus on. It doesn’t pick a specific stage of company. It doesn’t put more importance on researchers versus entrepreneurs versus creatives. It’s a full-stack community model simple and flexible enough for both leaders and feeders to build from.
Building a higher-performance feeder
In many communities, problems happen when feeder activity overwhelm entrepreneur leader activity. Entrepreneurs can’t figure out which feeders to work with. Feeders get focused on competing with each other, or worse, compete with entrepreneur leaders in the community.
How can we do this better? In my opinion, it’s not a matter of more funding or increasing input for entrepreneurs into the policy making process. I think change comes as entrepreneurs-turned-feeders move into leadership roles within key feeder organizations in our communities. And not just retired entrepreneurs looking to ride out their careers, but hungry entrepreneurs who have the drive and understanding of what today’s entrepreneurs face.
If you want a full-stack, high-performance entrepreneurial community, the feeders have to be entrepreneurial too.
We’re already seeing it happen here in Edmonton, where entrepreneurs are at the helm of major community feeders like Startup Edmonton, TEC Edmonton, Entrepreneurs’ Organization (one of the most active EO chapters in the world; the current EO Global chairman is from Edmonton), and perhaps most importantly, at Edmonton Economic Development (where CEO Brad Ferguson is leading the transformation).
It’s pretty rare that a city’s economic development corporation possesses the kind of entrepreneurial culture and leadership that’s emerging right now. While other economic developers debate about sustainability and diversification, EEDC is making moves like a growth company, acquiring feeders (like us) and loading up on entrepreneurial talent across all our businesses.
Over the last few months I’ve been working with a team on an initiatives called Ignite Edmonton. It’s a new brand, platform and network we’re creating to drive EEDC’s important role as a entrepreneurial community super-feeder.
- It starts with our core portfolio of incubator brands, spaces and programs that we actively operate and invest in. It’s a portfolio that covers startups and growth companies, enterprise innovation, prototyping and advanced manufacturing, technical literacy building, and pop-up incubation:
- We’re then taking a more strategic approach to invest in selected affiliate network partners (campus startup hubs, manufacturing centres, niche mentorship programs, entrepreneur-led co-working spaces and community initiatives). Instead of trying to connect every dot in the community, we’re concentrating on scaling up the dots that are working.
- I’ll be openly sharing our thoughts, our models, and our thinking around the entrepreneurial community with leaders and feeders in Edmonton. No one owns community and we don’t have to own the model. But we’re going to put our hypotheses out there and use lean build-measure-test cycles to continuously validate what works and kill what doesn’t.
- We’ll working more closely with our local education community from K-12 to post-secondary and beyond, to boost technical literacy, and concentrate collisions around existing strengths in machine learning, data analytics, nanotechnology, and wireless sensor technologies.
- We’re connecting dots by marketing a “season of entrepreneurship” to drive momentum between key community events including like Startup Week, Venture Prize and the Ignite E-Town Festival.
It’s a start.
The key is an underlying commitment to the leaders-and-feeders model. It’s not our job to lead the entrepreneurial community — entrepreneurs are doing that. But being a feeder doesn’t mean being a follower. Feeders must be active players when and where it counts in the full-stack community.
Becoming better feeders (for government and economic development leaders)
a) Be the first feeders in. Local government must be the first feeders to invest in the local entrepreneurial community. Leaders and feeders are inherently local — they live in your city, they go to school in your city, they build in your city. Align entrepreneurship priorities with your city’s brand values and place-making strategies. Don’t let top-down regional and national priorities dictate what happens in your community. Make the first investment and then have the others follow.
b) Feed the full-stack community. Strategically invest and mobilize in leaders and feeders towards a full-stack community vision. Know the distinction between the four types of entrepreneurs. Spend less time organizing feeder collaboration meetings to make everyone feel included. Spend less money sponsoring whatever random entrepreneurship branded event comes your way. Instead, activate a higher-performing local feeder network that uses a common playbook, shared metrics and a rising tide mentality.
c) Get out of the building. Entrepreneurial communities work when the leaders and feeders are working in sync. Stop asking entrepreneurs to provide one-way input into your strategies and roundtables. Go visit them where they work, go out into the community. Work with them to validate your thinking. If you’re not helping entrepreneurs start and experiment, or fuelling the engines that help startups to scale, then it’s time you get out of the way.
d) You can’t control the chaos. For economic developers, policy makers, and feeders, there’s a tendency to try to control the chaos by building complicated systems that perfectly move entrepreneurs along pre-determined paths. It doesn’t work this way. In community, chaos will always exist, and that has to be okay. The best feeders are the ones who are agile enough to continuously add value to the entrepreneurial community amid the chaos.
e) Recruit home-grown, entrepreneurial leaders. Take a chance on an entrepreneur leader-turned-feeder to spearhead major initiatives, especially if they’ve been a home-grown success. Empower them and give them the latitude to do what they do best and watch what starts to happens in your entrepreneurial community.
