Startup Ecosystems: Where Data Makes a Difference
The inside story behind 1776’s UNION network
My motto in life is #dataforgood. What I mean by that is data in itself is useless unless it has a larger purpose. Overseeing the development of the UNION network within 1776 from concept to growth is the embodiment of data for good. By bringing thousands of startups, mentors, investors and institutions from around the world onto a single platform, we can harness the resulting data to solve complex challenges around the world.
So, how did this happen? Let me start at the beginning…
A Data Geek Meets Her Calling
There are a few times in life when a combination of career experience, goals and passions align. When those things come together, you jump at the opportunity.
For me, that opportunity was 1776. Let me touch a bit on my history with data and what #dataforgood means to me. My resume includes a long history in the media and financial services industry with words like “database”, “automated reporting”, “analytics” and “insights.” I like being around data because it can tell us a lot.
Being a data geek is not only central to my career but important to my personal life as well. Three years ago I was looking for a great neighborhood to move to with my daughter. Rather than just look in the places where my friends happened to live, I spent long nights sitting at my computer mashing together data from GreatSchools and Neighborhood Scout while fretting about my carbon footprint staring at graphs of gigatons of CO2 production. I didn’t want to let the vagaries of who I happened to know prevent me from finding the best place to raise my daughter. Thank you to data for helping us find our home!
Enter 1776.
In the summer of 2014, I randomly bumped into Evan Burfield, a highschool friend, in the elevator of my office building. Over a serendipitous lunch, I learned about his budding new company 1776, a startup incubator he cofounded with Donna Harris. I sat there stone-faced, hoping I wasn’t about to ask a dumb question.
Me: “What do you do as a startup incubator?”
His answer was more compelling than I’d imagined. 1776 was taking entrepreneurs with new ideas and providing mentorship, partnership and investment resources to help the companies grow. But one thing plagued Evan.
Evan: “We have a bunch of promising companies, but we’re having a hard time tracking them and making sure they’re connecting with the right classes or mentors. I feel like there are missed opportunities.”
That’s when we had a fateful question-and-answer session that made me jump onboard.
Me: “How do you track this information now?”
Evan: “Google sheets.”
My data-loving brain CRINGED.
Me: “Let me help you, now.”
A Product Comes To Life
At 1776, we wanted to solve an important problem. We wanted to use data to make sure we were connecting founders to peers, mentors, experts and content based on their immediate needs. We wanted to identify a struggling startup earlier so we could intervene to help correct their trajectory. We wanted to quickly connect promising startups with the right introductions to corporate partners and investors based on their business models and maturity. And we wanted to enable 1776 to do this efficiently so we could scale past one floor in one building in one city.
Hurray! Like the startups that we serve at 1776, we had lots of customer discovery, a unique product concept with a vague roadmap of sequenced features and a long-term data strategy. But that was just the beginning of the hard work and tough decisions we had ahead.
Before anything else, we needed a name for this product, one that would complement the inspirational 1776 brand. After tortured debate, we chose “UNION”.
Next, we had to build a team, which took a lot more work than the name. We got to a Minimal Viable Product on the backs of my personal network of freelancers. We then started scouting the talent from our friends at General Assembly. Our first hire was a promising — and now well proven — engineer with a talent for user empathy and an eye for team process optimization. Fortune smiled on 1776 again when the opportunity to acquire the team from Disruption Corp landed us a talented group of product engineers with an eye towards design and a product history aligned with what we were doing at 1776.
Fast forward again through months of iterating on product features. We were constantly balancing between building a habit for our entrepreneurs while optimizing 1776’s operational efficiency in delivering our programs.
A year after beginning our journey with UNION, we could finally deliver reports on our startups’ connections to mentors and participation in events and classes. Best of all, we had data about which startups had momentum versus which needed guidance from our team. We were also able to use UNION to scale our 1776 program from DC into multiple cities. Data is so fun when it makes an impact on our community!
A Network of Networks
If my own role in UNION began with a chance encounter, then the second key moment of serendipity happened in the spring of 2016. Joshua Baer, the Managing Director of Capital Factory in Austin, was going to be in DC and wanted to swing by for guest office hours. Our team did what we normally do and set Josh up in UNION so he could discover some quality startups and events that would meet his interests during his brief stay in DC. Josh got a set of automatic emails from UNION informing him about his upcoming office hours and the startups he was about to meet.
Some gears must have turned in Josh’s head because Evan received a call promptly from Josh with the exclamation, “What is UNION? We’ve been putting together product specs on something to help our incubator, and you’ve already gone ahead and built what we want!”
With Josh and Capital Factory onboard as collaborators, we quickly verified that many other incubators and accelerators had similar challenges to the ones we faced. Once we validated the market our engineering team went through an arduous effort to transform UNION from an internal product for 1776 into a platform that could power incubators, accelerators, and entrepreneurs around the world.
Our vision though wasn’t simply to make UNION available to improve the operations of incubators and accelerators. Our vision was to use UNION to create a true union of great programs around the world. By sharing a common platform, we could open and connect our networks, vastly increasing the resources available to entrepreneurs in each of our local communities. Our ambition was nothing less than creating a single platform for the global startup ecosystem.
This isn’t a small problem to solve. We see two variables at play here.
First, the number of accelerators in the United States alone has grown from 16 in 2008 to 170 in 2014 when UNION was conceived, with many times as many incubators. And this isn’t just a phenomenon in Silicon Valley, Boston or London. In fact, almost every medium- to large-sized city in the world now has a credible mix of incubator and accelerator programs. These programs provide the infrastructure that supports each city’s startup ecosystem.
Each of these programs has been curating it’s own network of mentors, developing its own classes and using tools like Facebook groups and Slack to connect startups together.
We saw missed opportunities as we analyzed these networks. Every city has talent, and that talent would be in a greater position to succeed if it could connect to a larger network of startups, mentors and investors.
Second, it’s easy to assume that great entrepreneurs and great startups are only in Silicon Valley. It’s easy, but lazy. As our startup partners can attest to, there are passionate people with great ideas and the talent to execute on them in every city in the world, from Tulsa and Tallahassee to Santiago and Shanghai. Where you were born or choose to raise your family, or who you happen to know, shouldn’t determine whether you have the opportunity to build something great as an entrepreneur.
Before UNION, a healthcare startup in Tallahassee who needed sales and product guidance could only look within her local incubator’s network. But that startup would be missing out with connecting with Kat Mahan, a 1776 mentor and her “Product Strategy for Healthcare” office hours all hosted on UNION.
Our hope is the UNION network is evening the playing field for innovation to take place by anyone and anywhere.
UNION Goes Global
By January, we had worked out the kinks with Capital Factory, so we started making UNION available to incubators and accelerators that we knew shared our commitment to working in their local communities to give startups access to the best resources and opportunities globally. Validation of our globalization of incubator ecosystems came when we started to see the flood of mentor office hours occurring across communities.
It was such an amazing experience to watch for the first time a Capital Factory entrepreneur in Austin with a local farm to restaurant marketplace platform, signing up for office hours with a mentor in Washington, D.C. focused on “Transportation & Food Regulatory Strategy.”
Less than three months later, we are deploying UNION with our partners in Austin, Tulsa, Buffalo, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Tampa, Tallahassee, Ashburn, Santa Barbara, Portland, Athens, Kampala, Nairobi, Shanghai, Islamabad, Accra, Santiago and Mexico City. And we’re just getting started as we are adding several more programs every week.
Each of these programs is doing unique, amazing things to help their communities.
For example, in Buffalo, 43North runs a year long, hands-on competition and program that spurs economic development in upstate New York by offering eight startups a slice of $5 million in capital. As 43North enters the third year of its program, it wants to connect its startups to a wider regional and global ecosystem.
In Santiago, Startup Chile has attracted more than 1,300 startups from around the world to help catalyze its venture ecosystem, all in less than six years. More than half those startups are still active, and they collectively represent more than $1.3 billion in portfolio value.
In Baltimore, entrepreneurship campus Betamore is growing, both by adding new educational classes and through its expansion into CityGarage, where they will “allow people to code and weld under one roof.”
By connecting these programs together, the whole becomes much greater than the sum of the parts. A fintech startup in Nairobi can connect to a banking mentor in New York. An education startup in Baltimore can connect with a charter school innovator in Austin. And UNION does this seamlessly based on data.
Why I Really Love UNION Data
Junaid Qazi, an entrepreneur based in Dubai, who is building a software platform that helps solar installers. Because of UNION, Junaid was able to meet for virtual office hours with an with an expert from the U.S. Department of Energy to discuss his business.
When UNION connects a founder like Junaid in Dubai to a DOE mentor in DC, it helps that founder learn and grow. But it also enables that mentor and the founder to provide structured feedback which generates a set of data from that interaction. That data enables UNION to get better and better at making the right connections for each and every entrepreneur. It also enables UNION to provide an objective perspective on promising startups, wherever they happen to be.
That’s why I love UNION data so much. With UNION, we can use data to ensure that the opportunities available to startups are based on the power of their ideas and their ability to execute, not who they happen to know in their local communities. People have biases. The data in UNION doesn’t.
We’re Just Beginning
We have more than 20 programs deploying on UNION today, but we’re growing that number by several more each week. Imagine what happens when we scale UNION to hundreds of cities around the world, tapping into tens of thousands of promising startups!
The interesting thing about being data oriented is you concentrate on the macro data trends constantly, but it’s combining the micro data anecdotes with macro trends that hit home in the most gleeful sense. Seeing the updates from startups on UNION showing company progression from idea to MVP to first customer revenue validates that incubators are making a difference. A year from now, I will be looking for macro trends showing startup programs, who are part of a supercharged UNION network, moving their members from idea to revenue faster than before. Now THAT is #dataforgood.
