Crash Into Me; Collisions and Collaboration
Near the end of 2010, a jaded statement was made by a former corporate executive who was now swimming in the entrepreneurial waters of Boulder, Colorado. A year of meetups, pitch events, and demo days had barely put a dent into the adage, “it’s all about who you know.” Attend enough events and you quickly realize it’s more or less the same collection of folks, most of whom are vying for some face time with the hopefully dealflow minded Angel or VC in the room.
“Networking is broken.”
Week after week, month after month, a group of hopeful innovators and entrepreneurs with pitch decks in PDF converge in an exercise John Nash might offer as an example of failed game theory. Eventually these events devolve into community socials that while open to all leave many feeling like outsiders. These events are the hallmarks of the talent, activity, and support recognized as your local entrepreneurial community. There is inherent value in this convening, but from a communal perspective it’s an investment of talent and time of community resources. We have to ask ourselves if we are getting the best possible return on our collective investment? What are we investing in anyway?
Let’s be clear, this is an implicit investment, but it’s an investment all the same. Since innovation and creativity within entrepreneurship is recognized as the engine of economic growth that powers the train we’re all riding in, one could argue that we’re investing directly into our mutual economic futures. Stated another way, the entrepreneurial events that happen in each city is a communal investment in economic growth, no different than say a tax initiative, small business loan or grant, or any other traditional investment vehicles aimed at sparking economic entropy.
Entrepreneurial events are communal investments in our shared economic growth.
So let’s take a closer look at this investment. What are we investing in exactly? A group of people, with various expertise, talents, and motives coming together to participate in an event that is intended to benefit a handful of stakeholders specifically, with some potential for additional benefits for those who attend. There are a handful of examples we might consider, but let’s examine the most common entrepreneurial event, a.k.a. the pitch event.
Startup pitch events are so commonplace that it’s easier to find examples on how to pitch at an event than an explanation of what the event actually is. The primary stakeholders at these events are generally the companies pitching their product, service, or idea, investors who are looking for ideas or early stage projects to get behind, and sponsors who hope to create awareness within the entrepreneurial ecosystem and/or support local entrepreneurship. Secondary stakeholders can vary, ranging from business development and service providers looking for leads, job seekers, recruiters, college students looking for internships, and innovation enthusiasts all of whom are there to network.
From a communal perspective these are all certainly positive results. A startup is funded or officially launches, public perceptions of sponsoring organizations improve, new business leads are likely, business cards are exchanged, and of course people connect on their social networking platform of choice.
How much value has really been created?
A startup that is 95% or more likely to fail is funded, some organizations have provided some capital in exchange for socially minded marketing, a few potential clients are identified by local service providers, and CRM databases are likely updated with data that already exists somewhere else, and social networks are updated. If 100 people were at this event and it lasted two hours, we’ve roughly invested 200 human hours, hundreds of years worth of education and experience, a lot of energy, creativity, and shared interest to engage with others. Sure, the startup could become the next Facebook, a major merger or partnership could result from an introduction that was made, an organization might win over a lifetime customer for their community stewardship.
These things could happen. Holding events month after month, year after year, and these things could happen. It’s a long term play.
Seems like the equivalent of 5 full work weeks of educated and experienced human focus could produce a little more reliable value. This is where I’d like to loop in the thinking of Steven Johnson. I met Steven at a book signing he held here in Denver at the Tattered Cover a few years ago. The concept I was particularly interested in was his notion of the Slow Hunch as found in his work around “Where Do Good Ideas Come From?” The gist of the slow hunch is that no one person has the entirety of a good or innovative idea, but that people are more likely to have half or some portion of it. These fragments, when collided or connected with other fragments are the genesis of what we come to later recognize as the epiphany, eureka moment, or game changing idea. The historical eras where innovative ideas occurred with remarkably greater frequency are correlated with markers of increased connectivity of ideas or the ability to share ideas broadly. Examples range from coffee shops and taverns, to the printing press, radio, television, and of course the Internet. The more opportunity that exists for ideas to collide, the faster the cadence of innovative breakthroughs and discoveries. A little more eureka if you will, when there’s a little more collaborative potential, i.e., a chance for those with partial ideas to effectively run into each other.
If the cadence of innovation is proportional to the number of ideas that connect or collide, then it would stand to reason that communities hoping to foster productive entrepreneurship should look to maximize the opportunities for collisions to take place. What happens if we look at our entrepreneurial ecosystems through this lens? What questions or revelations might we discover that could prove additive in how we invest in and support local entrepreneurship? Let’s revisit our investment from before, that cocktail social otherwise known as the pitch event.
What we can be sure of is that each idea that gets presented reaches essentially everyone in the room, and there is an ambient potential for collisions outside of those pitching in the form of announcements, hallway time, or pure serendipity. At their most frequent, these events occur monthly and are likely to expose 1–5 entrepreneurial ideas each time for roughly 12–60 or more innovation showcase events where collisions are likely to occur. Built In Colorado, a tech focused hub for tracking Colorado based startups, currently lists 1,845 registered startups. Back of the napkin, with say 500 people attending each month, a monthly tech focused pitch event collides 3.25% of the ideas on just Built In Colorado’s radar to roughly 0.2% of the Denver metro population each year.
For perspective, just over 2.5 million people watched the Colorado Rockies put together their 5th worst season last year. That’s nearly 90% by volume of the total population colliding with someone’s idea of a winning team. I’m not suggesting pitch events and sporting events are even remotely the same thing, rather that we’re capable of creating collisions of varying scale when we create the space and opportunity for them. Flow of the population through civic spaces.
What if we were to rethink how we support and promote local innovation and entrepreneurship by creating the spaces and opportunities for those in the community to collide with it? What if 2.5 million people were able to touch, see, taste or otherwise become aware of the 1,845 startups within Built In Colorado’s database? Assuming this is even possible, what would it look like? Investments and experiments conducted in particle colliders around the world have led to greater discoveries and innovation via particle physics. Could a similar collision model work for communities looking to foster more opportunities for innovation for economic growth? Can scale a collider or accelerator model to a major portion of a community?
Imagine a community that creates spaces and welcomes opportunities to promote the collisions and cross-sections of ideas of all of its citizens. A community that embeds into the landscape a culture of constant engagement and wonder. Communities built to engage…like having the World’s Fair in town every day. Maybe together, we can move the needle on the efficacy of entrepreneurship and innovation such that what is going to arrive in the year 2050 instead happens in 2025?
