On Startup Manifesto’s

So Belgium is (finally) following the EU digital agenda directives and in order to make sure the Belgian government does it right some grassroots startup movements are gathering inputs in order to write a manifesto for the Belgian startup scene. After all, Greece, Spain, Poland and the UK startup scenes have one. I dare you to read them all.

Write once, read once

Coming from an enterprise-y environment it makes me think of the mission and list of values writing exercises each (department of the) company has to do in order to justify its existence (within the company). After writing these missions and values down they are often printed out and hung out somewhere on an often overlooked part of the cafetaria wall. Two months down the road no one looks at it anymore and two years later the employees have lost track of their mission.

Write once, smack them in the face frequently

Which makes painfully clear that the success of a mission statement, or of a manifesto, depends on the frequent articulation of it. Especially with entrepreneurs who are more often than not busy with building their own startups and with — in this case — frequently changing policy makers (and their administration?) being the target audience of the startup manifesto. So I hope Karen, Xavier and the rest of our — vibrant — startup ecosystem will do just that: frequently articulate the manifesto we’re all about the write.

So, what should be in the startup manifesto?

So, what should a government do to support startups on its territory?

Get out of the way

The first one would be: get out of the way of innovation.

I’m writing this from San Francisco, and yesterday I was talking with somebody who lives in Silicon Valley and who’s trying to start something in the healthy food sector. Californian state regulations require him to have a separate kitchen with a dedicated cooling environment, which severally adds costs to his startup. Yet another barrier to get started without him knowing his idea will even catch on. (That’s also why doing a software startup is way more interesting than doing a hardware thing: it’s easier to find out if you have traction or not.)

Bottom line: starting a new venture should be as easy and cheap as possible.

(On the other hand, entrepreneurs should realise a government also needs to protect its citizens, e.g. from dying from food poisoning.)

Take risks

Take risks, especially when private investors don’t want to take them. [1]

So dear government, please do fund research extensively, even though no immediate return can be expected.

Why not give each new company a starting fund of — depending on the startup’s domain — several thousands of euros so they can finance their startup costs (e.g. buy refrigerators)? [2]

Taking risks also means you have to be able to deal with failure.

Open source

I have created a bestartupmanifesto organisation on GitHub. [3] Even the White House uses it! [4]

The Belgian Startup Manifesto can be found in the bestartupmanifesto repository. I have invited Xavier Damman and Ramon Suarez as part of the organisation to handle the pull requests. The other members of the committee were not immediately found on GitHub.

References

[1] Often private investors don’t want to invest in basic research which can ultimately lead to stepping stones for things like the iPhone. Examples are mentioned in this article (Dutch).

[2] What about fraud detection? Startups tend to fail very often yet we don’t like fraud…

[3] GitHub is the leading open source version control platform in the cloud.

[4] The White House published its budget (proposals) for fiscal year 2016 in machine-readable format.