What experiment is PIE cooking up next?
Key ingredients will be community, mistakes, and open source
It’s no secret. We’ve been rethinking the Portland Incubator Experiment. (It’s an experiment, after all.)
What began eight years ago as a collaboration between the largest privately held creative agency in the world, Wieden+Kennedy, and the Portland startup scene led to a coworking space, an early-stage and mid-stage startup accelerator, a corporate accelerator, hackdays, startup events, and a hub for community, among other things.
All these iterations have been valuable.
As we’ve been evaluating PIE, we wanted to ensure that we continue to provide value to the startup community — in the broadest sense — and use our resources in the best way possible.
So after a number of conversations with startups, mentors, advisors, peers, and patrons, we’ve hit upon what we should be doing next. And now we’re ready to share the next phase of the experiment with you.
Introducing the PIE Cookbook
The PIE Cookbook will be an open source guide for creating, building, and improving your startup accelerator. Starting one from scratch? Already have one running? Traditional startup accelerator, new take on the accelerator mode, or corporate incubator looking for inspiration the PIE cookbook will have something for you.
Once complete, it will contain everything we’ve learned over the eight years of running PIE — successes, failures, and everything in between. What’s more, it will be completely free and open source so that anyone, anywhere, can put what we’ve learned to good use.
Why are we open sourcing our program and processes?
First, we believe the most efficient way to scale PIE is to provide direct access to our learnings. Second, we believe each and every community — enabled with the right tools and insights — has the potential to assist and accelerate promising folks further and faster toward success. Third, we believe there’s no secret formula to running an accelerator, and that sharing is the best way to help us all help each other.
And that’s just good for everyone.
Even if all we manage to do is simply document the PIE process, we’ll consider this project a success. But we hope the PIE Cookbook is the beginning of something much more meaningful. As an open source project, you will have the opportunity take part in creating the most effective documentation for startup accelerators, ever. And anyone can use the PIE Cookbook as the basis for documenting and running an accelerator program — whether it follows the PIE path or just avoids our mistakes.
If this sounds interesting to you, please take a look at the PIE Cookbook Kickstarter campaign and join us on this project.
More to come…
We realize that many of the folks who follow PIE are founders. And their interests lie not in building an accelerator but in being accelerated. Rest assured, we haven’t forgotten our roots as a program designed to build better founders. There’s more coming in that regard. 2016 is going to be a lot of fun, and a lot of hardwork. And the PIE Cookbook is just the first experiment we have planned for this year.
So please stay tuned. We’re excited to share the next phase of the experiment as it comes together.
Rick Turoczy (@turoczy) has been working in high-tech startups in the Portland area for more than 20 years. As founder and editor of Silicon Florist, he has blogged about the Portland startup scene for nearly a decade — even though numerous people have begged him to stop. That side project led Rick to cofound PIE (the Portland Incubator Experiment), a startup accelerator formed in partnership with global advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy. Those efforts led to the founding of Oregon Story Board, a project that is using learnings from the PIE experiment to accelerate companies in the services industry.
All because of a blog. Weird.
Co-author Renny Gleeson (@rgleeson) cofounded PIE to drive innovation at the intersection of startups and brands at Wieden+Kennedy, the world’s largest independent creative agency.
Image courtesy Kristine. Used under Creative Commons.
Originally published at blog.piepdx.com on February 29, 2016.
