How a single cup of coffee could make your entire startup community exponentially more awesome

What if one cup of coffee — in a moment of karmic butterfly effect — could change the face of your entire startup scene for the better? And missing that coffee could have exactly the opposite effect?

Not a huge capital infusion. Not the next billion dollar startup. Not a gigantic corporation. A cup of coffee. (Honestly, it doesn’t even have to be good coffee.)

• Let’s say you agree to have a cup of coffee with someone.
• That person is working on a startup. Your curiosity is piqued.
• So you grab another coffee with another person. And another coffee with another person.
• Soon, you’re starting to chat with all kinds of different folks in your community. It’s a community to you. But the community doesn’t even realize that it’s a community yet. But you see that it is. And you’re starting to see trends and themes.
• Then you begin to identify founders who should be talking to one another. Suddenly, you’re connecting dots.
• And you’re trying to do your best to tell as many people as you can that, yes, in fact, there is something interesting happening in your town.
• Then — seemingly randomly — a global corporation reaches out to you. While you continue having interesting conversations. And more coffee.
• Then you’re working with the corporation to build a coworking space.
• Soon, that coworking space becomes an accelerator.
• And people want to mentor the startups. And they’re thankful that they have a platform for doing that. Because someone helped them at one point — and they want to do the same.
• It keeps going.
• And now people are paying attention to the startup scene.
• It’s actually a scene now. A community and a scene. And it knows it.
• And then more corporations want talk to you. And be involved in the community.
• Then investors start talking to you.
• And investors start investing. Because they see they can make money for their LPs.
• And startups grow into companies.
• And then those companies get acquired.
• And then those founders start other companies.
• And the flywheel is starting to turn. The ecosystem is starting to sustain itself. And the community — the now-part-of-popular-culture startup scene — is a thing. An actual thing. Everyone knows it’s a community.
• And then startups from all over the world are pinging you.
• Then more people want to try this accelerator thing. For their communities. And for different kinds of businesses.
• Suddenly — seemingly overnight — you are part of an extremely awesome startup scene. And it seems to be gaining more and more momentum.
• And so you keep grabbing coffee.

Sound farfetched? I’d totally agree if I hadn’t lived it. And had a decade of amazing coffee meetings in Portland, Oregon. And founded Silicon Florist. And started PIE with Wieden+Kennedy. And welcomed companies like Coca-Cola, Daimler, Google, Intel, Nike, Target, and others to our startup community. And started other accelerators like Oregon Story Board. And have had enough conversations with other communities that I’m trying to share what we learned in the tech scene, here in Portland.

I’m the first to admit that this story is completely insane — completely true but completely insane. What’s more, it’s nothing but a random string of serendipity and dumb luck. And that if someone told me, in a similarly rambling blog post, that the plan of attack for getting to take part in the growth of an awesome startup community would start with a single cup of coffee, I’d probably tell them that they were crazy.

But that’s simply how it works.

One cup of coffee at a time.

Thanks to Cami Kaos for reviewing this post in draft.

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.