If you want to build a startup ecosystem, look at Hip Hop culture.

Salim Virani
Source Institute
Published in
2 min readApr 4, 2016

This is an excerpt from Bart Doorneweert’s post on the Source Community.

What would hip hop culture have been if its protagonists were scratching using the same sequences of techniques, the same tracks, the same lyrics by the same kind of MC, and the same type of dance moves ? It would turn more into ballet or an opera.

Hip hop is different, right? It’s people trying out new sounds, and new technology, riffing on each other’s work, finding new ways to express the culture. Each has the motivation to make their mark on the culture, adding to the body of sound and motion.

DJ Qbert in 1997

There are certain rules in this culture, but nobody owns the process on how it’s done.

Everybody is learning from each other, picking things up through observations on leaders during performance events, on youtube, or just sitting with each other and mashing together structures. And thus you discover at a point that your listeners are subconsciously bobbing their heads to the same beat as you are, with this MPC you’ve used to create a new flow.

Pete Rock explaining how he figured out the MPC drum machine.

There’s no instructor, telling how this should work. It’s driven by a unity of interest amongst people, who seek each other out to take their own skills to the next level. That is the most granular, and most timely way to get the insights you need to build what you gotta build.

This dynamic is the exponent of peer learning, and it is missing structure in our processes, brands, and curricula of entrepreneurship education. We’re waiting on our instructors to come up with the next thing.

Bart continues… so head over to the Source Community to discuss!

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Salim Virani
Source Institute

If you could pick anyone in the world as your teacher, what would you learn? That’s the world we’re creating at Source Institute. http://www.salimvirani.com