Since the first StartupBus in March 2010, we’ve run an annual competition in North America as well as Europe, Australia or Africa. Since the WHO announcement of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve been watching the news carefully and when we saw other events like the 2020 Olympics and 2020 Burning Man were cancelled, it became a foregone conclusion that the annual StartupBus competition was to not occur in 2020.
It was so obvious that putting a bunch of strangers on a bus for three days in 2020 was not appropriate that we hope you understand we didn’t need to waste the pixels.
The other thing about 2020 was the eruption over police brutality against Black people. It created a dialogue and opened awareness of what is wrong with our culture — no more blacklists (it’s ban list now) or master-slave (use “primary/secondary” or “host/client” instead). We had a head start on this conversation: our Advancing Black Pathways bus in 2019 born from our multi-year diversity goals was an eye-opening experience for me that made me realise what’s called identity politics in some circles is actually a human issue that requires White dudes like me to wake up. For example, a friend who now purchases 400 homes a month in America recently was telling me how home valuations are lower for Black people and its a well known secret to make a house look more “White” before getting it appraised. Housing has become the primary store of value for society which means home ownership has become the very definition of what makes the middle class and Black people have to look White to get a regular valuation?
There is a magic about StartupBus and our culture continues to attract the very best to build technology that disrupts the status quo. Indeed, the fact several billion dollars of equity has been been created by alumni (not just immediately following our competition experience, companies born from the competitions, but also by core leaders in the organisation behind the competition), means as a report card, that magic is very much on the money. We’ve seen our community become the entry point into the tech industry for a lot of now successful people. StartupBus, originally a joke on wheels, has inadvertently played a role to shape the minds of today’s business leaders.
Ten years on with ~2000 people that we can count as being part of the community, we’ve had a spectacular run. It’s infectious, if you pardon the pun, that we have several hundred people that are still actively engaged in the community in some shape or form. Leaving the question of what will become of StartupBus in a post-Covid19 world?
As politics gives way to evidence, increased testing capacity allows us to reopen, and vaccinations help us reach herd immunity, I am hopeful that by December of 2021, the world will be back to its pre-pandemic “normal”. And that future pandemics will be much less disruptive as globally we will develop the infrastructure to react better. (Yet it’s not even the end of 2020 and we have already forgotten about the Black lives matters protests.)
What role will StartupBus play in tomorrow’s world? Well, as I said earlier this year, “maybe it’s time”. But whether we ever run a competition again — which is how we bring new people into the community — is different from if we will continue to engage the existing community and create value.
For those in the community, I look forward to (re)connecting with you with a series of virtual events. We are going to kick them off where you will help define the answer of what will become of StartupBus now that we’ve had a decade to let it sink in. Reach out to me directly or through your Conductor to get connected to the conversations.
For anyone else such as those who have no idea what a Conductor is, stay tuned. Maybe — to a highway near you.
