What is The One Catalyst for a Startup Community: Great Founders, Great Companies or a Great Community?

by Chris Heivly, Entrepreneur in Residence at Techstars

Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Great football players make great coaches or great coaches make great football players. I call these circular arguments but they are actually causality dilemma’s and they drive people crazy.

In startup communities I believe the same argument or dilemma exists but with another anchor to the circle. Great companies.

My circular argument goes like this: Great leaders build great companies which build great Communities which build great leaders which build great companies.

For some of you this makes a lot of sense. You are probably the more vision & abstract type of thinker. For those of you who skew to a more precise and factual point-of-view, your head probably just blew up.

“You want answers! I want the truth! You can’t handle the truth.” (Insert Tom Cruise and Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men or Rudy Giuliani, “truth is not truth”).

Well I have a little surprise for you. While laying out this framework I have tricked you by getting you to eliminate the things that are not necessarily catalysts for a great startup community (space, capital, government programs or even Startup Weekends — all of which can help tremendously).

The one catalyst for a startup community are the entrepreneurs themselves.

I have a pet phrase I use every day, “no entrepreneurs — no entrepreneur community”. They are the center pivot for everything. Without them the rest is just noise. Without them the rest of us are useless. I think it’s funny and sad when I hear community leaders working hard to help spawn, grow and accelerate their startup community and never once spent more than 15 minutes with a local entrepreneur.

Let me repeat — everything starts with the entrepreneur. Serve them. Build your community around them. And when you are conflicted with multiple choices of what to do next, ask yourself this one question — “what action of mine would help the entrepreneur the best”.