A Decade of Ecosystem Stewardship and Why We Should Continue to be Ecosystem Builders? 4 Key Reasons
In June 2012, HUBBA opened our doors to our first guest coming into tour the space. By end of July 2019, I passed the torch to my cofounder and team with some big wins, and many failures. Before that, I had spent 2 more years running a social enterprise incubator with very minimal success. A lot has change in the landscape from the hey days earlier last decade and while as a team we managed to make almost every mistake in the rulebook as a startup founder, we kept growing the community, getting bigger and bigger projects and launching signature activities every year.
The Covid-19 happened, a paradigm shift that no one anticipated. Coworking spaces were under partial lockdown and will return to a socially-distant new normal. Events business have had to gone virtual and there is a plethora of free and paid offerings from across the world, now competing for our attention. I’ve been doing virtual coffees with dozens of lot of community leaders, event organizers, accelerator managers in Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, New Zealand and everyone had the same question in mind: whether they should remain in this career or that they should pivot out of the industry? Could people really make money in this space?
This morning I sat wondering, what lessons did I learned from the past 10 years in this business that will help guide me in the next decade? Inspired by the blog post from a long time friend, Managing Partner at Tau Ventures Amit Garg’s blog post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-found-startup-during-crisis-4-key-reasons-amit-garg/ I was compelled to write on for ecosystem builders.
It’s just like 2008, 2011, 2014, all over again
Whether it is the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, Massive floodings in Bangkok in 2011 or the Military Coup in 2014, Thai people are more used to and resilient. I think my Asian brothers and sisters will agree, we go through a lot of crises on a regular basis. But according to Kelly Bartog ‘s recent article about companies started during a recession, some of the biggest household names were launched during a recession:
Amit also reminds us that there are other legendary companies that were started during the backdrop: Apple, Google, Salesforce, Facebook, Netflix, Airbnb. HUBBA was started in the October 2011 floods. So what does that mean to Ecosystem builders? It could very well mean that the pivotal, tent pole tech company that your company was waiting for might yet be soon to arrive and you could have a hand in building it. Everywhere I go and to whoever I talk, there is a problem without a satisfactory solution. Schools delivering classes on LINE and Whatsapp sending short clips and PDFs. Corporates going remote but still asking accounting staff to come to the office. Delivery companies responsible for a 15% increase in disposable plastic consumption in Thailand despite banning single use plastics in retail malls and women being disproportionally affected by Covid-19 lockdowns.
Long-Term Promise of Community never changed
The vision of creating a safe, fun, collaborative community with likeminded people across the world never changes — but some fundamental assumptions and dogmas and been shattered. In our arduous fundraising journey earlier in 2019, we often faced the unanswerable elephant in the room about: “How can you compete with WeWork?” As we worked on products and services to digitize our community and put it online (and tried and failed many times), investors ask: “Who would pay for your webinar/online content/access to your community?” Rightly and wrongly, no one could predict the future and a lot of our investors and even well intentioned mentors got it wrong.
These tech that were readily available and unloved soon became indispensible, spread by the fear of death and disease. SARS gave Alibaba the big lift, Zoom is now the world’s social network and as Amit pointed out, fintech like Stripe and Square got started in 2009 (and this time around, touchless payments, going cashless and e-wallets finally make sense!). Many companies will pivot to bring cash at the door, to keep communities engaged, to take their accelerator and training program virtual like The Founder Square by HUBBA. But the long term promise of making a better Linkedin, a better recruitment platform, a better way to network, a conference experience that is safe but also doesn’t give you fatigue is still unsolved.
Talent = Growth
When we hosted Startup Battleground powered by DEPA X HUBBA X Techstars in 2018, we hustled hard to get 1,000 people inside the main halls at Impact Area. Last month, for Startup Weekend: Unite to Fight Covid-19 Edition, over 10,000 people showed up virtually to participate. The energy across all the Discord groups were buzzing, as different teams from Taiwan, Malaysia, Australia and Thailand where I facilitated and mentored worked even harder than in our physical events to be crowned a winner (Our winner, Rod Gub Khao, and Uber for grocery trucks plying the city streets had paying customers and made 20,000 baht by the end of the weekend). With so many people laid off, furloughed, on Work from Home or asked to leave without pay, the key resource for growth, people, is now being redistributed across different projects and ideas. As Amit mentioned, Google’s success is that they attracted world-class engineers post-2001 that a startup of their size would not have been able to afford during the peak. How can these unemployed or underemployed talent find their next opportunity? This is the job of a community builder and a chance for all of us to design better upskilling/reskilling programs, to make knowledge sharing reach widers than the confines of our coworking spaces and event halls and really help people who need help the most. (Here’s a list of great job sites in Thailand for you to find your next opportunity)
The ultimate stress your community‘s culture
Culture in a community starts with the core team, it could be the management of the leadership, it could be the active members and mentors in the network and other contributor that want to see a network succeed. So the ultimate test in this crisis is whether people will band together like in the ‘Band of Brothers’ or lynch each other in the mutiny of ‘Night’s Watch’? Rather than resort to throwing the people that care the most about your community under the bus like President Trump, ignoring what makes you strong like your culture and brand and resorting to knee-jerk reactions like and not engaging with your community, it’s time to bring everyone together to turn the ship around, all hands on deck. This is the time where Paypal Mafias are built, where groups of comrades survived the dotcom bust arms in arms to supported each other, throught the thick and thin, and then to go on building the Tesla to LinkedIn to Yelp.
Survival of the Most Adaptive
10 years, and a beautiful mansion has served as the Hewlett Packard and the Apple garage of the Thai startup ecosystem. But are we so focused on our past successes as mentioned above that we cannot see into the future. As Amit mentioned in his blog post, “In 1997 Apple had an internal crisis, namely 90 days from being bankrupt. Steve Jobs came back, signed an agreement with arch-enemy Microsoft, the rest (iPods, iTunes, iPads and iPhones on the road to $1T) is history.” I don’t for a second want to compare myself or anyone in the world to be the next Steve Jobs, but just remember that the God of Innovation himself has failed miserably, got kicked out of his company, came up with some pretty rad ideas, reinvented himself and Apple to be the most valuable company in the world, don’t count anyone out. Not your members, not the travel tech and retail tech startups that are at their wits end, not even the community leaders that no longer have a space, a program, a conference to run. Because this crisis might be the wake up call for all of us to reinvent the way we serve our members, and provided them with a superior value that is accessible anytime, anywhere and in the format that they need the most.
JFDI and find the team that helps brings out the best in you
The tools that we have today are limitless. Medium to craft this blog in 20 minutes, Anchor.fm for podcasts, and Zoom to start a live broadcast. The tools to our community and ecosystem building craft has never been more accessible but yet many of us feel like we need a professional videographer, that we need an office building to feel legitimate or that we don’t know enough about coding or design to DIY. Guess what, my biggest advice to you is JFDI (Just F*cking do It!) and start. Our first conference in HUBBA is 160 people for a meetup, and every year it has doubled in size since. And as I wrapped up my tenure in June 2019 at the height of Techsauce Global Summit (which is now going Virtual in June 19–20, 2020 by the way), I have come to realize that the difference between taking a crappy idea like turning a house in the middle of nowhere where there aren’t that many startups to being with to become a ecosystem and innovation powerhouse is all due to the love, believe and support of those people around me. So my advice to you is if you are feeling down, like you haven’t accomplished anything, or that you’re not making enough money, talk to the people who benefitted from your work and they will tell you how you changed your life and how far you have come. And that’s when you know that what you do is actually meaningful.
