Introducing Venture Town Hall
A hometown is a special thing. It’s not just a place you live, or grow up in. It’s a living part of your identity — whose landscape, people, and culture combine to create something larger than their parts. The places we choose to call home are sacred.
They’re also not immune to change. Whether its technology, climate, economies, laws, or culture, the ripples created by change can be tsunamis to a small community. Nonetheless, change is constant. The small communities we choose to call home must adapt to change, in order to retain their sacred identity.
Last spring, my partners Cory, Fletcher, and I decided to formalize a few passions of ours:
- Fund amazing entrepreneurs
- Create stellar returns for our investors
- Be a positive steward for venture in the communities we love
The first two were market opportunities we recognized and understood. The third was more of a hunch — like a wise man feeling the coming storm in his bones. Three fourths of our team is from Colorado’s Western Slope; all four of us are from small towns. And all four of us believed that venture could do amazing things for the communities we treasure. But before we could be stewards of venture, we had to learn:
- What were community leaders already doing?
- What could we do to help them?
So starting last September, I embarked on a customer research journey, meeting with the forward-thinking citizens who had already taken the idea of venture and their favorite small town, and put them to work.
These were entrepreneurs and community leaders across Western Colorado who were hustling for this shared goal, and willing to meet, often over nothing more than a cold email. All across Colorado, coffee with a stranger yielded rich conversations, often blowing pass the time I had allotted in my calendar invite. Small town venture was a force to be reckoned with, yielded by a small army of impressive individuals.
However, each town, and each meeting, revealed a totally different approach to building this new economy in their respective location. In fact, the big takeaway from this customer research journey was the diversity of solutions. Some of the local initiatives I encountered:
- Bringing together local remote workers
- Leveraging the “second-home” population as venture mentors
- Accelerators to attract and build new startups
- Coworking and incubator spaces bridging the community and local university
- Events of all kinds — pitches, meetups, and more.
Every single community I visited had a different approach for cracking the venture nut.
So where does that leave us — Kokopelli Capital — self-proclaimed positive stewards of venture?
Our opportunity arises from this diversity in ideas. While the solutions are brilliant and many, and each community is unique and often requires a unique solution…
We can improve the cross-collaboration between small communities and their respective venture initiatives.
That’s not to say there isn’t already cross-collaboration — quite the opposite — there are a lot of players doing great things to solve this. This week brings a shining example, with the Mountain Ventures Summit, hosted by Telluride Venture Accelerator. On top of that, the Fuse Summit, a conference for business strategy in Western colorado, comes two weeks from now. Events like these are the backbone of innovative community building. We at Kokopelli Capital would like to provide a place to continue these discussions, year-round and slightly easier to attend.
Introducing Venture Town Hall
Venture Town Hall is a place for anyone to publish their account of small community venture. Kokopelli Capital may be the host, and provide some authorship, but there are countless leaders and doers in their respective communities whose perspectives should be shared.
Every town is different, but the goal of a healthy economy, built to improve the life of its citizens, is common. It turns out, there are countless approaches to crack the venture nut for our small communities. Venture Town Hall serves to speed up this process by helping our respective communities learn from each other.
Ways to Engage with Venture Town Hall
- Comment — What do you think of the post you just read? Does it resonate or sound bogus? More discussion the better. Make a Medium account (painless), and start the discussion.
- Author — Is there a discussion we should be having? What are your community’s unique problems and solutions? Maybe someone else is working on them. Write up your perspective from your hometown. Email me (jamie@kokopelli.vc), and I’ll happily post it for all to see.
- Connect — Want to learn more from someone? See an opportunity to collaborate offline? Reach out, and make yourself available, for offline discussion and collaboration.
- Share — The more people, the more ideas, the more events, the more effective we will learn. If you know anyone trying to steward venture in their community, we want to hear their perspective. You can also share with your followers by clicking here.
This platform belongs to the do-ers in our communities — the ones who see their success as their communities’ success. Let’s help each other build the venture economies that suit the places we call home.
Jamie Finney, General Partner @ Kokopelli Capital
PS — This journey is by no means complete, or limited to Colorado. Venture Town Hall is meant to include ALL small communities. Please email me (jamie@kokopelli.vc) to add your community to the conversation.
