Startup Weekend Community Leaders Recap
Startup Weekend is a global phenomenon. These 48 hour startup sprints have provided an easy entry point into the startup world for hundreds of thousands of people and birthed countless companies, including the likes of Launchrock and Zapier. It’s a tried and true way to facilitate the startup method of problem solving.
At Startup Colorado, we wondered…
What if we apply the Startup Weekend format to the problems we face as Colorado’s small startup communities?
Having spent the last six months learning about the issues our micro-startup communities are facing, it only made sense that we take a startup approach to solving them. Why not let our entrepreneurs and community leaders come up with the solutions and test them?
Here’s what we learned:
Whether you’re building software, gadgets, or startup communities, the customers know best.
We have a spreadsheet full of scores from twelve different communities across five different categories (density, talent, capital, culture, and local gov’t) that guide our efforts and measure progress. These sixty metrics are the result of months traveling across the state, meeting with entrepreneurs, investors, and every other stakeholder imaginable, trying to understand the problems entrepreneurs face in their hometowns. While we’re proud of this grassroots approach and excited by the many Startup Colorado initiatives it has prompted, this weekend showed us that the leaders on the ground are chock-full of great solutions.
A few sample ideas:
- A traveling bus to provide startup resources to isolated rural towns
- A podcast to tell the stories of Rural Colorado Entrepreneurship
- A shared community real estate investment trust
- An alternative finance funding guide
One or two people can make a big difference in their startup community
Most startup community solutions need people, food, facilitators, chairs, and flyers as opposed to the lines of code, plastic molds, or millions of data records that a modern startup might require. When the market you’re serving is your community and the inputs are that simple, one or two people can make astounding progress in a short amount of time.
Effective community leaders are driven by action and comfortable learning and iterating in front of the community they serve.
Come Sunday afternoon, after a fun weekend of collaborating over our small town startup struggles, it was time to pick a winner. Rather than a panel of startup experts, we elected to let our participants (the real experts, anyways) choose the winner. We gave everyone three sticky notes to vote…
…and the winner of the first ever Startup Weekend Community Leaders is…
Vail Innovation Hub
Made up of two Vail locals, two Denverites, and a Telluridian, this team spent the weekend focusing on how to engage innovative Front Range companies with their local startup community.
What if Slack, Zayo, or Google sent a team up the mountains for a remote work retreat? And what if the local towns welcomed them with a great space to work out of and a shared mountain experience? And helped plug these guests into the local entrepreneurial culture? What might come out of those collisions?
Within a weekend, their group had met with municipal leaders, generated interest from large Denver companies, and sourced a few locations to house the retreat. Startup Colorado will be backing this novel solution to connect the companies of the Front Range with the innovative community of the Eagle River Valley. We look forward to seeing it come to fruition, and watching the team learn and iterate from there!
All in all, this experimental format for a Startup Weekend was a great success. We were blown away by the ideas and level of engagement we witnessed and plan on continuing to improve upon it for next year!
Let’s Work Together
If you would like to host a Startup Weekend Community Leaders event, reach out! In addition to the support provided by Techstars, we are happy to share our learnings.
If you have a community initiative that you’re looking to test in your community, let us know. We’re here to support you.
