Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City by Brad Feld

• Evidence suggests that location, rather than being irrelevant, is more important than ever. Innovation tilts heavily toward certain locations.
• Richard Florida - Creative-class individuals want to live in nice places, enjoy a culture with a tolerance for new ideas and weirdness, and - most of all - want to be around other creative class individuals.
• Often the terms advisor and mentor are conflated. An advisor has an economic relationship with the company he is advising, the mentor is helping startups without a clear set of outcome goals or economic rewards.
• Four key attributes to leadership in a startup community:
  • Leaders must be inclusive
  • Must realize they are not playing a zero-sum game
  • Need to be mentorship-driven and recognize the continual power of a mentor-mentee relationship
  • Must embrace porous boundaries
• Mentors never stop teaching, and learning, regardless of the situation
• Giving people assignments works as a tool for figuring out who are doers and who are leaders - Do they actually do the assignment? Do they take it to the next level?
• It’s not that you should fail fast across the entire startup community; instead, you should fail fast on specific initiatives that don’t go anywhere, attract little interest, or generate no impact.
• If failure is not acceptable, bad ideas will perpetuate and people who ultimately decide they aren’t going to spend more time on something destined to fail will withdraw from the community. To be successful, embrace failure as part of the process.
• Entrepreneurs live in networks. Government lives in a hierarchy.
• Build a reputation for trying stuff, collecting data, pivoting, and improving. Over time, that’s much more attractive and impactful than a reputation of being afraid to give it a shot. And it’s much better for the long-term health of the startup community.
• Tips for startup events:
  • Have a topic
  • Good content matters
  • Avoid the filler content
  • Vary the event’s date and time
  • Schedule daytime events
  • Look beyond the local area
• If not us, who? If not now, when?
• Great entrepreneurs are intensely self-aware. They know exactly what they are bad at and describe it often, as in, “This is what I suck at.” Government leaders rarely talk this way. Entrepreneurs fail often and own it; government leaders rationalize why something didn’t go their way. Entrepreneurs are directly critical of themselves and others and support their viewpoints with data. Government leaders work to “impact public opinion.” It’s a different vocabulary and a profoundly different behavior pattern.
• In a networked system, you want to have impact; in a hierarchy, such as government, you want to have control.
• A startup community is a rapidly evolving, ever-changing thing. It doesn’t need a long-term structure; that will emerge from the continually evolving activities of the entrepreneurial leaders. It doesn’t need a hierarchy because it runs on a network model. Most importantly, it doesn’t need any bureaucracy because this just slows down progress and the necessary and continual change that has to happen over a long period of time.
• Part of trying something is to understand how to fail fast. If you try something and it doesn’t work, being able to either pivot based on the learning or call it quits and stop wasting time and energy on something that isn’t working is key. However, if you don’t try, you won’t have the data to know whether something is working.
• Trying to create the next Silicon Valley is a fool’s errand
• Venture capital simply isn’t that important to startups. Less than one in five of the fastest-growing companies in the United States take any venture capital at any point in their history. Less than 0.5 percent of all new businesses in the United States ever raise venture capital...Venture capital, while a wonderful accelerant for some companies, is neither necessary nor sufficient to create startup communities. While most entrepreneurs eventually need risk capital, it will come as a function of the opportunities presented, not before.