When it comes to fostering high-impact entrepreneurship, there’s a secret ingredient many communities don’t understand or appreciate. It’s not startup capital. It’s not specialized facilities. It’s not any of those higher-profile, sexier aspects of entrepreneurial development.
No, the secret ingredient for building a thriving startup community is making connections.
My two decades in economic development opened my eyes to the importance of making connections for startup founders. Brad Feld — an ecosystem champion in Boulder, Colorado, and co-founder of Techstars — echoes this point in his book “The Startup Community Way.”
“In startup communities,” Feld writes, “many people mistakenly focus on the individual elements rather than on the connections and interactions between them.”
When it comes to connections and interactions, two types come to mind.
- First, it’s critical that communities connect entrepreneurs with specialized startup resources and expertise available to them locally. To do so, entrepreneur support organizations must be experts in the resources available, understand individual founder needs and act as distributors of the region’s resources. Entrepreneurs can be effectively introduced to support resources and startup expertise through programming, ecosystem communications and one-on-one concierge services. This hands-on approach is much more effective than passive online resource guides.
- The second kind of connection needed is between entrepreneurs, themselves. Entrepreneurs typically operate on islands of isolation, left to their own devices to figure out business models, sales processes and such. Yet, all around them are other entrepreneurs who have experience with those matters who are willing to share their insights if given the right channel for doing so. In fact, creating peer connections is the key to developing a thriving startup community, in my opinion, and thus is worthy of community investment.
It’s obvious other aspects of entrepreneur development are sexier than curating connections. But nothing is more important. Now that the secret is out, let’s see who’s listening.
John Moore is a principal with Momenteum Strategies, an Upstate-based consulting firm specializing in helping communities and their economic development organizations build thriving, impactful innovation ecosystems.
