Startup Communities

Back when the pandemic hit, Chris Heivly spearheaded a podcast with Ian Hathaway and me in support of our upcoming two books, The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem and Build The Fort: The Startup Community Builder’s Field Guide . We did eight episodes of a solid but complicated-to-produce series. Chris is now spearheading a Season 2 podcast series with Techstars, mirroring a format pioneered by Seth Godin, who was a recent guest on our GiveFirst podcast. ...

As I wander around Seattle for a few days, including a fun event with JP Morgan in the morning and PSL at the end of the day, I’ve been pondering the evolution of startup communities. I first started coming to Seattle in 1990 and wrote a post seven years ago about it – Hanging Out In Pioneer Square . Last night, while sitting with Greg and Shannon Gottesman, overlooking Lake Washington, I relaxed into a wonderful feeling of topophilia . ...

January 3, 2020, seems like a very long time ago. That day, I wrote a post titled The Future Of Work Is Distributed . I had no idea that four months later, all office workers in the world would be working from home, and within six months, the idea of distributed and remote work would be a topic discussed daily. When the Federal tax laws were changed in 2018 to eliminate the deductibility of state income tax, I made the assertion, in the context of Startup Communities, that this would cause movement of people and companies across state lines, as this now created another layer of competitive advantage for states with no income tax. I remember most people waving this off, especially those living in high tax states like CA and NY. ...

The audiobooks for The Startup Community Way and Startup Communities, 2e are both available. I’ve gotten this request from many people, so I’m glad they are finally out. If you are an Audible listener, you can get them at: The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, 2nd Edition The Audiobook.com versions are available at: The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem ...

My new book with Ian Hathaway, The Startup Community Way, is officially out. When I saw the Kindle download first thing this morning, I felt a moment of unbridled joy. Writing a book is extremely hard. I’ve now written seven of them, all about startups and entrepreneurship. My next one, which I’ve been working on for a year with Dave Jilk (my first business partner), combined entrepreneurship and philosophy. Well, Dave’s been working on it a lot more than I have – I’ve been the slacker in this particular effort. But now that The Startup Community Way is out, and the 2nd Edition of Startup Communities is also out, I’m hopeful that my writing energy will shift to the book I’m working on with Dave. ...

Tim Ferriss did one of his very long-form (150 minutes) podcast with me last week. I met Tim for the first time in 2007 and we’ve been friends since, although we’ve spent relatively little time together in person. Like many of my friends, I have a very comfortable remote relationship that has a lot of emotional intimacy in it. While many humans find this difficult, I never have and enjoy it a lot. ...

My new book with Ian Hathaway, The Startup Community Way , comes out on 7/28. We’ve begun the pre-order campaign. Since every author loves pre-orders, so if you want to do something that will make me smile today, pre-order your copy here. To give you a sense of the book, following is the Table of Contents, in detail. CHAPTER ONE: Introduction – The Next Generation – Our Approach – A Deeper Motivation – The Boulder Thesis – Startup Communities are Complex Adaptive Systems – Where We Were in 2012 – Where We are Now in 2020 – Using Complexity Theory to Explain Startup Communities – Evolving the Boulder Thesis to the Startup Community Way ...

As I caught up this morning on the posts in my new Startup Community community (over 1,000 people have already joined – that was a pleasant surprise – click here to join us ) I noticed one from a member from a founder in Adelaide. It was in response to a prompt from Tom Higley to kick off the Complex Systems topic discussion. The response (one of many) was: ...

My new book The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem is coming out this month (pre-order it here .) At the same time, the 2nd edition of my book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City is also coming out (pre-order it here .) Ever since I started thinking, writing, and talking about startup communities, I’ve always wished there was a global virtual community for anyone interested or involved in startup communities. While there have been some efforts by others over the years, nothing has ever seemed to gain critical mass, really stick, be inclusive of anyone who wants to be involved, and be useful over the long term. ...

A major incident has been declared in Bournemouth as crowds flock to the beach. Finnbarr Webster/Getty Images My first reaction to this photo was “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me.” My next reaction was the title of this post, “Humans Just Don’t Understand Complex Systems.” The Covid crisis is a complex system. I’ve had my head deep in complex systems for the past year as I worked with Ian Hathaway on our new book The Startup Community Way. We never anticipated that the framework we used for the book around complex systems would broadly apply to the world beyond startup communities, but we find ourselves in the middle of a moment where, as a species, our lack of ability to understand how complex systems work is causing accelerating misery all over the world. ...