I love the concept of Binary Stars. Ian (my co-author) and I are using it in our upcoming book The Startup Community Way which should be out in the second half of 2019.

Amy gave me a New Yorker article titled Binary Stars: The Friendship That Made Google Huge. It’s the story of the partnership between Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat whose pair programming approach in the early 2000s changed the course of the Google and the Internet.

It’s a magnificent and delightful story. If you are a programmer, engineer, creator of any kind, or are interested in Google history, you’ll love it.

If, like me, you alternate between solo efforts and partnerships, it’s also wonderful.

Some of my best work has been done with a partner. While what I’ve done with Amy is the most visible example of this, collaborations with Dave Jilk, Jason Mendelson, David Cohen, Lucy Sanders, and many others come to mind. And, most recently, I’m excited about my work with Ian Hathaway.

Binary Stars can be magical, and not just in space.

I had dinner with Ian Hathaway a few weeks ago when I was in London. It was a delight to see him in person. While we’ve been collaborating on Startup Communities 2 (which we are now calling The Startup Community Way), which will come out at the “end-of-the-year-ish,” having dinner was a delight and reminded me how much I like him.

A few months ago he wrote a post on Waterloo, and activity in Canada in general, titled The North Star. It’s a good post worth reading but reminded me of a concept that we are weaving into The Startup Community Way.

There is an increasing number of “binary star” startup communities. If you aren’t familiar with binary stars, they are a system of two stars in which one star revolves around the other or both revolve around a common center.

Boulder and Denver is a canonical example of this, where each city has developed a strong startup community, but the relationship between the two makes each stronger as they grow and develop.

Other examples that I’m familiar with that jump out at me include:

• Toronto – Waterloo
• Detroit – Ann Arbor
• Provo – Salt Lake City
• Cleveland – Akron
• Brisbane – Ipswich
• Wellington – Auckland
• Vancouver – Victoria
• Tampa Bay – St Petersburg

If you know of other binary star startup communities, especially if you are a participant in one, leave a note in the comments.