Ecosystem

Today, I participated in the Juneteeneth 4.0 Celebration that was hosted by OHUB , ThePlug , and Living Cities and led by Rodney Sampson . In addition to being part of a panel, I made several commitments as part of the #RacialEquityEcosystemPledge . Here’s the fact sheet released by OHUB today. I’ve agreed to: Do a monthly podcast called Equity.District with Rodney on racial equity in entrepreneurial ecosystems and other issues around racial equity in entrepreneurship. Help organize and co-host a Racial Equity conference inclusive of Rodney’s network, my network, and anyone else who wants to participate. Make a meaningful financial contribution to the OHUB Foundation from the Anchor Point Foundation . If you are able, I encourage you to donate as well. Make a meaningful financial contribution to at least two more Black-led ecosystem building organizations recommended by OHUB. Work with Rodney and the OHUB team on an ongoing campaign to raise money for Black ecosystem builders, funds, and founders. The entire event is below. There’s a lot of awesome stuff in it. ...

I participated in a one hour Crowdcast yesterday with Techstars and 43 North about How to Build a Successful Startup Ecosystem in your City. Some of the thoughts from my upcoming book The Startup Community Way are in the hour, along with a bunch of things Techstars is doing around this initiative. powered by Crowdcast If you are in a city somewhere in the world working on developing your Startup Community and are interested in learning about the new Techstars Startup Ecosystem Development product, drop me an email .

Recently my partners and I spent some time discussing three of our recent investments – Spanning , Yesware , and Attachments – which are each applications built on top of Google Apps. Specifically, they are built for Google Apps and available in the Google Apps Marketplace or the Chrome Web Store . Each company is going after something very different. Spanning is all about cloud backup. Attachments is all about getting control of your email attachments. And Yesware is “email for salespeople.” However, they have one very significant thing in common – they are all deeply integrated into Google Apps. In our thematic definition, they are in the Protocol theme. ...