TechStars’ Katie Rae On What Drives An Entrepreneurial Community

Entrepreneurial and startup communities are growing everywhere across the United States. The recent everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference event highlighted entrepreneurial communities “everywhere else” outside the major hubs like Silicon Valley and New York.

We’ve recently started up our “Sneaker Strapped Nationwide Startup Road Trip Part Deux”. During our first journey, that started at SXSW 2012, we visited over 60 startup communities across the country. Since going back on the road we’ve visited Atlanta for Startup Georgia’s kick-off, Nashville for Spark Nashville and Arkansas for Think Big Arkansas and the kickoff of Startup Arkansas.

Last month, Katie Rae, the Managing Director at TechStars Boston, spoke at Grid New Haven. Gris is a hub or startup community catalyst, that’s part of Connecticut’s “innovation ecosystem.” They hold several programs including CEO Boot Camp, Startup Weekend New Haven, Launch New Haven and several speaker sessions designed to help entrepreneurs on their journey.

On January 24th Rae spoke at Grid New Haven and offered what she thinks are the four backbones to a great entrepreneurial community. In addition to being the managing director at TechStars Boston (one of their most successful accelerators) she is also a founder of Project 11 a firm that invests in and helps early stage startups.

Check out her video below and add these things to your list of important things for startup communities.

See Startup Community Activist, and Startup America CEO Scott Case on the importance of Startup Marketing here.

Scott Case: “If You Build It They Will Come, BULL SH!T”

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Scott Case, CEO of Startup America addresses the audience at Think Big Arkansas, Startup Arkansas Kick Off (photo: NMI 2013)

If you’ve ever heard Scott Case, the CEO of Startup America and founding CTO of priceline.com speak than you are very familiar with the subject of the headline. Case often talks about the movie Field of Dreams and it’s most popular line, “If you build it they will come.”

A lot of startup founders have the same philosophy, they think that no matter what they do as long as they build it people will come. It goes along the same lines as growing organically, or magically.

Sure there are huge grand slams every now and then but most of them either come from founders with long pedigrees in startups or because they caught the backing of name brand venture capitalists and angel investors early on. For others, gaining traction requires marketing. For bootstrapped (or sneaker strapped) startups that often times means grass roots marketing, crowdfunding, and good ole donations.

When speaking, Case follows the Field of Dreams example with, “if you market it they will come” a valuable lesson.

In the video below he talks about his first big venture into entrepreneurship. He built a product in 1994 that was packaged software and still available to this day. He talks about buying a full page advertisement in the biggest industry publication for his product. The problem though, the phone never rang. That’s when he set out to learn marketing.

This is a valuable lesson for all startup founders and the video is worth watching. Case was delivering the keynote at the recent Think Big Arkansas event in Conway Arkansas, a similar message to the one he delivered the week before that in Atlanta and the week before that in Memphis at everywhereelse.co The Startup Conference.

In talking with Case we discussed “canned speeches” and how I’ve personally seen Case speak over 30 times in the last year. The thing about him though, is that he doesn’t do the same canned speech at every event, but he often resorts to the Field of Dreams story, because it’s not a valuable lesson, but the most valuable lesson.

Now go watch this hilarious video from the Startup Arkansas kick off.

We’re on the sneaker strapped nationwide startup roadtrip part deux, find out how you can help here

Arkansas Thinks Big Everywhere Else

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Lee Watson organizer of Think Big Arkansas and Startup Arkansas (photo: NMI 2013)

Hendrix College in Conway Arkansas was bursting at the seams with young entrepreneurs and seasoned corporate executives. They’ve come together this morning to celebrate the kick off of Startup Arkansas and to Think Big Arkansas.

Event organizer, Lee Watson, did a great job of bringing startup community leaders from the entire state in to Conway for this event.

Scott Case the CEO of Startup America and founding CTO of Priceline will be keynoting today. Brad Feld, the author of Startup Communities should be at the event in the evening as well.

The morning session kicked off with entrepreneurs and event organizers from

Mike Smith, Innovate Arkansas (photo: NMI 2013)

organizations like BarCampConway, Startup Weekend, Innovate Arkansas, Ark Challenge, Made By Few and many others, to talk about what’s going on with their organization and how to bridge it all together in one cohesive unit.

In a pre-event dinner Thursday night Startup Arkansas Regional Champion Luke Coleman reached out to myself and Scott Case to address the problem that there are “cliques” in each part of Arkansas. Noooooo I had never heard of that before????

Case was able to give him some great advice which was summed up as “do you want the good news or the bad news first”, of course Coleman elected to take the bad news first which was “every region in Startup America has been in that same spot”, the good news? “Every region in Startup America has been in that same spot”.

Tennessee is no stranger to where Coleman sees a huge opportunity for growth, however in Tennessee we’ve done a great job of overcoming our hyper local focus and celebrating the victories in each of the 9 accelerator regions. It’s not uncommon to see a van or bus ful of Memphians at a Nashville or Chattanooga startup event, and vice versa.

Friday morning the parallels continued, confirming the main theme of the recent everywhereelse conference, startups and startup communities everywhere else have commonalities in problems and growth areas.

At the beginning of the event Arkansas Regional Champions Dave Moody, along with Coleman, brought 5 attendees up to the mic to share their ideas for a better community.

Abbey Keever with RedClay echoed one of Scott Case’s favorite themes,which was don’t try to be the next Silicon Valley. Keever, an experienced business woman and the fearless leader at RedClay, said she would love to see Arkansas expand in startups in their biggest areas, of course retail (Walmart) and logistics (Walmart and JB Hunt).

Most every startup community we’ve seen is starting to get their patriarch companies or at least their industries intertwined in the growth of the community.

Other ideas included keeping the dialoge open and holding vertical specific summits to give entrepreneurs access to closer related resources.

If you haven’t seen this amazing video from Thursday night, Go here now!

Nashville Entrepreneurs Share Their Dumbest Decisions Ever

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Nick Holland (L) and Marcus Whitney (R) talk about the dumbest thing they’ve ever done (photo: NMI 2013)

Failure and dumb decisions are part of every true entrepreneurs life. If an entrepreneur goes through life without any failures, anyone telling them their babies are ugly and any dumb decisions, they’re doing it wrong.

Thursday night at 3rd and Lindsley in Nasvhille as part of Southern Alpha’s Spark Nashville event, seasoned local entrepreneurs Nick Holland (CentreSource/Populr.me) and Marcus Whitney (CTO at MoonToast), shared their dumbest decisions.

Both guests looked surprised when Southern Alpha Editor In Chief Walker Duncan asked them to share their dumbest decisions, but the surprise on their face made everyone quickly realize that they were going to actually share their dumbest decisions.

Holland’s centers around his days growing CentreSource. He had a bunch of developers sitting around on the payroll and needed something to do. Holland wanted it to be something creative and something that could make them some money so he had the developers re-do any Nashville website they wanted. The hope was that the businesses who owned the sites they chose would throw money at CentreSource for the new design. What really happened made for a great story.

Whitney’s dumb decision is one that has been a source of constant debate the last four years I’ve personally attended SXSW (3 as Thedroidguy 1 with nibletz). I can only hope that startups out there heed Whitney’s advice, unfortunately with SXSW two weeks away, there’s going to be quite a few startups in Whitney’s shoes come March 12th.

Check out the video for some entertaining and enlightening stories.

2 Of Nashville’s Startup Community Leaders Talk About The Yes Mentality

Spark Nashville,Marcus Whitney,Nick Holland,SouthernAlpha,Startup Communities

Southern Alpha’s Editor In Chief Walker Duncan (L), Nick Holland CEO of Populr.me, Marcus Whitney CTO Moontoast (photo: NMI 2013)

Thursday night was a big night for Nashville’s startup community. New online publication Southern Alpha, which covers high growth technology for the south east, held their inaugural Spark Nashville event. The event organized by Southern Alpha Marketing Director, Kelley Boothe and Editor in Chief, Walker Duncan, was a huge success.

Spark Nashville consisted of three main parts, a fire side chat with Duncan, a pitch contest for Tennessee startups and time for networking in a startup exhibition.

For this first event, Duncan had a fireside chat with community leaders Nick Holland and Marcus Whitney. Both men are seasoned entrepreneurs who’ve had measurable success with their own startups to date.

Holland was the founder of what is now one of the biggest agencies in Nashville CentreSource and Whitney began his career with Emma and eventually spun off and cofounded MoonToast, a social agency that has clients as big as Universal Music Group. Whitney was named the CTO of the year this year by the Nashville Technology Council.

Duncan had come up with some great questions for both guests who are now frequent mentors and advisors to budding young startups in the Nashville community. Holland has an open door policy with all entrepreneurs, a recognizable figure that stops and chats with anyone with an idea. Whitney is a managing director at JumpStart Foundry and a regular, accessible face at community events, as well as at the Entrepreneur Center.

While both guests talked about the struggle and how hard it is to start your own business, they also both talked about the importance of peer groups and finding people to say yes. Sure every entrepreneur wants to find the people that say yes, “yes we’ll write you a check”, “yes your idea is great”, “Yes we can sponsor you”. As you’ll see in the video it’s actually an important foundation in a successful startup community.

Both Holland and Whitney acknowledged that once you go out and prove yourself, roll up your sleeves and prove you’re not afraid to work hard, and not afraid to try, the yes’s get easier.

Holland likes to steer clear of negativity and people who resort to no rather than to hear an idea out. When someone pitches Holland on an idea for a project or an event, if he can wrap his head around it he’s looking for ways to say yes and get it moving rather than to say no. “When I get inspired by somebody it’s infectious and I do whatever I can to say yes”.

Early on in the video Whitney talks about his first experience pitching Holland. Nick had already had some success with CenterSource and Whitney was about to embark on the first BarCamp event, he went to Holland for $1,000 to sponsor. Whitney was a scrappy young and hungry entrepreneur with a great idea, and Holland said yes.

The duo have worked together to help bring Startup Weekend to Nashville as well. They also both support just about any cause or event that’s good for the startup community. When startup community leaders are this supportive it is infectious and the community builds.. wait for it.. organically.

Watch the video below:

Jacksonville Startup Weekend Entrepreneur Has Domain Name Ripped Off

Jacksonville just recently held a Startup Weekend event. The event, like most Startup Weekends, brought hordes of entrepreneurs, hackers, developers and designers together under one roof to build companies over a 54 hour period.

Jennifer Chapman, was one of those entrepreneurs.

She had an idea called “Pinstitute” an online education platform taking the concepts behind sites like Skillshare and applying them to Pinterest. Basically, a platform to buy and sell online classes to make the cool stuff you see on Pinterest.

“I’m relieved, I’m excited, I’m a little anxious that I’m about to take on this amazing new venture,” Chapman said after her first-place win reports the Jacksonville Business Journal. “This is amazing, it’s been an awesome experience.”

Co-founder of Banyan, and new Chattanooga resident, Toni Gemayel, was one of the judges for the Jacksonville event, giving some great advice to Chapman, “Don’t let anyone leave here with your idea”.

Unfortunately that’s what somebody did. Chapman couldn’t afford the $3800 for the premium Pinstitute domain name, and by the end of Startup Weekend, someone at the event had shelled out the money for it, someone not on her team.

“That was disappointing to hear that somebody would do that,” said Todd Smith, one of the event’s five judges. “At the end of the day, it’s the person with the vision and the execution who is the real entrepreneur.”

In the end it looks like Chapman will move forward with the idea, perhaps under a different domain. File this one under total douchebag.