Startup Communities, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER SEVENACTIVITIES AND EVENTS

Up to this point I've been giving you a framework and talking in abstractions about how to create a great startup community. In this chapter, we shift to some specific examples of things various leaders in Boulder took on, got going, and turned into fundamental components of our startup community. The impact of each one varies, and individually you might not view any of them as a particularly huge endeavor, but collectively they provide a powerful base that our startup community is built on.

In each section, I'll provide a brief introduction, and then you can read, in the leader's words as of 2012, about how the initiative came about. The initiatives are roughly in the order they were created, to give you a sense of how they build on each other while being individually created and led. I'll then have a brief summary of what is going on with the initiative today, in 2020.

YOUNG ENTREPRENEURS ORGANIZATION

When I first moved to Boulder in 1995, the only person I knew was Verne Harnish. Verne was the founder of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization (YEO) that he'd started in the late 1980s. YEO was a membership‐based organization for entrepreneurs of companies under the age of 40 (now 50), who had founded companies with over $1 million in annual revenue.

I joined YEO in 1990 after attending the first Birthing of Giants event, which was sponsored by YEO, Inc. magazine, and MIT Enterprise Forum. That first class included a number of amazing people, ...