Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

HAVE POROUS BOUNDARIES

The best startup communities have porous boundaries. It’s acceptable for people to flow from one company to another. Leaders talk to each other and share strategies, relationships, ideas, and resources. When someone leaves one company for another, they aren’t shunned. When someone moves to town, they are welcomed. When someone leaves town, they are missed, and celebrated every time they come through for a visit.

Although some communities have factions, over time the short-term benefit of the factions are often outweighed by porous boundaries. If you study places like Silicon Valley, you see a continual shift of people from one subset of the community to another, and, for some reason, these subsets have come to be called “mafias.” At moments in time you might have a Yahoo! mafia, PayPal mafia, a Google mafia, or a Facebook mafia. Although the members of each mafia share a common set of experiences, they also co-mingle as new companies are created and subsequently acquired by other companies. Although the personal relationships may have short-term complexities, the participants who take a longer view, who embrace their specific mafia, but also encourage and participate in porous boundaries between these mafias, end up playing the best long-term game.

I’ve seen this in action many times. One of my favorite experiences was in the first year of TechStars in 2007. Two of the mentors had been founders of competing companies. Although each company had long since ...