Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

PLAYING A ZERO-SUM GAME

Once members of the startup community realize that geographic borders are artificial, they often fall into the trap of playing a zero-sum game, where they win at the expense of the neighboring startup community. “Our community is better than yours” starts popping up. Government initiatives to recruit startups from other states appear. Major branding initiatives around demonstrating that “we are the best startup community” emerge. Resistance appears when there is an opportunity to collaborate across geographies.

This is dumb. As a society, we are far from the saturation point in terms of entrepreneurship. Although there is not an infinite capacity for it, playing a zero-sum game, especially within neighboring geographies, simply stifles the growth of the startup ecosystem. Instead, take a network approach and connect your startup community with neighboring ones.

This is the approach we have taken with Startup Colorado. The north-south highway connecting the state is I-25. There are four major cities within two hours of each other—from north to south we have Fort Collins, Boulder, Denver, and Colorado Springs. Although Boulder is the smallest, it has the most robust startup community. Yet each of the other three cities has incredible inherent resources for entrepreneurship, many of which are different from but complementary to those in Boulder. In the first year of Startup Colorado, one of our initiatives was to export some of the activities in Boulder to ...