Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

BOULDER OPEN COFFEE CLUB

When Jason Mendelson, one of my partners at Foundry Group, moved to Boulder in 2006, he asked me if there was anything obvious he could do to more quickly get plugged into the local startup scene. I suggested he start an Open Coffee Club. I’d heard about Open Coffee Clubs a few months earlier from Saul Klein of Index Partners who had started the first one in London. Jason did a little research on how Saul was doing it, and the result was something pretty awesome. Following is Jason’s story of how the Boulder Open Coffee Club came about.

One activity that helps foster a startup community is a regularly occurring event by the community for community. This is the opposite of large events or special award ceremonies; it’s a small gathering that isn’t special but happens on a regular basis where members of the community interact deeply with one another in an informal setting. Boulder Open Coffee Club is an example of this type of event that we’ve had great success with.

We did not invent the idea of the Open Coffee Club; rather, we got the idea from Saul Klein, who started the first Open Coffee Club in London (http://startuprev.com/b1). We heard about it and decided that we’d try an experiment in Boulder to see if we could generate interest in folks getting around a table and hanging out.

We started very simply. We decided that the club needed to be before work (8 a.m. to 9ish), on a regular schedule (every other Tuesday) and at a local coffee shop.