Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

ACTION VERSUS POLICY

Entrepreneurs are hard wired to take action; government leaders focus on creating policy. Once again, there is a fundamental disconnect in language that can simultaneously consume an enormous amount of energy and make entrepreneurial leaders insanely frustrated.

I’ve been in numerous meetings with government leaders and their staffers talking about a particular issue relevant to entrepreneurship. In these meetings, I talk directly to the government leader, who engages charismatically and thoughtfully about the issue. Sometimes these conversations are robust and detailed; often they are 15-minute-long collections of talking points interspersed with niceties. After the government leader drops off the call or leaves the room, the real discussion with the staffers begin. Policy question after policy question gets asked. “How will this impact that?” “Why would this person over here, who clearly has a different agenda, support this?” “Could we add this language into what you are saying so there’s a compromise?” “I’m not sure we can take this position because we need the support of so and so on something else.”

In many cases, these conversations lead nowhere. In situations in which you have a strong, thoughtful leader like the current Colorado Senators Udall and Bennett, or a previously successful entrepreneur in Congress like Jared Polis, you end up with substance around entrepreneurship policy that can translate into action. Often, however, you just end up bogged ...