Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

BE OPEN TO ANY IDEA

I’ll try anything once, as long as it’s not illegal. I’m curious and I’ve found that the best way to learn things is to try things. Trying things and running experiments is a corollary to being open to any idea and has become well understood throughout the entrepreneurial ecosystem, especially in tech, as a methodology called the Lean Startup that has been popularized by Eric Ries.

In a hierarchy, when someone suggests something, the immediate reaction is to start asking questions and try to figure out why it won’t work. In a network, the opposite approach often happens. When someone suggests something, just respond with, “Awesome—go do it.” They either will or they won’t. You’ll recognize this as being similar to the approach of giving people assignments. You get a natural filtering process. If someone doesn’t move forward with an idea, no time was wasted. If they do, then the results appear and often more people get involved.

Part of trying something is to understand how to fail fast. If you try something and it doesn’t work, being able to either pivot based on the learning or call it quits and stop wasting time and energy on something that isn’t working is key. However, if you don’t try, you won’t have the data to know whether something is working.