The Startup Community Way

CHAPTER SIXTEENBE ACTIVE, NOT PASSIVE

Startup Community Way Principle

The startup community must have continual activities that meaningfully engage the entire entrepreneurial stack. Constant engagement develops relationships and builds trust across boundaries, creating opportunities for experimentation and learning. Including the whole community in the activity of entrepreneurship provides the basis for diversity to be embraced.

The fourth principle of the Boulder Thesis is that the startup community must have continual activities that engage the entire entrepreneurial stack. This means that infrequent or irregular contacts between startup community participants won't establish meaningful enough connections to drive real change, and that the nature of these events should be active (e.g. hackathons, competitions) rather than passive (e.g. cocktail parties, awards ceremonies). This also means that activities must offer opportunities to engage with the breadth of participants in the startup community.

SELF-SIMILARITY AND REPLICATION

Complex systems exhibit self-similarity by replicating smaller scale patterns into higher-order ones, which occurs when subsystems show similar patterns of behavior as those within a larger system. Consequently, a larger system is the product of an infinite number of more minor interactions that can be understood and influenced by examining and changing the patterns at a smaller scale.¹

Efforts to improve behavior and mindset, even among small ...