Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

PLAY A NON-ZERO-SUM GAME

Many people approach business as a zero-sum game: There are winners and losers. This is stupid and counterproductive in the context of a startup community. Startup communities are often a tiny fraction of what they could ultimately become. As a result, there is a huge amount of untapped opportunity. Approaching it as a non-zero-sum game is much more powerful.

For starters, fully embrace the notion of increasing returns. The goal of everyone in the startup community should be to create something that is durable for a very long time. Although ups and downs with individual companies will always happen, view the startup community as a whole entity. If there is more startup activity, this will generate more attention to the startup community, which will generate even more activity.

View the percentage of your local economy that the startup community contributes as its market share. If the macro environment gets better, so will the overall dynamic of the startup community. The macro cycles are unpredictable, but these up-and-down swings will likely only have impact on the overall macro. During downturns, there are actually opportunities for the startup community to gain market share of the local economy.

We’ve seen this aggressively play out in the most recent economic cycle. Although the global financial downturn that started in 2008 has continued to cast a dark cloud over world economies, startup communities in the United States and throughout the world have ...