This special live episode features a panel discussion from the Global Entrepreneurship Congress 2025 in Indianapolis, moderated by Alloy Partners’ GM Lesa Mitchell. Join startup community leaders David Cohen (Techstars), Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Ian Hathaway (Far Out Ventures), and Erik Mitisek (Denver Startup Week) as they share actionable insights and proven strategies for building thriving startup ecosystems worldwide.
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Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome everyone to the Advantaged Podcast, brought to you by Alloy Partners. I'm Drew Beechler and I'm excited to bring you a truly special edition of the show today. And so this episode is a departure from our usual format instead of a one-on-one conversation. I. Or a group conversation. We're presenting a live panel discussion recorded at the Global Entrepreneurship Congress that took place on June 3rd, 2025 here in Indianapolis.
Intro: And the panel titled Startup Community Super Builders was moderated by our own general manager, Lesa Mitchell, who has spent years at the forefront of nurturing high growth startup ecosystems.
Intro: Joining Lesa on stage are four remarkable leaders who have shaped the future of starter communities around the world. Many names of which you know, David Cohen, who is the co-founder and CEO of Techstars, the global mentorship driven accelerator that has invested in supported thousands of entrepreneurs worldwide.
Intro: Brad Feld, a partner and founder at Foundry Group, also a co-founder of Techstars and the author of Startup [00:01:00] Communities and many other books whose work has helped to find how we think about entrepreneurial ecosystems. Ian Hathaway, a partner at Far Out vc, an early stage venture investor and co-author of the Startup Community Way with Brad, and he spent years researching and supporting startup communities across the Americas.
Intro: and Eric Mitisek, founder of Denver Startup Week, one of the largest entrepreneurial events in the world and advisor to Techstars with deep experience in building vibrant, inclusive startup communities.
Intro: we captured this conversation in front of a live audience and decided we wanted to release this here on the Advantage Podcast feed so that everyone could benefit from it.
Intro: At Advantage, we believe the unlocking growth and transformation comes from connecting the best ideas, people and organizations. Whether you're a founder, investor, corporate innovator, this episode offers a unique perspective on what it takes to foster thriving startup communities and drive real change.
Intro: settle in and enjoy this special live panel of season two, episode three of the Advantage Podcast.
Lesa Mitchell: Hi, my name is Lesa Mitchell. I'm a general manager of Alloy Partners. We're a venture studio. I am super [00:02:00] excited to be here with good friends of mine for a very long time. Some of them. We're here to talk about building ecosystems.
Lesa Mitchell: For entrepreneurs. The entire conference is about entrepreneurs. But we're gonna talk about different components of an ecosystem, how you get those things built. These guys have all had a lot of success in different cities in doing that, and so we hope to share all of that information with you.
Lesa Mitchell: So let's start with David. Would you introduce yourself and tell me one thing that you wanna make sure everybody gets out of this panel before they leave?
David Cohen: Sure. Hey everybody. I'm David Cohen. I'm one of the founders and CEO again, of Techstars came back as CEO about a year ago this week, actually.
David Cohen: Techstars is a mentorship driven accelerator that many of you may know. We invest capital in. Entrepreneurs all around the world and have a lot of fun doing it. So glad to be here. What's your one
Lesa Mitchell: thing?
David Cohen: My one thing, secret weapon of the best startup [00:03:00] communities in the world. The secret weapon that they all figure out is this thing called Give First.
David Cohen: This guy wrote a book on it. You're gonna hear about that a little bit, I'm sure, but that is the secret weapon in my mind of the best startup communities.
Lesa Mitchell: Okay. Who are you?
Brad Feld: I'm Brad Feld. I am a partner at a venture fund called Foundry Group. I'm also co-founder of Techstars with David Cohen, David Brown, Jared Polis.
Brad Feld: I'm also a long-term disciple of Lesa's from time that we had, going back a long time at the Coffin Foundation when we worked on a number of projects together. And I've been enraptured with the idea of startup communities for a very long time. And this notion, which I think this conference so embodies, but the idea the fundamental idea of globally democratizing entrepreneurship, the idea that you should be able to start a company, anyone in the world should be able to start a company anywhere in the world, and that should [00:04:00] be able to grow into a big company.
Brad Feld: The one thing I want to get out of this I want everybody to stand up and stretch 'cause you've been sitting for a while.
Brad Feld: I refuse. Stretch. Give yourself a good Yeah. Like that. Alright. Even John Hill, get your butt up in the air. Even John Hill.
Lesa Mitchell: Even John Hill.
Brad Feld: All right. I accomplished my one thing.
Lesa Mitchell: Okay, great. Ian, who are you?
Ian Hathaway: Oh, what do you want us to get out of this? How much time you got? Ian Hathaway. I'm a partner of an early stage venture firm called Far Out, or FOVC.
Ian Hathaway: We invest in, first check rounds throughout the Americas. Did a bunch of stuff before that, including had a good run at Techstars and met all these fine folks and got to work closely with them. One thing that I want people, you wrote a book too. Oh yeah. I let this guy write a book with me a couple years ago called The Startup Community Way.
Ian Hathaway: We'll probably talk a little bit about [00:05:00] that. So that was pretty exciting as well. And one thing would be don't overthink it. It's actually pretty easy to do something that can help an entrepreneur, whether it's. You can do it today, you can give them 10 minutes of your time, buy 'em a cup of coffee, connect them to someone in your network.
Ian Hathaway: So that would be my challenge, is to help one entrepreneur in one small way today.
Lesa Mitchell: Great, Eric.
Erik Mitisek: Thank you, Lesa. So excited to be here. I'm Eric Matisse. I'm the founder of Denver Startup Week which happens to be one of the largest free entrepreneurial events in the world. In Denver, Colorado, we host up to 20,000 people a year for an amazing 200 plus event, week of celebrating entrepreneurs.
Erik Mitisek: When I'm not doing that, I'm an advisor at Techstars and have the ability to work with David and Brad on some of the work that we're doing globally. But most importantly, when I think about the work of startup community building the one quote that always comes back to me is Margaret Mead.
Erik Mitisek: Never underestimate the power of a small group of people to change the world, indeed is the [00:06:00] only thing that ever has. When I think about your ability to be the athlete or of startup communities startup community building is a special kind of sport, and those of us who do it understand the intrinsic value of giving back to founders to make better founders in our communities.
Erik Mitisek: And so if there's one thing that you walk away with from this panel, I want you to really think deep of what you can possibly give to the community. And no matter how small or for how long it adds value to the fabric of all of our startup communities globally. And just push yourself to do that one thing, to give a founder a better chance to succeed.
Lesa Mitchell: Awesome. Brad and Ian Brad, you wrote the book Startup Communities First. Then you and Ian wrote the book Startup Community Way. What did you learn from book one to book two? That people should take to heart if they're building startup ecosystem.
Brad Feld: So book one, which came out in 2012, defined what a startup community was at the [00:07:00] time.
Brad Feld: That phrase didn't exist, and up until that point there were other phrases that sort of described what was going on. Yeah, entrepreneurial ecosystem was probably the most common, but innovation cluster would come up, research this would come up, and I just didn't feel like any of them were very accessible, either phrases or constructs for founders.
Brad Feld: They might be useful in other dynamics, but it really didn't talk to people. So in that first book, I worked really hard to define what a startup community was. I came out with this thing called the Boulder thesis that were four principles that probably everybody here is or many of you are familiar with.
Brad Feld: The idea that the founders have to be the leaders. You have to take a long-term view. You have to be inclusive of anyone who wants to engage, and that you have to have activities and events that engage everybody in the startup community. In with entrepreneurial activity in, interestingly, in, it may sound [00:08:00] straightforward, David's so tired of hearing me say it.
Brad Feld: But in 2012 it was weird. It was not the norm. It some people really liked it. A lot of people are like, what is this? And as time passed, somebody asked me recently, do I still believe in those four tenants? And the answer is absolutely yes. Like they are very durable. When Ian and I started working on the startup community way, there were a couple of things that we really focused on.
Brad Feld: One of them that relates back to that first book was fixing two things. One was this notion of the founders have to be leaders, or entrepreneurs have to be leaders. By the way, I like to use founders a lot instead of entrepreneurs. They're obviously interchangeable, but I've found that the word entrepreneur is now starting to mean a lot of things.
Brad Feld: That is distinct. It's a super set of just founders. So when you hear me saying it, I'm using them interchangeably, but I'm thinking of the founder. I define these two [00:09:00] constructs leaders and feeders. I said the founders are leaders. The feeders are everyone else. But I really didn't do a good job of separating people from organizations.
Brad Feld: And if you think about it, what I was really trying to say is, all the organizations. Are supporting the founders who are leading the startup community. At the essence of that, if you drop it down another level we in the second book, we define the difference between a startup community and an entrepreneurial ecosystem.
Brad Feld: The startup community has one purpose, one purpose, and that's to help founders succeed. The entrepreneurial ecosystem is bigger. It's a bigger thing with a whole bunch of organizations, university large companies government service providers, venture capitalists, and those organizations have. [00:10:00] A motivation.
Brad Feld: One of their goals with the startup community is to help founders succeed, but they have lots of other motivations. If you go to a university and said your only motivation, your only goal, your only objective is to help founders succeed. They'd be very confused. No, we have all these things, but yeah, but one of 'em is to help founders succeed.
Brad Feld: So that startup community was at the essence of it with a singular goal. And then you have the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a super set. The mistake I made in the first book, and it was a mistake that was pretty clear, pretty quickly, was there are a bunch of people who work for these organizations that play a leadership role in the startup community.
Brad Feld: So it's not just founders, not just entrepreneurs, but it's also a group of people that Ian and I labeled Instigators. Instigators are people who work for one of the. Participants in the entrepreneurial ecosystem, one of those organizations, but plays a [00:11:00] leadership role in the startup community. And I learned about that from people like Eric, who, there are many people in the Boulder and Denver startup community who were not founders, but were doing things to really help and amplify what was going on in the startup community and play real leadership roles.
Brad Feld: And it kept coming back to me. You're leaving these people out. And the answer is, oops, I screwed up. Yep. And today, what we say very clearly is this separation. The goal of the startup community is singular. It's to help founders succeed. The leaders of the startup community are founders and instigators.
Brad Feld: Instigators work. For the organizations that make up the entrepreneurial ecosystem, one of whose goals is to help founders succeed.
Lesa Mitchell: Okay. Let's play off that. Ian. You did research figuring out who all these instigators were. Help me understand, because clearly one of the instigators or the [00:12:00] blockers are policy.
Ian Hathaway: Yeah,
Lesa Mitchell: actually, yeah. Talk a little bit about that. Those of you in the room are from all over the world. Many of you have different kinds of policies in place in your own. Countries that are blockers or instigators. Tell me what you and the policy institute that you work with in Washington DC now is your fun side gig.
Ian Hathaway: Yeah.
Lesa Mitchell: Think are those policies that need to be in place.
Ian Hathaway: Yeah. That's actually something from startup communities that I know we've talked about this before, that you wanted to evolve, which was basically there's no role for government and. We took a fresh look at that and started let's
Brad Feld: Let's be crisper on that.
Brad Feld: In the first book, in the first edition, I did not do a very rigorous job of thinking about how government could help startup communities. I said mostly do no harm and let the startup, which is good. Yeah. And let the startup community and the founders do their things in the second edition of the first [00:13:00] book.
Brad Feld: I added a lot more stuff 'cause I learned a lot and realized that was pretty limited in my own thinking and it was something that in the second book, and I'm gonna give the mic back to Ian he challenged me a lot around it not just to evolve the thinking, but to be clearer about how government and how policy could really help.
Ian Hathaway: Yeah. So how can it help? First rule is do no harm. Obviously
Lesa Mitchell: take that back to your governments
Ian Hathaway: genuinely. Like actually that's probably the mic drop. Do no harm. No, but this is a great venue to discuss this topic. Look, we don't have time to cover this in a comprehensive way. There are plenty of people out there who are actual life experts on this and, can advise governments in a much deeper level.
Ian Hathaway: But I guess like a couple of, maybe principles I would talk about. So the first is, do no harm. Secondly is it's a little bit boring, but, there are certain things that only government can do. Entrepreneurs can't do it. Private actors [00:14:00] can't do it, do that well. We have a framework in the startup community way for those who aren't familiar called the seven Capitals, which is basically seven pillars of the things that are important.
Ian Hathaway: To an entrepreneurial ecosystem. And when you look at that, the list of those seven pillars, some of them are entirely in the realm of government or at least government plays a critical or supportive role. Things like institutional capital rule of law, reg regulations, stable markets, functioning capital markets, monetary policy, stuff like that.
Ian Hathaway: Supporting scientific r and d. Intellectual property protection, you know that's really important to what we're talking about. Human capital foundational, right? Training our young people, our workforce, attracting the world's best talent. These are critical things that, government plays an essential role in.
Ian Hathaway: I know innovation policy, entrepreneurship policy, getting involved is really exciting. But if we don't do [00:15:00] those things well, it undermines the rest. And actually, I left out a very important one for, for especially local governments. We're here in a city, right? We're celebrating entrepreneurship in this city, and it's the role of what we call physical capital, but it's the quality of place people can live in a lot of different places.
Ian Hathaway: Now we've learned that and, talent wants to. Wants to live around other talent in places that are enjoyable, safe, good schools fun. So again, that's a critical, government do the things that only you can do. Do those. I would talk about a couple of other principles. I, I know we're a little limited on time, I won't go too far, but I like this concept that I'm borrowing from a friend of mine, Joe Marshack.
Ian Hathaway: He talks about platforms versus pipes. So in government, classic is right, like we are setting the vision, we're setting the policy, the idea, and we deliver the solution. We deliver the service In ecosystem building, right? It's about. The platform, creating the [00:16:00] individuals to interact in a free and autonomous way.
Ian Hathaway: This is an example of that. I don't know how all the sponsorship dollars came together for this event, but it's convening us. This is a, this is an example of, it's an excellent example of a city coming together to create a platform for ecosystem building to take place. Couple of others like that stand out from my experience at Techstars and at other places is.
Ian Hathaway: Before you launch into something new, spend real time understanding what's actually going on already. It might surprise you. There's a lot of overlapping initiatives. There's critical gaps. Spending that time with the instigators, with the entrepreneurial leaders can give you important information about what should we do next?
Ian Hathaway: And these are all really basic things, but they, too often I think our best intentions, we just want to jump in and do stuff. Yeah. And there's other things we need to do first.
Lesa Mitchell: Yeah. So that's a really good switch to you, David. If we're talking about placemaking and how do we [00:17:00] figure out, how do we start, where do we start, what do we do?
Lesa Mitchell: Talk to us about what Techstars is doing around, around startup partnerships with cities.
David Cohen: So Techstars is 18 years old. And we get, as an organization, we get a lot of calls from communities that want us to be a part of their community. And I think over the years we've tried to respond to that in different ways.
David Cohen: One way was, oh, everybody wants us to have an accelerator in their community. Some communities might be ready for that, some might not. And we've made some mistakes in that regard, going to a few places. That, that really weren't ready in one way or the other. And it doesn't end well, right?
David Cohen: Because there's not enough investors in that country, or not enough, ecosystem in that particular place to make it work. Trying to be responsive to that and really listening, when I came back as CEOA year ago, I had these three recomm commitments, right?
David Cohen: One, one was just help founders succeed. That's what we do. Let's really focus on that. The other was embrace startup communities. The way that [00:18:00] Techstars was built was through the communities that we operated in, the origin story of Techstars in Boulder with, a hundred mentors and everybody, cheering for the 10 companies that were going through the accelerator and them investing in it and introducing downstream investors and acquirers and all that, that's the magic of community.
Lesa Mitchell: But it took 18 years,
David Cohen: It happened pretty quickly actually. It's been taking longer to figure out how to connect it globally. Yeah. And so when another community calls and says. We want that magic. Our response for a long time was, okay, let's stamp out an accelerator. But that wasn't always the right solution for every community to just start investing there.
David Cohen: So we've come up with this concept based on the books that, that Brad and Ian have written startup Community, as a startup community away to basically build an accelerator for startup communities. And rather than. All these communities trying to go it alone and figure out, how can I.
David Cohen: How can I make my startup community grow and thrive? We've basically taken what these guys have researched and figured out and written about and tried to [00:19:00] package that in a way that is, is joint learning. And so someone like Eric who runs the biggest startup week, I think in the world in Denver, I.
David Cohen: Right is a great mentor for other communities that wanna do that. And so there are mentors across the network that can teach each other, learn from each other. And mentorship, again, very two way word in the Techstars context, you're learning and you know you're getting and you're giving, right? As a mentor, I think this concept of startup community partnerships working with places like Omaha who's a partner, or a place like Puerto Rico or Sarajevo, right places in the world that we're partnering with to try to attach our network, which is many thousands of portfolio companies, many thousands of founders, many thousands of mentors, many thousands of community builders.
David Cohen: Between these places, learn together, grow together in a very entrepreneurial way, is how we're now approaching it. Rather than, we've always gotta do it through investment.
Lesa Mitchell: And so when you go into Sarajevo, you're building you're creating those [00:20:00] linkages locally, but then you're building them into global linkages that you've already got built
David Cohen: global.
David Cohen: We're building our own relationships there so that, when we do start investing there, that's an established network. They're already connected. Their companies are already benefiting in the community, people are already mentoring or investing across the system. It's a slower build, but it's the right way to do it for a lot of places.
David Cohen: And so it, it allows us to grow our network, put more nodes on the network, activate more people on the network to help our founders portfolio be successful, grow those relationships. And then my analogy is why did Google early on lay fiber in Africa? Because they knew it was gonna be an important place.
David Cohen: This is our version of laying fiber, laying that infrastructure.
Lesa Mitchell: They laid it first in Kansas City and then Brad built a house in the neighborhood. I remember
David Cohen: that.
Brad Feld: Found a house. Tell me one thing about you that nobody knows. I once had a house in Kansas City that had gigabit internet to it. And that was
Lesa Mitchell: about the only, only positive
Brad Feld: attribute of that house.
Lesa Mitchell: Exactly.
Brad Feld: I wanna add [00:21:00] one thing to what David said, which is. So it's not lost. When we started Techstars and the first pro accelerator program was an experiment, we did a couple of things. We said, let's limit the number of companies. We had 300 something apply. We took 10, not 200. So there were what, 20, 30 people involved in that first program.
Brad Feld: Founders. We then surrounded them with mentors. That was somewhere between 50 and 75 mentors in that first program that were mostly experienced founders, but also VCs, a couple of lawyers, and not just people in Boulder, but people in Denver, but West Coast, east Coast that would come to Boulder. So we got connectivity that way.
Brad Feld: We put them together in a physical space for 90 days. So we really concentrated on having them interact a lot with each other. Not just the founders, with the mentors, but the founders. With the founders. Everybody [00:22:00] learning from each other. And oh, by the way, in addition to be re being really intense because starting a company is really intense.
Brad Feld: We tried to do it in a way that was fun, right? That was positively reinforcing. It wasn't like, okay, I gotta go do this shitty thing for 90 days. I'm gonna be miserable and it was hard and a lot of people had sacrifices 'cause maybe they weren't with their family for that 90 days, but a lot of people took their family with them, and that family became part of the startup community.
Brad Feld: Boulder happens to be a pretty awesome place to be back to the point that Ian made so you can build these feedback loops. So think about that and now map that kind of activity with one exception to the startup community partnerships where instead of. In a startup community, in a geography, right in Puerto Rico or in Sarajevo or whatever.
Brad Feld: It's just a focus just on that. Of course, there's a focus just on [00:23:00] that, but it's with their peers, a couple of other startup community partnerships that are for a period of time working together in a structured way, having regular interactions. The one nuance is we don't bring them all into the same place.
Brad Feld: But we move them from place to place. The people in Puerto Rico are absolutely gonna want to end up spending time in Omaha and in Sarajevo as they get to know each other. Those will be natural phenomena, so they're learning from each other. And then that cohort that's going through the startup community partnership accelerator that.
Brad Feld: Doesn't acronym they are surrounded by mentors, people like Eric and others who have been incredibly successful, whether it's building out a very specific part of a vibrant startup community, like a startup week. Or whether it's being part of the fabric of the university and how the university interacts with the startup community, and we don't expect that at Techstars.
Brad Feld: We, we have [00:24:00] lots of ideas about that stuff, but we don't know the answer for every place in the world. But we do know that if you get a bunch of people working on the same thing that are at the same stage interacting with each other, surrounded by mentorship. Real magic can happen and that's where this emerged from.
Brad Feld: Last comment. I think we learned this from lots of mistakes we made. David said it, but I don't wanna lose it. 18 years later, we made a lot of mistakes and that's how you figure out what works not by having the right idea at the beginning and then just doing it. Yep. And in this particular case I know that there's lots of people here that are in different parts of the world.
Brad Feld: To the extent that any of this rings true to you reach out because we're trying to learn, we're trying to figure it out. We're trying to make this something that 18 years from now we look back and say, wow, that startup community partnership really made a difference.
Lesa Mitchell: Yeah, but I don't wanna leave you out, Eric.
Lesa Mitchell: I see you down there. And these guys [00:25:00] have been talking about instigators that are within a community, and instigators can be corporates, they can be funders, they could be governments, they could be whatever. When you guys put, how many years have you been doing Denver startup? Week
Erik Mitisek: 14,
Lesa Mitchell: when you guys put that together, and as you've seen it grow over the years because it's huge.
Lesa Mitchell: What's changed? How does that become a big platform? Are you bringing together instigators? Is it just entrepreneurs?
Erik Mitisek: Thanks Lesa. Yeah, the story of Startup Week is one about collaboration and I think to Brad's point when you using some of the Boulder thesis, being inclusive to all those that want to be involved was a critical differentiator for the work of Denver Startup Week.
Erik Mitisek: We started out with a few thousand people and 50 events that was mainly put on by founders in the first few years of the program. But as we thought about ways we could broaden the message turn up the volume on the topics within our [00:26:00] community and support more entrepreneurs, it became really important to not only invite the founders to the table.
Erik Mitisek: But all of the service providers, the government our entrepreneurial support organizations across the community, and really be a tapestry for the entire startup community to collaborate and build a symphony of activity around one consolidated event. And so I think the biggest takeaway from the success that we've had as we've scaled the program is really from the Boulder thesis, which is you must be inclusive and welcoming to all those that want to be involved.
Erik Mitisek: When we grew the event from the 60 some events to over 300 it was no longer about tech startups in Denver, it became about small business. It became about manufacturing. It became about Boulder and Fort Collins in Colorado Springs, and it started to tell a much bigger story and a much bigger platform.
Erik Mitisek: But without that, that, that welcome mat for every single person to be involved, regardless of background, regardless [00:27:00] of business, regardless of community. Was really the differentiator. And the more that we went deep in being intentional about it and driving on equity and access for those in our community that really needed to have the most support, it just amplified the volume even more.
Erik Mitisek: And Lesa, I would just suggest that anyone that's continuing to build that startup community that be really intentional around being welcoming and leverage the methodologies of give first in all that we do. But most importantly. In, invite people to the table to be themselves, honor them and most importantly, amplify their work in the community.
Erik Mitisek: And that's what made the biggest difference in those early days.
Lesa Mitchell: Yeah, absolutely. And many of you if you look at the timeline that's out there relative to global entrepreneurship, Congress, global entrepreneurship week, et cetera, et cetera, Brad and I have been involved, san Paulo is on the wall down there.
Lesa Mitchell: I see some of those people today. Yeah. That we met way back when Many of them have become entrepreneurs. Maybe they were instigators before they become [00:28:00] entrepreneurs, they become mentors.
Erik Mitisek: Bingo.
Lesa Mitchell: Everybody cycles into different phases of their life in terms of what their role are.
Lesa Mitchell: Hopefully some of 'em become governors and senators so that they're friendly to the startup community. Otherwise, it might not work so well. Last comments that you wanna leave. For all of the people. You've got people from, various countries in Africa, people from Omaha, et cetera. What are the last comments, Ian, that you wanna leave to this group?
Ian Hathaway: Yeah I want to talk about something that Brad has written a lot about, which you know, and has discussed a lot, which is really the. If you, if it comes down to one thing, it's this phrase that I learned from you, which is tolia, which is love of place. We can talk all day long about the alphabet soup of how you create vibrant startup communities, sustaining entrepreneurial ecosystems.
Ian Hathaway: But if the people leading the community don't care, then nothing else actually matters. One comment I [00:29:00] want to make as well as the only non Coloradan. Coloradan, is that right? Yeah, it's Colorado. I'm not Colorado. No, I just, Colorado. Oh, and you, sorry. I've, I spent time in, in Boulder, significant time.
Ian Hathaway: Couple of things to say about it with startup communities, some people dismissed as, oh, this is just one place not valuable, whatever. But actually the more time I've spent there and the further, I've gotten away from the first time I reading that book. I just wanna say like it, the startup community there is collaborative because the citizens of the community are collaborative in care, and this is a place, the word to paraphilia if I don't wanna steal the thunder, came from the governor of Colorado, which was a recognition that state people seem to have an unnatural love of place.
Ian Hathaway: It also happens to be a place where if you look at the data and you look at entrepreneurship per capita, whether it's. Main street businesses, whether it's high tech businesses, whether it's venture backed businesses on a per capita [00:30:00] basis. There are multiple cities in Colorado that are off the charts.
Ian Hathaway: And so just with that, I would say you've gotta care. And a place like Colorado, if you've never been, I would go experience this startup communities. There's a lot to be learned
Lesa Mitchell: being. And is Santa Barbara a startup community?
Ian Hathaway: Yes, it is.
Lesa Mitchell: Yes,
Ian Hathaway: especially on a, a per capita basis. I reside in Santa Barbara not from their relatively recent edition, five years.
Ian Hathaway: If you don't know much about it, it's pretty impressive. Six or seven tech unicorns in the last as many years. But one of the things I would say about Santa Barbara, which is what I look for in any community, whether I'm coming to Indianapolis or Kansas City or, paris, France, how easily can I get connected into the people who are engaged?
Ian Hathaway: Maybe it's because I have a network I can connect into certain people, but in it's, I've seen it time and time again. Some places it's just easier to connect into people. There aren't walled gardens, there aren't gatekeepers to get to important [00:31:00] people. Santa Barbara is one of those places it's very easy to plug in.
Lesa Mitchell: Yeah. And Brad, I think you've said over and over when you find gatekeepers or people who want to control the ecosystem, you find it not blooming
Brad Feld: well and maybe this is a good final word for me, which is when I started with these ideas in the startup community in 2010, I'd lived in Boulder since 1995.
Brad Feld: I came to Boulder from Boston. And when I showed up in Boulder, I didn't know anybody. I knew one person. He moved away six months later. And I quickly tried to get to know other people like me, and I did some things to find other people like me. I started the Boulder chapter of the Young Entrepreneurs Organization.
Brad Feld: Which is now about to celebrate its 30th year. I was very involved in EO today. It used to be called YEO. Kaufman [00:32:00] was very involved and very supportive in the early days. I was probably about the hundredth member was on the board for a while. And in this, like I found other peers simply by starting an activity.
Brad Feld: In this case, YEO. That, or YO in Boulder that got a bunch of other people together. I didn't ask permission, I didn't have to get a license. I didn't have to go through, some organizational structure. And in fact, a lot of my early experience in Boulder from 1995 through the internet bubble through the financial crisis was over that 20 year period was really living in a parallel universe to the infrastructure of the city.
Brad Feld: One day I woke up and everybody knew who I was, but it wasn't because I navigated through all the gatekeepers. I just did stuff. Yeah. I started companies. I funded companies. My wife Amy, and I have a foundation called Anchor Point Foundation. We did stuff philanthropically and by just [00:33:00] taking action rather than asking permission or waiting for somebody to say, will you do this?
Brad Feld: As a founder, as a motive force in the startup community, lots of things happened. Part of the power of that was not just what I did. So yeah. Good job, Brad. Nice. It was being an example for others that felt like, oh, there's something blocking me, or there's something that's structurally problematic. And if you've read the first startup communities book there's two chapters that talk about how universities can engage in a different way.
Brad Feld: And in Boulder there are two guys Phil Wiser, who's now our Attorney General and Brad Bernthal, who's been a long time professor who were really the leaders of the, our entrepreneurial activity at CU Boulder, which is a top 20 research university in the US Public Research University in the us and a really, a good, a really good school that had no engagement with anything to do with the startup [00:34:00] community.
Brad Feld: Brad and filler in the law school. Why in the world would people in the law school be the drivers of it? And the reason is they didn't ask any permission of anybody. Yeah. They didn't let the gatekeeper stop 'em. They just thought it was interesting. And Phil had a vision for how technology policy and the law fit together, and how technology policy and the law fit together, and then linked to startups and entrepreneurship as a result of a conversation where you had a conference and they had a bunch of big companies talking about it and they didn't have any startup people.
Brad Feld: So this sort of dynamic of just saying, don't let the gatekeepers block you. And if you are in a position where you're a gatekeeper, open the gates. Yeah. Make it easy for the people who don't have the power in your community to engage with you. Yeah.
Lesa Mitchell: I think you all got that last message. Each one of you has the power of purpose. Take it, jump into your community. If you wanna hop into one of the networks that you've heard talked about here today you know who the people [00:35:00] are that you can reach out to, but it's up to you.
Lesa Mitchell: Change the world.