Brad Feld

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Building Entrepreneurial Communities Is A 20 Year Journey

Oct 06, 2010
Category Books

During the Tahoe Tech Talk three hour Q&A segment with the panelists, someone in the audience asked about how to create a stronger entrepreneurial community in their city so that it could be “more like Silicon Valley.”  After a little banter, Chris Sacca and Dave Morin called me up onto stage to do a short riff on what we’ve done in Boulder and what makes it special.  Damon Clinkscales recorded it on his iPhone – the three minute video is embedded below.

The key points are:

  • Don’t try to be Silicon Valley (it’s a special place – learn from it – but don’t try to emulate it)
  • It takes at least a half dozen people that are committed to provide leadership over 20 years
  • You have to do things that engage the entire entrepreneurial community (e.g. TechStars)
  • You have to continually get new first time entrepreneurs into the entrepreneurial community

There’s a lot of stuff about this in our new book Do More Faster in case you want to go deeper on this topic.