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Startup Communities is Shipping

It’s hard to describe the satisfaction of “shipping” your product. I know many of you out there have done it many times and I expect you know what I’m talking about.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City is officially shipping. The Kindle version is available immediately; the physical copies are still on pre-order on Amazon but I know books are flowing.

Vivek Wadhwa wrote a wonderful article in the Washington Post on Monday that highlights the Boulder Thesis. The article - This is how you build a tech community - follows up on a Bloomberg article that Vivek wrote in 2010 titled Why Boulder Is America’s Best Town for Startups. In his latest article, Vivek does a great job of summarizing the Boulder Thesis and highlights my views on the difference between entrepreneurs (as leaders) and government (as feeders) in the effort to create a vibrant long-term entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Jerry Colonna also wrote an awesome post riffing off of Startup Communities titled The Sarajevo Effect. If you don’t know Jerry, he’s an extremely successful VC (he and Fred Wilson at USV were partners in the 1990′s at Flatiron Partners) who retired from VC in the early 2000s and is now a coach to a bunch of amazing entrepreneurs (including several who I work with). Even though we don’t spend a huge amount of physical time together, I consider Jerry to be one of my closest friends and intellectual soulmate on a number of fronts. We’ve had three great dinners in the last 60 days – two of them in Boulder (he’s living here part time now) – and we spend a lot of the last one (in NY) talking about some of the ideas underlying the thoughts in his post.

Finally, Fred Wilson put up a nice post last week titled Two Must Read Books For The AVC Community which included two books, Startup Communities and Steven Johnson’s new book Future Perfect. I’m a huge Steven Johnson fan and that one is now on my Kindle.

For everyone that has supported me during the effort of getting this book out, y’all are awesome – thank you. I’ll be blogging regularly about it up on Startup Revolution as I wander the earth talking about Startup Communities. If you are interested in this topic, I hope you read the book. Feel free to send me any comments – good, bad, or otherwise.

September 26th, 2012     Categories: Startup Communities    
Brad Feld

Hi, I'm Brad Feld, a managing director at Foundry Group who lives in Boulder, Colorado. I invest in software and Internet companies around the US, run marathons and read a lot.

 
 
 
Startup Communities - Chapter 3