There was so much optimism going into this year. 2019 had been a fantastic year, and it seemed like momentum was building toward something amazing in 2020.
Had you told me a year ago what was to come in the following 366 days, I would have suggested you find a psychiatrist. No travel after February, no in-person events past the middle of March, no toilet paper in April, the politicization of everything by May, nothing for the kids to do all summer, and all of the things I enjoy the most about both summer and fall virtualized, canceled, or ruined in some way.
Exasperatedly, I look back at last year’s wrap-up post, and it hurts. It hurts seeing what this year could have been. For the most part, we lost an entire year of progress and momentum. That’s why I’m calling 2020 the Year of the Asterisk. The things that actually got off the ground this year are forever going to have an asterisk next to them – an explanation needed, something that doesn’t really count, and so on.
Even though it was nice to have some events online, something important was missing. Those random collisions that occur over the course of a conference just didn’t happen, even during the conferences that offered some brief networking time. That’s why the asterisk is needed. Yeah, it happened, but it just wasn’t the same. I’ve made some amazing connections over the last six years at everything from structured networking events to informal parties and get-togethers, and when you only have a limited time to talk to each person, it makes real connections much more difficult. Of the online events that offered any networking time, it was all limited by countdown timers. Some events that didn’t have any networking time really felt lacking.
Looking for silver linings became a trend this year. However, as the year went on, and one thing after another was canceled or moved online, silver linings were harder to come by. I don’t know about you, but my positive energy is really drained. Zoom fatigue is real. Burnout and isolation are real. Working from home already, it wasn’t much of a change to stay at home, only leaving the house when necessary. I’ve been doing that for years. Since the freelancing pipeline dried up for a good chunk of the year, I was able to take care of mountains of personal projects. My office has never been as organized as it is now.
Eventually, the novelty wore off, as two weeks to flatten the curve became two months, and then kept going. If the toilet paper shortages didn’t show the wheels coming off the system, the riots and the politicization of everything certainly did. Poor policy decisions over the last several decades dug a massive trench in the economy, and grinding the economic engine to a sudden halt in March and April blew the cover off of the trench. But hey, let’s just print some more money – that will fix it!
Common sense seemed to disappear this year. Up is down, left is right. If it makes sense or is based on sound logic, someone will try to cancel it. Authoritarians and mobs seem to have won the day. If you yell the loudest in 2020, you get your way. Calm, rational discourse is being pushed to the shadows, and we only have ourselves to blame. A joke, a way of coping through a rough patch, gets you removed from activities you like, as a friend of mine in Cedar Rapids found out.
The events of this year make me want to give up on entrepreneurial ecosystem building. I’m not getting paid for it, and get almost no recognition or thanks for the work I do. I didn’t go into it for money or fame – I wanted to make our startup community a better place, and leave it better than I found it. That should be the goal of anyone involved in community or ecosystem building. Even though community rankings are mostly meaningless, it’s always fun to see Iowa City punching way above its weight class, matching or beating communities with 2-3 times as many people. This year, with nearly every startup community event I had planned canceled or postponed until at least the second half of 2021, was a huge punch in the gut and makes me question whether or not I should bother continuing to plan any of this stuff.
I keep getting pulled back in, though, when I have the chance to talk to people who have benefitted from the startup community programs and events that I’ve kept going. I had a chance to talk to the team at OpenLoop (formerly Apollo) after they gave their pitch at the Techstars Iowa demo night at the beginning of December. Had it not been for the connections made at our 1MC chapter, the team might not have come together while Apollo was in the Hawkeye Student Accelerator and wouldn’t have continued on to Techstars. Seeing how entrepreneurs and the statewide ecosystem benefit from the work that I’m doing along with my co-organizers gives me the push to keep going and keeps me from throwing in the towel.
Over the long term, I can’t do this alone. I’ve been able to move forward without any assistance whatsoever from the “business establishment” or local government. There was enough momentum in 2018 and 2019 that we didn’t need to fiddle with them, because they don’t seem to understand what we’re doing, even after multiple explanations. The Business Partnership seems more interested in photo ops and news coverage than embracing fledgling entrepreneurs and startups. The city council is more interested in painting bike lanes than they are increasing the tax base. The hope is that both of these organizations sees the writing on the wall that the only way back to prosperity after The Virus is to embrace startups.
Not only will we need to embrace startups, but we also need to embrace the entrepreneurs hit the hardest by government interference. The unemployment rates are the worst in the states where lockdowns have been the harshest, but many places, like here in Iowa, are probably drastically undercounting the number of people who have completely dropped out of the workforce, and are not counted by the traditional metrics of unemployment. These uncounted people are prime targets for the programs I run – many of them, whether they wanted it or not, have the time to work on a new idea. Local governmental and quasi-governmental organizations should be supporting what’s left of small businesses. However, through 1MC and other community programs to come in the future, I can help these people as well.
We have to support the people who are still willing to put it all on the line, even in this crazy time. Since the Great Recession, it’s small businesses and startups that have created all of the new jobs – not the big companies that state and local politicians seem to love. Relying on big, multinational conglomerates to solve your unemployment problem is like trying to build a house with Scotch tape and toothpicks. One big gust of wind – a viral pandemic and economic shutdown – and the whole thing topples over.
A main takeaway from this year is that we need better leaders. No, I didn’t specifically say younger, I said better. There are a lot of people my age who don’t understand economics and the constitutional limits of government any better than the Boomers running things now. The problem was face now is the problem of fiefdoms. Nobody wants to lose their territory, especially those in permanent government. The fix over the last few decades is to just add more layers on top of a broken system, both locally and nationally. If a 5500+ page bill to fund the federal government doesn’t show you that the system needs a complete overhaul, nothing will. In order to overhaul the system, we need better leaders.
Sadly, I think we’re in for quite the rough patch. I’m trying my best to not end up a purveyor of blackpills, but 2020 has taken a lot out of all of us. Like I wrote earlier, there have been a number of times where I’ve wanted to give up on community building. Why should I keep putting myself out there when all of the powers-that-be keeping dumping on people like myself? I didn’t feel this way about community building until about half way through this year, when everything seemed to invert.
Something just feels weird about ending the year on such a negative note. I guess every bull market has a bear market correction – every action has an opposite reaction. Things had been so optimistic over the last few years, I guess we’d never really had the opportunity to discuss what went wrong and what should be corrected, and it finally bubbled up to the surface this year. However, I wish a lot of the discussions had been more civil, rather than people just yelling past each other. If we’re going to fix anything, we need to find some common guideposts shared across groups. If we don’t, 2020 might just be the opening salvo in a long decade of division.
There were at least a few highlights this year that are worth mentioning. CiderCon in the Bay Area was a great break from the cold last winter, and I made a number of new connections during that trip. It’s hard to believe that was this calendar year – it feels like it was part of 2019. I’ve made a huge leap forward on everything related to Cider Finder. The app should be available for mass consumption in the middle of the year, just in time for tap rooms to completely reopen across the country. I got that stupid star on my license back in October, and I want to start using it when airplanes are no longer giant tubes of recycled corona.
Our 1MC chapter in Iowa City was the first in the state and one of the first in the Midwest to move online when everything started migrating from in-person events in March, and we really have become the go-to chapter for entrepreneurs in the state. We routinely have a couple of people attending from outside Iowa, and our theme months featuring entrepreneurs of different backgrounds has gone really well. We had a crossover event with the chapter in Ames, and we have a ton of stuff planned for 2021, which I will highlight in part 2 of this post.
Long, long ago, way back in January, I got to facilitate an actual, in-person Startup Weekend in Rockford, Illinois. Most of the participants were local high school students learning about entrepreneurship, so much of the information that Startup Weekend participants already understand – value propositions, Business Model Canvas, minimum viable product, etc. – were completely new. I had a great time teaching the ins and outs of fast entrepreneurship, and a couple of them came up to me at the end of the program and said they learned more during the weekend than they had during their entrepreneurship class. I’m glad I got one facilitation in before everything went haywire, and hopefully, I’ll have at least one or two chances to facilitate events in 2021.
Even some of the online events were great additions to the schedule that I wouldn’t have attended had they not been online – Startup Weekend Detroit, several west coast cider tastings, and a couple of programs that usually require membership in an organization or usually have a large ticket price were at my fingertips this year. However briefly during speed-networking, I was able to make some connections with people who I otherwise would not have met. There were definitely some bright spots during the year, even with all of the madness.
Now, I’d like to start looking ahead 2021. I feel like I’ve complained enough about this year, so I’m going to change gears in the second half of this year end post. I have a few guesses about trends for the next year based on the ongoing chaos of 2020, but I’m not going to make any guesses about the business environment – you can see how well that worked out a year ago. I wasn’t completely wrong on my big three guesses, but I definitely didn’t get them completely right. 5/10, probably wouldn’t do again. Even though I don’t want to guess about the future of the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a whole, I do have some announcements for the upcoming year regarding my own work and a number of projects that are going to start taking shape in the next 12 months. So, read on to part 2 for more!