It’s certainly been a while since my last non-review post. Not traveling for months on end makes it difficult to generate content for a blog documenting travels through the entrepreneurial ecosystem. In fact, as of this past week, we’ve officially crossed into the second year of Coronaworld. March 11, 2020 was the last in-person entrepreneurial event before everything shut down. Hilariously, that final event was the 1MC Iowa City Entrepreneurial Event Panel. Since then, I’ve attended a number of events online – some better than others. But it’s just not the same.
CiderCon was the most recent event to go online, back at the beginning of February. I knew that the experience wasn’t going to match the previous two years, as the main purpose of a cider event is to sample various ciders from across the country, and specifically the region in which the convention is being held. I didn’t even have a chance to open a cider until the final day of the online event, and it was something that I had ordered from the previous Cider Summit but hadn’t yet had a chance to try. During the majority of CiderCon this year, I was also having to run the kids to school, dance classes, and appointments, and do all of the usual stuff around the house that I do when I’m working at home.
It finally clicked the second or third time I had to break away from convention programming to do “dad stuff” – not only is it the in-person interactions missing from online events, but the ability to actually be fully engaged with the event. When I’m out of town, the wife and kids understand that I’m unavailable for a few days. Out of sight, out of mind, right? When I’m sitting at my desk in my home office, that barrier doesn’t exist. To my kids especially, it’s like any other day where I’m working at home. Frustrating for me, but understandable.
So, I’ve decided that I’m not attending any more entrepreneurial events from home, and I’m going to be attending very few events this year in total. In fact, there are two big events left on my calendar this year: GLINTCAP and Denver Startup Week. GLINTCAP can’t be virtualized – it’s pretty hard to remotely serve cider to judges. Denver Startup Week could be online again this fall, but I’ve already decided that I’m visiting Colorado in October, around the proposed event dates. I have two itineraries in the works – one where Denver Startup Week is in-person, which would require a few nights near downtown Denver, and the other where the week is virtualized and my participation in it is secondary to visiting cider makers in the area. Great American Beer Festival is also supposed to happen the weekend after Denver Startup Week, and the itineraries also take that into account.
As of right now, there are no entrepreneurial events on my calendar in Des Moines, Ames, or Cedar Rapids this year. I don’t know if the Des Moines Tech Crawl was ever rescheduled, and no word yet if the Young Entrepreneur Convention is coming back this summer or fall. EntreFest has an in-person option, but $200 is a bit much to ask with absolutely no information yet on this year’s speakers, and last year’s lineup was relatively uninspiring and seemed really corporate. Here’s hoping that something pops up on the calendar in the coming months, but I’m not holding out much hope for the remainder of 2021.
We’re still rolling along here in Iowa City – one of the few places that fully adapted to Coronaworld a year ago. Our 1MC chapter is the only one in the state that’s continued to meet each week all of the past year, with only a couple of weeks off due to presenter emergencies. We’re booked out all the way through the end of July. We haven’t started filling August and beyond yet because we haven’t yet made the decision on going back in front of a live audience. Our organizing committee has tossed around the idea of doing outdoor 1MC events so long as the weather holds out in August, September, October, and potentially November. We will probably make this decision in June so that I can schedule out the rest of the year.
In bigger news, I’ve teamed up with a number of people across the state to produce Startup Weekend Iowa Online April 23-25. Yes, it’s actually happening! A number of people in Des Moines would like to bring the in-person version of the event back there, and there’s no better way to get that ball rolling than to have the interested parties get a feel for organizing an event over the course of 6 weeks. I’d like nothing more than to have someone else organize future Startup Weekend events elsewhere in the state, so I can participate on a team building a startup in 54 hours, rather than run the show each and every year.
Having other people pick up the ball and run with it across the state is going to be one of the main goals for my still-in-development entrepreneurial ecosystem-building organization. Organizational support, I’ve found, is one of the biggest hurdles to getting programs to stick here in Iowa. The handful of organizations who have tried to fill this gap have ended up wanting complete control over everything, killing the project in the process. I want this organization to function as a resource for creativity and the necessary bank account to handle finances, not to function as a community gatekeeper. I’ll share more about this project in the coming months, as everything comes together.
I’ve also been hard at work on a number of creative projects over the last couple of months. To coincide with CiderCon, I published The Cider Finder, a four-part documentary-style video series on my cider travels pre-Coronaworld. I spent about 120 hours working on the videos over the course of 5 weeks between New Year’s Day and the beginning of CiderCon, and was the biggest video project that I’ve worked on in quite some time. I’m hoping to create a “season 2” once everything reopens and I start traveling again – possibly filming the first new episode in October while I’m in Colorado!
I’m also working on the newest chapter for BondingBox, the DateBuilder card game. BondingBox has been on an extended pause over the last 18 months or so, and we’re giving it one more go with the card game that we developed. There’s a great deal of work we need to do in order to get the game in front of a number of people and taking the Web site that was started back in 2019 out of moth balls. I can’t reveal too many details yet, but we should have something ready to go here in the next few weeks.
Coronaworld is slowly coming to an end. Just over the past week or two, I’ve quadrupled the amount of work on my schedule. I’m glad I got The Cider Finder done when I did, during the darkest part of winter. Delving deeply into creative and technical projects and forgoing most social media usage over the past two months has been invigorating. The couple of times I’ve bothered to log on and scroll through the Timelines of Doom, I’ve noticed that the bubbles have gotten smaller and more reinforced. The cancer is growing. Get out while you still can.
Seriously, for your mental health, connect with real people off of social media. Read blogs and Substacks of the people you admire and love – don’t bother with a Timeline of Doom, full of people who really don’t care about you or what you’re building. Delete social media apps from your phone so you don’t have the ability to doomscroll first thing in the morning. Now that spring is around the corner, go take a walk and get some sun. Let this be the year you opt-out from feeding the algorithmic monster and the tracking machines.
I doubt that I’ll have another substantive update for the next couple of months. Between now and then, Startup Weekend Iowa Online will happen, my entrepreneurial ecosystem-building organization should be launched, a number of startup projects should be finished, and perhaps I’ll know whether or not GLINTCAP is on for mid-May or perhaps later in the year. I should have my Substack launched discussing the entrepreneurial ecosystem and current events, and maybe I’ll finally get around to launching the Freelance Media Podcast. I’ve come back up for air, taken a big breath, and now I’m heading back down. Talk again soon.