I don’t know about you, but I really didn’t expect for things to start bouncing back toward normal as quickly as they did. Had you asked me a few months ago, I would have said that most events wouldn’t come back in 2021 and would probably be back after cold and flu season in the spring of 2022. Also, if you had asked a while ago what it would be like when live, in-person events began again, I would have said that things will start off slowly, as people relearn what it’s like not to have the “Zoom delay” while talking and can’t just shut off their cameras and microphones when meetings start going sideways. I certainly didn’t expect the second half of the year to start booking up so quickly, but that’s what happens after nearly a year and a half of pent-up demand for in-person connection!
It was great to reconnect in person with a number of local entrepreneurs at the pre-EntreFEST party back on June 9. There are multiple reasons why I couldn’t make EntreFEST work with my schedule this year. A big reason was that it was the last two days of the school year in Iowa City due to the pandemic-related delay of the start of the year in 2020, so I was still on kid-shuttling duty and wouldn’t have been able to be in Cedar Rapids (or even online) for much of the event. In addition, I have a bunch of different projects on my plate right now. There’s a lot of cool stuff to be unveiled later this year, and I can’t wait to show each and every one of you what I’m building.
Third, there just weren’t enough networking opportunities or personally interesting session content to justify the price of a ticket or to spend two full work days out of the office. I’ve discussed previously that I’m starting to cut down on the number of different conferences I attend, free or not, online or in-person, because the content tends to start repeating after a while. Events that are permanently on the calendar, like Denver Startup Week, are there due to the ample networking opportunities with people outside my current circle. I don’t go to Denver for talks on marketing, sales, or growth; I go to connect with new people. The keynotes are secondary, and the individual sessions are tertiary for the most part. Also, Denver Startup Week is on the calendar because it doesn’t cost $250 to attend, but that’s a discussion for another post.
Even with in-person events beginning to return in eastern Iowa, the moment I knew things were finally snapping back to normal nationwide was Memorial Day weekend, when I received an email containing firm dates for the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan. This cider competition had been pushed back a number of times since the start of the pandemic, and I was using its rescheduling as a kind of light at the end of the tunnel, since Michigan had the strictest lockdowns and restrictions in the Midwest. Once the organizers announced that GLINTCAP was returning July 28-30, I immediately made travel arrangements. My first trip outside eastern Iowa since February 2020 officially booked!
Or, so I thought that would be the first trip outside eastern Iowa in what seems like forever. About a week ago, a fellow entrepreneurial ecosystem builder based in San Antonio posted to a Slack channel that they were planning an in-person Startup Weekend July 9-11 and were looking for a facilitator. I was surprised nobody had jumped on the opportunity to facilitate something in person, so I reached out and told him I was interested in helping. They seem to have a fairly active startup community in San Antonio, and part of the reason I got into facilitating Startup Weekends is to be able to travel across the United States and connect with ecosystem builders, so I can learn from them and bring good ideas back to Iowa City.
So, in the course of a month, I went from no trips planned at all to having plane tickets booked to Texas and an AirBnB booked in Michigan. It’s like we hit the stop button on reality in March 2020 and then, all of a sudden, the play button was pressed, starting the tape again right where things were left off and resumed at full speed. I’m not complaining about things going back to essentially a normal state this soon – it’s something that I’ve been anticipating since March 2020. It was just unexpected after all of the turmoil of the past year and a half. But, I guess one of the main lessons of 2020 was to expect the unexpected.
I’m excited for both trips, not just because I’ve confined myself to a four county area in eastern Iowa for 16 months. I love the activity of an in-person Startup Weekend – it’s an energy you just can’t duplicate online. I’ve had the chance to be involved with two online Startup Weekends, and while there’s still some interaction, it’s really just not the same as sitting at the same table with complete strangers for a weekend, working on a common goal. Running an online Startup Weekend also removes the interactions that make facilitating or organizing in-person Startup Weekend so much fun. While running Startup Weekend Iowa Online back in April, it really felt like I was running an online help desk for the majority of the event. I may have been solving some technical problems with the software, but I didn’t feel like I was solving any business problems.
The Startup Weekend planned in San Antonio is designed specifically for college students, so I’m planning to spend a bit more time on startup education while I’m in front of the group. Way back in the before-times, when I facilitated Startup Weekend in Rockford, Illinois, I spent a lot of time running through the basics, like value propositions and the Business Model Canvas, as most of the participants in that event were high school students. One of the participants of that event actually told me that she had learned more about the inner workings of startups just from participating in the weekend than she had in her entrepreneurship classes. The students in San Antonio who participate in the upcoming weekend are part of a special immersive entrepreneurship program through the local colleges and universities, so I’m hoping that the program will have covered much of the basic information. I am bringing a bunch of handouts that we use in Iowa City for a general audience, just in case.
It’s going to be a busy week starting with Startup Weekend San Antonio. The 1 Million Cups Organizer Summit is online again this year, and they scaled it down to a few hours in one day with a handful of optional seminars later in the week. If you remember last year, the derecho occurred about half way into the first day of 1MCOS, so I missed about 75% of the live programming. Luckily, they had recorded most of the stuff that they covered, so I was able to watch it back a couple of weeks later, after power and Internet were restored here at the home office. Based on what I heard from other organizers around the country and from the footage I watched, the event really didn’t need to be 2 days, and maybe that’s the feedback they received in Kansas City.
I don’t expect to get much out of this year’s 1MCOS. The main point of the in-person event is to hang out with organizers from across the country, getting to know them and learning what makes their communities great. The online format, for the most part, takes away that aspect of the event. Honestly, with the technical snafus and general pointlessness of last year’s day 1 morning session, the derecho saved me from having to sit through another day and a half of live programming. We don’t attend 1MCOS just to listen to Kauffman Foundation employees talk at us – local organizers want to learn and bond with other local organizers.
They haven’t released the agenda for this year’s 1MCOS, but after the madness of 2020, you’d think they would want to devote some time during the event to talk about what worked when everything moved online featuring communities like Iowa City that successfully transitioned online and consistently stayed online through nine months of 2020 and the first half of 2021. After attending 1MCOS 2018 through 2020 and the changes in the conference during that time, I know that they won’t do this. If this were the 1MCOS of 2018 where we spent much of the time discussing modifications of the program that made the program work in each individual community, they would. From 2019 on, they’ve become very protective of their core program and strongly discourage any deviation from the set program even if it strengthens the local startup community. Moving online in 2020 was acceptable only because there were extenuating circumstances.
Even if they do manage to allow time to discuss online 1MC, I highly doubt they will ask us to present. There are a number of chapters and organizers that seem to be preferred by headquarters, and from the experiences I’ve had, we’re definitely not part of that list. If they would spend less time picking favorites and artificially gatekeeping the program, great things could happen with 1MC, especially in small, rural communities that could benefit from this program. It’s been disappointing to watch the energy disappear as the national organization becomes more sclerotic. Here in Iowa City, we’ll keep plugging away, drawing in entrepreneurs with our local positive energy until we’re ordered to change (which, hopefully, will be long after I’ve left our organizing team.)
A week after Startup Weekend San Antonio, I’ll be spending the weekend at MERGE helping to run Startup Weekend Iowa City Education edition. We have a decent number of entrepreneurs signed up and ready to build something awesome over the course of the weekend. It will be amazing to finally get back to having live events at MERGE after so many months away. Ian’s agreed to facilitate the in-person group during the weekend, and I’ll be online running the hybrid portion of the weekend – we’re allowing participants to either join us in person at MERGE or online via Discord and livestream. I’ve been pushing people to join us at MERGE, mostly for the in-person energy, but also because I don’t want to spend the entire weekend managing a Discord server with a bunch of people who have never used the platform, a la Startup Weekend Iowa Online. We have our judges and mentors lined up already – we’re working out the last few details with the catering and prize sponsors. The lead up to the weekend is usually the most hectic, so between getting back from Startup Weekend San Antonio, helping to run Startup Weekend Iowa City, and attending 1MCOS, I plan to get nothing else done that week.
I’m sure you can tell that I’m pumped that live, in-person programming is back! It’s going to make blogging significantly easier again. When you base an entire blog around the travels through entrepreneurial ecosystems, stopping all travel and moving the ecosystem online starves the blog for content. I have a few heavier topics that I’m probably going to eventually publish probably elsewhere online, since it doesn’t really fit the ultimate theme of this blog. Also, I expect that live programming will pause again during cold and flu season this winter – I will be surprised if CiderCon actually takes place in Virginia in February. I fully expect us to flip 1MC Iowa City back to the online format for a couple of months around Christmas (after flipping back to in-person in August), mostly because of the spike in The Virus™ that I expect to happen during cold and flu season, but also because it’s the time of year with the lowest attendance. I’ve already scheduled the two December meetings as online as a precaution.
The next five weeks are going to be pretty hectic. It’s time to shake off the cobwebs and embrace crowds and travel once again. I’m ready for airport drinks and conference food once again. Even if it’s paired with toe taps or elbow bumps, I’m ready to make new connections and reignite old connections. Hopefully, over the next month or two, the rest of the year’s travel schedule will fall into place. Denver Startup Week will release their hybrid event schedule in mid-August, and I’m still waiting to hear when the Young Entrepreneur Convention is going to return – hoping for a mid- to late-October date, but it sounds like they’re at the mercy of Iowa State University’s schedule.
It’s time to start embracing extroversion again. My extrovert battery is officially overcharged, and I desperately need some time away from the outlet.