I had mentioned in my last blog post a number of events that I had on my calendar for July. Back-to-back Startup Weekends followed by a road trip to Michigan to finally reconnect with cider makers and enthusiasts in person for the first time since CiderCon in California, way back in the before-times of early 2020. Including online meetings, I had a stretch of 16 days of professional contact without a day off – definitely a shock to the system for someone who has had the luxury of working in the bunker without much adult contact for the vast majority of the pandemic.
I started off the stretch with the first of two Startup Weekends for the month, Startup Weekend University San Antonio. I’ve always wanted to travel to Texas, but never had a chance to get down there until now. I’ve had my eyes on the larger entrepreneurial ecosystems in the state and some of the larger events, including South by Southwest and San Antonio Startup Week, but the timing has never worked out to attend any of those events. There are only so many weeks in the year, and the calendar was usually set a year in advance… until Coronaworld.
There’s never been a better chance to experience new parts of the country and start checking off parts of the “I’ll get there someday” list (the sequel to the “I’ll get to that project someday” list worked on heavily in 2020) now that we’re on the other side of the outbreak. Years ago, I started contemplating becoming a Startup Weekend facilitator so that I could see what startup communities through the United States were doing to build the base of their entrepreneurial ecosystems. I started to make this a reality when I facilitated Startup Weekend in Rockford, Illinois, in January 2020. Now that in-person events are back, now is the time to reach out to events across the country and hop on a few planes.
There were minimal delays getting from eastern Iowa to San Antonio – a bit over two hours on the first leg, and just under an hour on the second leg of the trip. Roger from Geekdom picked me up from the airport and brought me downtown to the venue so I could meet the rest of the team, and so we all could grab some lunch. We decided on barbecue, so we went across the street to Pinkerton’s and grabbed a sampling of all the meats and side dishes. When you’re in BBQ country, you’re legally required to sample the region’s barbecue, and I was incredibly impressed. My favorite combination was the jalapeno sausage with the jalapeno cheese rice – just enough spice to clear out the sinuses without the fire burps later in the day.
I got checked into the hotel a bit after 4 pm, took a shower, and put myself together for the opening evening of Startup Weekend fun. The opening and closing events took place in a separate location from the rest of the weekend – teams worked on their ideas in the Geekdom coworking space, but the Friday evening and Sunday evening programming took place around the corner at the Geekdom Event Center, tucked into the street level of the parking ramp behind the coworking space building. Along with learning what works and what doesn’t in different startup communities, I really like visiting coworking spaces across the country just to experience the vibe of the place. If I lived in San Antonio, I could see myself working from Geekdom.
Over the course of Friday evening, nearly 30 ideas were pitched by the college students in attendance – a handful of attendees pitched more than one idea. By the end of the night, four teams had formed from the six ideas that advanced after all of the quick pitches. This is the highest percentage of participants pitching on Friday night that I’ve ever seen at one of these events. I was doubly impressed by the large number of participants who pitched two different ideas. This was one of the most easily energized group of participants that I’ve led as well – this is why I love working with high school and college students, because they tend to be a lot easier to motivate than a group of participants my own age.
As is tradition with Startup Weekend, the food served during the event is usually the best the community has to offer, and the event in San Antonio was no exception. Breakfast tacos, Asian fusion bowls, and local burgers rounded out the offerings, which were all made at restaurants near the venue. I wish I’d had more time in that part of the world to sample more local food and drink – there never seems to be enough time on these whirlwind startup community tours to sample everything, especially in larger cities. Even when I go to Denver for a week each year, I don’t have enough time to try everything I’d like, and I rarely repeat any restaurants while I’m there. It’s even more difficult when you only have a weekend.
Demo Day on Sunday evening went well, with a room full of people cheering on our participants. I had an amazing time leading the group, and it’s always fun to see the progression of each team from the ideas pitched on Friday to the final pitches roughly 48 hours later. You can always tell which teams have put in the work necessary to do well in the pitch competition – they’re the teams with the defined value proposition and customer segment, and data to back up their claims. We’re not looking for slick demos or unreasonable goals for the future. I’m hoping that at least one of the teams continues on with their project, and some day I hope to hear great things about them.
Flying back to Iowa on Monday wasn’t nearly as smooth as the trip south – the first flight was delayed, which caused me to miss my connection in Dallas. Luckily, I was able to hop onto the next flight back to Cedar Rapids the same day, and the delay allowed me to grab a bit more barbecue and a cool beverage in the airport. It wasn’t nearly as good as Pinkerton’s, but you never can have too much barbecue. I got home about 3 hours later than I thought I would, right around when the kids were going to bed. I was glad they weren’t asleep yet, since I hadn’t seen them since Friday morning. I went to bed about an hour later, because I knew it was going to be a long week ahead.
The next morning, I sat down in front of the computer for the first of four days in a row of online meetings, and the first day of this year’s 1 Million Cups Organizer Summit. As predicted, there wasn’t a lot of time to connect with other organizers during the main day of the summit – about half an hour at the beginning of the program, and your networking partners were selected for you. Otherwise, day one mostly consisted of passive viewing and minimal time to discuss much of anything. The breakout sessions on Thursday and Friday were better, but they focused more on answering questions rather than free discussion.
In one of the Friday breakout sessions, I was paired with two other long-time organizers, and we spent most of the time comparing notes on what has worked for our chapters through the pandemic, and what we’re planning for the coming months. What we’re planning for Iowa City basically lines up with other key chapters across the country, so I think we’re in a good spot there. I’m really excited for our first in-person 1MC Iowa City since March 2020 – our Entrepreneurial Event Panel was the final event we held at MERGE before everything went online, which is hilarious now that we’re looking back on it. Before that first in-person 1MC happens, however, we needed an opportunity for a bit of a dry run and an opportunity to shake off some rust. Startup Weekend Education Iowa City afforded us that opportunity.
We had about 25 participants show up on Friday, and we ended up with about a dozen ideas pitched on Friday evening, around which four teams formed. Three of the four ideas had a clear education focus, and I thought the fourth idea would turn more toward that over the course of the weekend. We had an almost completely new to Startup Weekends crowd participate this year, including a small handful of educators from Iowa and western Illinois. Like the university students the week before in San Antonio, the group in Iowa City really seemed to soak up everything that was presented during the workshops and all of the advice given by mentors who circulated through the event on Saturday and Sunday. The leader of the team that won first place actually wanted to dissolve her team early on Saturday, but I put my foot down and didn’t allow it – the idea was really solid, and part of the entrepreneurial process is to work through problems. My stubbornness paid off again.
Over the course of the two weeks, I think a new crop of Startup Weekend fans has been created. I’ve talked to the crew at Geekdom since the Startup Weekend event, and a good number of the students who participated that weekend and are interning with companies in the coworking space have raved about the weekend. I guess they were so pleased with how I facilitated the weekend that I’ve been invited to fly down to San Antonio again to facilitate another in-person event in December – more info on this in the coming weeks. Also, a handful of participants in Iowa City were asking about the next event locally, and I let them know about the statewide online event that we were contemplating for mid- to late January, with the next in-person event in Iowa City planned for next July (barring another pandemic or a zombie apocalypse.)
To round out my Startup Weekend year, I’m also booked to facilitate an event in Anchorage, Alaska, at the beginning of November. Like my trip to Texas a few weeks ago, this will be my first trip to Alaska, and I’m pretty excited about it. I haven’t had my first meeting with the event organizers, so I don’t know all of the details, and I don’t yet have plane tickets or lodging booked just yet. I’ll have more info on this in the coming weeks as well. With this event on the horizon, the calendar is officially full for the rest of the year and into the first part of 2022. It’s another shock to the system that the calendar filled up so quickly – like I talked about in the last post, I thought things would ramp up a bit more gradually and not feel as though a switch was suddenly moved back to the “on” position as much as it was moved to the “off” position in March 2020.
As much as I’ve been focusing on entrepreneurial ecosystems and Startup Weekends, I feel like I’ve been neglecting the cider part of my life! I’m still working on the stockpile from the most recent online Cider Summit, featuring ciders from Oregon and a handful of international ciders (because I also purchased the international box on top of the two Oregon-focused boxes.) Add to that the nine cans of cider I brought back from Texas – Roger got me a six pack of brut cider made in Austin, and I found a berry cider from Dallas at a small grocery store just a couple of blocks from the hotel. I didn’t get a chance to completely work my way through the stockpile before my trip to Michigan last week to steward at the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition.
This year’s GLINTCAP seemed much more “down to business” than it did in 2019, but it was still a great deal of fun. There were roughly the same number of entries as there were two years ago, and many of the same stewards and judges were back this year. Due to some problems at the border, some of the Canadian samples didn’t make it to the competition, which was unfortunate. However, the samples that were there from all over the world made for a great competition, and made for some sore feet by the end of the two days for someone who has relatively inactive for the past year and a half!
I made a great number of contacts over the two days of the competition, and I was happy to see a number of familiar faces. Several different cideries from the Denver area were represented as both judges and stewards – at this point, I have an open invitation to visit nearly any cider maker when I’m out that direction for Denver Startup Week later this year. I got to connect with a number of cider makers from Chicago as well, and hope to make it to some of those facilities in 2022. I also met a couple of cider makers from Virginia as well, the home of CiderCon this coming February. We’ll see if they play a big part in the event out there this winter through cider tours around the convention, much like the tours around northern California the week of CiderCon in 2020.
The organizers of GLINTCAP didn’t require entrants to send as much cider to this year’s competition, so there wasn’t a bunch of unopened cider left at the end of the second day, as there had been in 2019. Some of the cider makers serving as judges or stewards brought some of their work, and I managed to grab a bit of that during the closing ceremony dinner and party, to bring with me back to Iowa. Most of the social stuff was earlier in the week as well – I had my latest night out on Thursday, where we started at a local bar and then moved a few blocks down the road to Vander Mill Cider, where we took over the patio first, and then the taproom after it closed to the public.
It felt like this July was what happens when you try to compress half a year of events into one month. The switch was turned back on, and everything instantly went back to the speed at which it was traveling in March 2020. If I were ten years younger, I probably wouldn’t be so exhausted from these past few weeks. It’s a good thing that I have a few weeks coming up with no travel outside the area, to get some serious work done and recharge my battery again before the two and a half weeks starting September 30. Between Techstars Iowa Demo Day, Denver Startup Week, front range cidery visits, and the Startup Champions Network Summit, it’s going to be a busy start to the fall.
Until then, it’s time to get a number of projects done. I feel like I’ve barely been in the office this past month to get much of anything done, and what I was getting done revolved around Startup Weekend and 1 Million Cups – just kind of keeping pace with current issues and problems but not actually accomplishing anything long-term. It will be great to turn off social media again for a while, knock out a few videos and programming projects, and start plowing through the stack of books I’m reviewing for my book review series in 2022. Once my feet finish recovering from the few days in Grand Rapids, I want to start walking the bike trail – I don’t want to be miserable while I’m in Denver with all of the walking I tend to do while I’m there.
There probably won’t be another blog post outside of the book review series until mid-October. In a way, it’s nice to go dark online for a while. I went silent for a while as I completed The Cider Finder back in January, and I felt completely refreshed after the break. I’ve been looking forward to another stretch away, and now that I’m not promoting anything, it’s time. Startup Weekend Iowa Online isn’t happening again until January and Startup Weekend Iowa City is done for this year. I’ll have more news on finished projects and new endeavors in my quarterly newsletter – get signed up for that if you aren’t yet before it comes out on September 30, right as I leave for travel round 2.
So, until my next post, you know where to find me.
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