Massage Chairs, Boat Rides, and Blue Cider

Reading Time: 17 minutes

Routinely, I have a habit of scheduling way too much in a week. This problem is amplified when I travel, because I know I only have a certain number of hours in a place and want to maximize the time I have. I tried not to do this during the Delta Be Damned Tour in October, but then reality set in. Not only was I trying to schedule and do as much as possible while in a certain location, but a number of other projects popped up right before I hit the road, which led to a number of extra meetings being squeezed into an already tight calendar.

Needless to say, it’s been quite the ride on the Delta Be Damned Tour.

The last time I posted an update, I had a basic outline of the two weeks that I’d be in Denver, Des Moines, and San Antonio. Denver Startup Week was the first week, followed by a couple of days in Des Moines for the Startup Champions Network Summit, with a quick couple of days after that devoted to San Antonio Startup Week. In Denver, there were a handful of in-person activities taking place skewed more toward the beginning of the week, and there were a number of cider makers I intended to visit toward the end of the week – they almost perfectly complemented each other! With a day at home in between, I then was to drive to Des Moines for two days of in-person summit activity, skipping the final half-day of the summit to hop on a plane and hopefully make it to San Antonio just in time for a big-money pitch event and a day of general programming, followed by a day of sightseeing, since I didn’t get much time for that during the hustle of Startup Weekend in July. This basic outline was then to be filled in with specifics right before I got on the plane for Denver on October 3.

Boy, were the specifics filled in! Almost all of the days were 10-12 hours of activity – meeting people, on Zoom for meetings, visiting cider makers, and chugging through airports. I actually had to scrap a couple of things I wanted to do because I had just run out of steam by the end of each week – socially deconditioned from 18 months of Coronaworld. Luckily, none of the things that were scrapped were terribly important – mostly just a bit of sightseeing and non-work activities at the end of each of the weeks. It’s okay, because I’ll be back at some point to all of the cities I visited. There’s no sense in exhausting myself just for the sake of fitting a couple extra activities into a visit.

After a smooth flight into Denver and a visit with good friends on Sunday night, I was ready for the first session and first in-person experience of the week at the Denver Startup Week Kickoff Celebration, which like the other in-person programming, was ticketed and on a much smaller scale than 2019 and years previous. It felt like many were shaking off the social rust over coffee and breakfast burritos, and I wish the networking portion of the morning had been twice as long! After networking and breakfast, a number of founders got up on stage and talked about their entrepreneurial journeys in Denver. It really felt as though this was a huge step back to the way things were pre-Corona and was a great sign of things to come for the rest of the week.

Most of the programming during the week was online – Denver Startup Week was still a hybrid event for those who don’t want to leave their bunkers, and nearly all of the educational sessions were online-only. (I actually found one educational session that was in-person, and I’ll talk about that in just a little while.) At the Kickoff Celebration, we all had to grab bracelets at the door to show our “level of comfort” in networking – green for the fully adventurous, yellow for the cautious, and red for the germophobes – not sure why someone would sign up for an in-person event and then grab a red bracelet. As expected, most everyone grabbed green bracelets before heading directly for the coffee and the burritos.

My favorite online educational session during Denver Startup Week was Brad Feld’s Monday morning talk on his new book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche. I plan to do a book review on this book some time in the new few months, so I wanted to hear about the book from the author himself. It was great to hear the back story as to why he decided to write this book, as it differs quite a bit from his usual genre – business building and community relationships. I read the book in just a few sittings because I wanted to have it done before this session, but it’s really designed to be read one chapter a week over the course of a year. This session was the one online session I would recommend people check out now – the rest of the online sessions were a bit dull, and I’m probably not going to sign up for more than a couple of online sessions in 2022. Zoom fatigue is real, and I didn’t enjoy most of the online stuff.

Luckily, Monday evening offered a couple of really awesome opportunities to mingle, network, and enjoy some free beverages. One of the neat things about having smaller get-togethers during this year’s Denver Startup Week was that different venues from previous years were used throughout the city – no big tents along the 16th Street Mall this year. The Monday evening party was held at a margarita bar a short train ride from my hotel, and there were probably 100 people in attendance. Of those 100 people, I quickly ran into someone I know – Amanda McLernon from McLernon and Co. was sitting at a table in the middle of the party talking to several people when I spotted her and sat down with the group.

I met Amanda at Denver Startup Week back in 2018, and we’ve kept in touch since then, following each others’ business journeys. Right when I sat down to talk with her, she invited me to a private party on Thursday afternoon for her friends and clients, to thank everyone for their support over the years. While we didn’t have a long time to talk on Monday, we got to talk a bit more on Thursday at her party. I also had the chance to talk with her boyfriend, who actually happens to be from Iowa City! It doesn’t matter where I go, I end up finding a connection back home. (My theory is that we only keep the minimum number of people here at home, in order to keep the lights on and prevent Nebraska from stealing our corn.) Amanda mentioned that she visits Iowa on occasion now, and I’m hoping she’s able to make it to one of our entrepreneurial events here in eastern Iowa in 2022. We have some great stuff in the works, so keep reading to find out what we have planned…

It’s always a great start to the week to run into familiar faces, and the Monday evening shindig is usually the place for that to happen. That doesn’t mean I limit myself to just looking for the same people each and every year – I tend to make at least one or two new connections each year. I talked to everyone from software developers, to makers, to the owners of a place called The Beer Spa (which, of course, I had to check out for myself during a couple of free hours I had on Wednesday.) As the Welcome Party wrapped up, I walked a few blocks over to the Design Track After Party at The Block Distilling Company – I looked at their menu before heading over there, and noticed they make several seasonal gins, so I thought I’d give them a shot. The Design Track committee was running this event each night of Denver Startup Week, but Monday was the only evening it worked for me to get over there. I had some great conversations with some great people during the evening, and I’m hoping this event returns next year.

I attended three different pitch competitions during my week in Denver – the Youth Pass Pitch Competition, the DSW BIPOC Pitch Competition, and the DSW Pitch Competition Finals. The youth competition was online Monday afternoon, right before the evening social events kicked off, while the other two competitions were in-person events. There were some great ideas and businesses pitched in each of the competitions – I think all of the people who pitched had gone through preliminary rounds prior to Denver Startup Week. It’s hard for me to pass up a pitch competition, as you know if you’ve been following this blog for any period of time. I’d love to see a huge statewide pitch competition here in Iowa, and it might be something on the radar for 2022…

The Physical Product Showcase, while showcasing a larger number of companies and products this year than they did in 2019, didn’t seem to be as big an event as it had in previous years. They held this year’s event inside – surprised this wasn’t held outside as it had been in 2018 and 2019. Because it was inside, and there was a defined direction to walk through the event, it felt as though attendees were to “get in, get through, and get out.” Also, having the showcase on Friday removed a lot of the energy from the event – Denver Startup Week really starts to wrap up on Thursday, and anything held on Friday usually has lower attendance and interest. Many years, I leave on Friday morning, as there aren’t any sessions I plan to attend that day. This was the only real disappointment of the week, and I hope that they move this event back outside and put it back earlier in the week, either on Wednesday or Thursday.

I spent much of the latter half of the week visiting a number of cider makers around Denver. It worked out quite well that most of the Denver Startup Week activities happened Monday through Wednesday, with a minimal number of activities, in-person or otherwise, happening Thursday and Friday. This left my schedule wide open to schedule time at cideries around town. On Wednesday morning, I visited Waldschanke Cider, just north of downtown for a cup of coffee before diving into their collection of ciders. I visited Haykin Family Cider in Aurora on Thursday evening, and then traveled over to Wheat Ridge on Friday afternoon to Clear Fork Cider. The great part about all of these cider makers is that they are just short walks from commuter rail stations – perfect for enjoying a few beverages and not having to then drive back to the hotel. I brought a few things back home from each of the cideries I visited to enjoy over the next couple of months. (If you’re not following Cider Finder’s Instagram, you should – I’ll be posting there about my experiences at each cidery in the following weeks.) When I visit Colorado in 2022, I plan to venture out of metro Denver to a number of locations, including Stem Ciders’ Acreage north of Denver. However, there just wasn’t time this year.

The only in-person educational session that I found to attend this year was “Scent + Design,” a talk on utilizing smell and taste to improve the experience of a live event, in the same way sound, sight, and feel are used by many event organizers and managers. This is something I had never considered previously, but got me thinking about many of the events I’ve attended in the past and what I can do to introduce some of the concepts covered in the session at future events I run. It was also one of my events overall, mostly because I was handed a glass of Champagne when I entered the room – if you want to improve your event, a glass of Champagne improves any get-together by at least 10 percent. I’m hoping that more sessions like this are offered next year. The Design Track routinely holds the best events of any of the tracks during Denver Startup Week – this year and during previous years I’ve attended.

After a week jam-packed with activity, I returned home for roughly 36 hours before heading to Des Moines for the Startup Champions Network Summit held at various locations throughout downtown. I left home relatively early, because I had a two-hour Zoom meeting leading up to the beginning of the summit. As expected, it was a Zoom meeting that easily could have been about 30 minutes with a lengthy descriptive email. I set up camp at Gravitate early so I could grab a cup of coffee before the start of the Zoom. I knew I’d need at least a couple cups of coffee to sit through that long a call. Once the call wrapped up, I went straight into the summit activities – I had scheduled nothing on top of the summit, as it looked like it was going to be non-stop activity the entire couple of days. I definitely made the right call.

The best takeaway from the summit was learning more about the history of the Iowa entrepreneurial ecosystem. I started my journey several years after things started coming together in both Des Moines and Cedar Rapids, and really was on the outside looking in from late 2013 to early 2015, following the adventures of Andy Stoll and Amanda West on social media, before really starting to get involved in ecosystem activities in the spring of 2015 (and beginning to document things here in the fall of 2015.) I’m also glad that we’re beginning to think in terms of a statewide ecosystem, urban and rural, west and east, all groups included. I know it had to start somewhere, but we’re at the point in our ecosystem development where we are engaging interested parties in all locations and situations across the state. Silos are crumbling and rivalries are being put aside for the greater good.

It’s a great time to be building here, and it can only get better.

Networking with other ecosystem builders was emphasized all throughout the summit. I walked away with a bunch of new ideas and a great collection of contacts from which to draw inspiration for new programs and services here and across the state. Wednesday was the main day of the convention and had some of the best opportunities to socialize and learn from others. My favorite part of the summit was the final session on Wednesday (and the final part of the summit I attended) titled “Roses and Thorns.” It was an informal opportunity to sit down with several other attendees and go through a list of questions highlighting both wins and losses in an honest and open discussion. This was a nice end to the summit for me, and a great way to finish off a long day.

I’m seriously considering attending one of the next Startup Champions Network events – either the spring event or the summit next fall. The spring summit is supposed to take place in North Carolina in early April, and I’d have to move some things around to make it work. I’m waiting to see if they publish more details before I make a decision on buying a ticket. I may wait until the fall summit and turn it into a yearly adventure, much like Denver Startup Week, CiderCon, or GLINTCAP. As I move forward, I’m accumulating yearly pilgrimages at an alarming rate – there are only so many weeks in the year, and I can’t be on the road all the time.

After a long evening on Wednesday, I crashed for a few hours and got up early to head to the airport in Des Moines in an effort to get to San Antonio before the start of Tech Fuel, a headline event of San Antonio Startup Week. I managed to arrive at the auditorium just as the event was beginning and found a beverage and a seat a few minutes before the pitches began, as some local leaders were giving introductory statements. The five businesses pitched were chosen from dozens of pitches given in preliminary rounds, much like the Denver Startup Week competition. Three of the businesses were based in San Antonio, while the other two were based elsewhere in Texas.

After the winners were announced, there was a cocktail party outside on the patio, next to the river. I ran into a bunch of folks from Geekdom and a couple of the college students who went through Startup Weekend University San Antonio back in July. It was great to see all of them, and the food and drinks were great! Even halfway through October, it was still pretty warm and humid – while it was nice to have the party outside, I was missing the air conditioning inside the building. (Thankfully, a cold front moved through on Friday and Saturday was incredibly comfortable all day.)

I socialized a bit longer and then went back to the hotel to get a good night of sleep before checking out a day of educational sessions. A broad range of topics were covered, from the interface between technology and city government, to entrepreneurship among retired military members, to tips and tricks related to social media. I wish I’d been able to spend more time there that week, as some of the other days had some interesting topics and talks planned. The detour to San Antonio happened after I already had planned to attend the Startup Champions Network Summit. I’ll keep my eye on timing a bit better in 2022, so there’s not such a time crunch.

After rushing around, I spent Saturday doing a bit of sightseeing around downtown San Antonio, including taking the boat tour along the Riverwalk. I was surprised at the amount of activity that I’d missed while I was in town in July. Most of it is not visible from street level – there were a number of vendors along a sidewalk that goes under a major road. I’m going to go the length of the Riverwalk on foot when I’m there again and check out some of the activity up close. I’ve already agreed to travel back down there in mid-December to facilitate another in-person Startup Weekend – maybe the humidity will subside for a weekend and I can see the lights they were hanging off of the trees along the river.

After nearly two solid weeks on the road, it was nice to get home, see the family, and begin to dig through everything I’d accumulated during the trips. There were a number of emails to be sent and meetings to schedule. In addition, I needed to put together my presentation for 1 Million Cups Iowa City, as I’d scheduled myself to give that talk just a couple of days after I returned home from Texas. I had a lot to talk about on the 20th – not only had I not presented anything publicly about Cider Finder in several years, but the talk was my official send-off as the “face” of 1MC Iowa City and a bit of a discussion regarding what’s next for our local startup community and the statewide entrepreneurial ecosystem through my upcoming non-profit, Iowa Entrepartners.

If you missed the presentation a couple of weeks ago, you should check it out. I covered a ton of material, and this blog post has gone on way too long already. The brief summary is that Cider Finder is beta testing, and Iowa City Open Coffee, Startup Weekend Iowa City, Startup Weekend Iowa Online, and a statewide Startup Week are going to be consolidated under an organization called Iowa Entrepartners – an organizational home for “front-door” startup activities in Iowa. Some groups are doing economic development with existing business and large corporations, and others are doing great things around workforce training and funding high-growth startups. However, to this point, there’s been little to no focus statewide on bringing new entrepreneurs into the ecosystem, and what’s there is disconnected or siloed. I hope to solve this issue with Iowa Entrepartners, combining an organizational structure for entrepreneurial events with a “list of lists” of funding and mentorship resources in Iowa and beyond. With a bit of funding from grants and donations and employing a paid administrator, the program should essentially run itself, bringing in event organizers and facilitators as needed.

I hope you’ll join me for this latest adventure in the world of entrepreneurship.

The Delta Be Damned Tour didn’t end when I returned home – it continued on the next couple of weeks! Iowa Startup Games returned for the first time since the beginning of the pandemic the weekend after my 1MC Iowa City talk, and I stopped by for a few hours on Saturday to mentor the teams and to check out the final pitches on Sunday afternoon. There were a number of people mentoring and leading the students who I hadn’t seen in person since 2019 – astounding that it had been so long! There were only a couple of teams that really needed my help in moving forward, which on one hand is a good sign regarding the education they are receiving from The University of Iowa’s entrepreneurial programs, but on the other hand made for a rather uneventful mentoring session. I had to help pull one team through the process of ideation after they discovered no customers for their original business idea. They were able to pull something together by demo day on Sunday, and I’m glad they didn’t decide to disband.

The following weekend, I was on the road again, this time to the Iowa State University campus for the fifth installment of the Young Entrepreneur Convention. This event has had a different theme each of the five years, focusing more on building a personal brand and media marketing toward the beginning, and then turning more toward a traditional entrepreneurial focus in the following couple of years. This year’s event was actually supposed to take place in April 2020, but kept getting pushed back due to Corona. The theme this time was “founders helping founders,” and it was a great series of talks from people who had “been there and done that,” aimed primarily at an audience of beginning entrepreneurs.

Of the five years, this year’s installment of the convention felt the most relaxed and informational – many of the speakers in previous years leaned more into the motivational and felt like many were there to sell or promote something. For example, even though friend of the blog Ben McDougal had written a book, he wasn’t specifically trying to move copies during his talk. He spent his time telling his story and how he fit into the entrepreneurial ecosystem. I’m hoping that many of the first-time attendees got a better understanding of entrepreneurship from the talks, and could picture themselves building something great in the next few years.

Like Denver Startup Week, it was fantastic to see a number of people in person at the Young Entrepreneur Convention who I either haven’t seen since 2019, or have only seen online in the past 18 months. The entire month of the Delta Be Damned Tour felt like a reunion at just about every location. The Internet may have kept us connected during these years, but there’s just something to getting together with people that nobody has been able to replicate online. Zoom fatigue is real, and it’s hampering any event that tries to fully virtualize. This, unfortunately, affected the last leg of the tour, as Startup Weekend Alaska Online was canceled three days before I was to board a plane to head north this past Thursday.

The interest just wasn’t there to run an online event – something I’ve been seeing here in eastern Iowa and is something I’m worried about with Startup Weekend Iowa Online coming up in January. The major differences between our offering and theirs are cost and duration of the event. Like the online event we ran back in April, we’re not charging for tickets and the event is only about 26 hours rather than the traditional 54 hours of an in-person weekend. Our only major issue was that two-thirds of the people who signed up to participate in April didn’t actually attend the event. We were still able to get two teams put together, but it’s still going to be a challenge to get the majority of people who sign up to actually attend the weekend. The organizing team in Alaska is considering rescheduling the event in the early spring, but no decision has been made just yet – I’d still like to visit and facilitate, but we’ll see if the date they pick works with my calendar next year.

I knew October was going to be a busy month, and I didn’t even cover everything I did last month in this post! Between July and October, I feel like I accomplished two years of traveling in those two months. It’s nice to be back home for a while, to try to catch up on writing and coding, push some finished products out the door, and to enjoy the cider I’ve accumulated over the last couple of months. This begins the push to the end of the year and into 2022 – there’s a ton of stuff to get done, and not a lot of time left to do it. In between everything, I’ll be traveling to San Antonio one last time December 10-13 for their final Startup Weekend of 2021. I’ve already booked flight and hotel for CiderCon 2022 in Richmond, Virginia, at the beginning of February – the first in-person CiderCon since California in February 2020 and only the second in-person cider event I’ve attended in that same period. On top of everything else, there are a number of other potential projects and big events in the first few months of 2022 in the planning stage.

It’s a strange state of flux right now, but everything should fall into place before the end of the year. I can’t wait to share those things with you when the dust settles. Until then, enjoy a couple more book reviews and my traditional two-part end-of-year review and new year prediction posts on December 31. The twin posts on the last day of the year are usually my favorite posts to write, and this year’s recap should be a bit more fun to write than 2020’s. My optimism is beginning to return, and I hope some of yours is too.