Something really interesting and unexpected seems to have happened this year. Maybe it was the low-to-no expectations I had coming into this year, but it felt to me like life had a hard restart around Memorial Day – like pulling the plug on a computer, then plugging it back into the wall and pressing the power button. The amount of progress I’ve made as an entrepreneur, ecosystem builder, and leader this year would not have been possible without some sort of hard restart, epoch shift, or whatever exactly happened mid-year. Yes, some of it was part of a gradual progression of my career, but there was more to it than that.
It’s tough to put it into words – opportunities arose that weren’t visible, even if life had continued progressing normally through 2020, without a pandemic. The sudden stopping of nearly everything last year led to an equally sudden restart that I wasn’t expecting. I was not completely ready for the restart, and I felt like I stumbled a bit at the beginning. However, the long period at home was probably the best thing that could have happened for me, in order to gain focus and move forward. I’m now beginning to reap the rewards, and I feel like things are just beginning to ramp up, with more to come in 2022.
This year started as last year ended, fully virtualized, with the novelty of Zoom wearing thin. CiderCon would have been in Chicago at the beginning of February this year, with the week capped off with the Cider Summit tasting event. Unfortunately, CiderCon was an online event, and I ended up missing most of it due to the kids being home from school. There weren’t any tasting events, which made the program relatively boring – I usually grab tickets to 2 or 3 of the sessions that involve tastings plus education, always including the food and beverage pairing. As everything was online, the logistics of sending all of the required beverages out to everyone interested in tastings would have been a nightmare, so they did away with them this year. Cider Summit had a couple of “best of” boxes in place of the in-person Cider Summit that would have taken place at Navy Pier, as it did in 2019. This was the saving grace of the entire event, and I actually broke into one of the boxes early, during one of the CiderCon sessions I was actually able to attend.
Startup Weekend Iowa City was beginning to enter my mind after the conclusion of CiderCon – I figured that there weren’t going to be any more events until then, and it was still unclear in mid-February whether or not we were going to be able to pull off anything in person by July, as vaccines were just rolling out to most everyone by this point. As I began the earliest planning stages for the summer event, Ben McDougal contacted me about his interest in restarting an in-person Startup Weekend Des Moines event. Techstars had created an online version of Startup Weekend at the height of the pandemic in 2020, and I suggested we team up to put together a statewide version of Startup Weekend online, to give him his first taste of organizing an event. He had the rest of the organizing team lined up soon after, and we were able to put together the first statewide online Startup Weekend event in Iowa over the course of roughly six weeks. Without the heavy lifting of Ben and the rest of the committee to recruit participants, mentors, judges, and prize donations, we never would have gotten the event off the ground.
As May approached, I had two online events under my belt for the year, and I was refusing to add any more online-only events to the calendar. However, things turned the corner just a few days later. Startup Weekend Iowa City planning officially kicked into high gear when we got the green light from MERGE and the Iowa EdTech Collaborative to hold the event in-person in mid-July! The Iowa EdTech Collaborative had asked to partner with Startup Weekend Iowa City to hold an education-focused event, with the goal of creating education-technology startups and to allow teachers a low-barrier opportunity to experience the startup creation process and to use some common ideation tools, in order to better educate their students the following academic year. It was an amazing feeling to finally have an in-person event confirmed on the calendar, and it felt as though there might be a light at the end of the tunnel.
Along with Startup Weekend Iowa City setting firm dates, a number of other events began returning to the schedule. The Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition, which had been repeatedly postponed from May 2020, was finally going to happen at the end of July 2021. EntreFest, which had gone completely virtual in 2020, was planning a hybrid affair at the beginning of June. To top everything off, the team at Geekdom in San Antonio needed someone to facilitate their first in-person Startup Weekend since the pandemic began, scheduled for the weekend before Startup Weekend Iowa City. While the timing didn’t work for me to attend EntreFest this year (aside from a party the night before the conference), the calendar in July was officially filled by Memorial Day. This was the hard restart that I wasn’t expecting until 2022.
Once the train was in motion, there were no stops. The calendar for the rest of the year filled up even before the events of July concluded. I hadn’t facilitated an in-person Startup Weekend since January 2020 in Rockford, Illinois, before I made the trip to San Antonio in July. However, I must have done such an awesome job that the Geekdom crew immediately asked me to facilitate another event in December and to consider stopping by for a couple of days of San Antonio Startup Week in October. Also in October was Denver Startup Week and the relaunch of a number of social events that had gone on hiatus in 2020. In between Denver and San Antonio, a trip to Des Moines was in order for the Startup Champions Network Summit. The Young Entrepreneur Convention also returned to Ames at the end of October. Nearly every event that sent a representative to the ill-fated 2020 Entrepreneurial Event Panel at 1 Million Cups Iowa City returned in 2021, and I couldn’t have been happier.
Speaking of 1MC Iowa City, I’ve decided to wind down my involvement leading the chapter. On October 20, I gave a talk regarding my future plans post-1MC, as many of my other projects are quickly maturing, which will require me to be absent a number of Wednesday mornings in 2022. I officially stepped back from my role as “the face” of 1MC Iowa City during that talk, and I’ll only be popping in to emcee the event a handful of times in 2022. Once I’ve scheduled the rest of next year and done my handful of events, that will be the end of my run leading the chapter. I’d grown pretty frustrated with the lack of support in 2021 – both with the national organization for disallowing any sort of innovation on the local level to help better connect communities struggling through the aftermath of the pandemic, and locally for refusing to move the event back in-person.
By early 2020, I was already planning to move on mid-year from the emcee role, but then the pandemic hit and I wanted to see us through to the other side. I thought we had reached the other side by August, when we restarted in person meetings. However, within the month, we were back online due to MERGE closing down to outside events once again. My talk on October 20, had it been in person, was going to include cider tastings and treats. Unfortunately, I settled for an online presentation since there wasn’t enough time to find a new venue with as busy as September and October became. I hope that 1MC winds up back in person at some point soon, for the sake of the handful of people who still attend that event each week. Perhaps moving Iowa City Open Coffee back in person mid-January will cajole some of the other 1MC organizers to reconsider things.
In realigning my priorities late this year, I managed to secure a number of wins for myself, my community, and my career. I’ve been grinding away for so many years now, and it finally seemed like, for whatever reason, everything really started to fall into place. Some of the wins were part of amazing team efforts this year, such as the successful launch of Startup Weekend Iowa Online in April and the education-themed reboot of Startup Weekend Iowa City in July. The rest of the great things that kept happening were due to my persistence – friendly recommendations that I made on this blog accounted for a couple and finding connections through other connections accounted for a couple more. However, some of the coolest stuff that happened toward the end of the year were due to people across the country and across the world reaching out to me to help them build some really cool stuff.
It’s always felt a bit odd being cast in the “expert” role, and as the requests for assistance really started rolling in late this year, I’ve had a few spells where I feel like I’m not really qualified to play this part. Imposter Syndrome is real. Having people include me in so many things feels amazing at first, but then the feelings kick in where I feel like some sort of fraud. I know that it’s completely ridiculous – different people in different parts of the world wouldn’t keep requesting the same things of me if I weren’t at least slightly competent at what I do. There was a session at the Startup Champions Network Summit in October called “Roses and Thorns,” where we had confidential small group conversations with other entrepreneurial ecosystem builders, and I brought up my Imposter Syndrome during the session. It was nice to get those feelings off my chest during that session, and I haven’t felt comfortable talking about it until now. Fake it until you make it, right?
Well, I guess I’ve made it (or, at least, have started to make it.) Through a mutual connection, I was asked to join the Johnson County Advisory Committee for Horizons, the folks here in eastern Iowa who run Meals on Wheels and a number of other social services. It’s a cool way to bring together my love of community building and dust off some of the knowledge from my educational background in public health. I’d asked a few people in the past couple of years if there were any openings on any boards or committees, but made no progress. I made nearly instant progress when I finally found the right superconnector who has also had to navigate against the stagnation of the establishment. Over the couple of meetings we’ve had between October and the end of the year, they seem like a great group. My role on the committee is to help bring online a version of their Web site localized to Johnson County, which will hopefully take shape in the first half of 2022.
In September, I was asked by Gerard Iga, a Mandela Washington Fellowship alumnus based in Uganda, to apply with him for funding through the Fellowship Reciprocal Exchange program to create a course to teach new entrepreneurs in Uganda about the basics of startups and the Business Model Canvas. I met Gerard in 2019, while he was part of Mandela Washington Fellowship programming at The University of Iowa. He took up my offer of a free ticket to Startup Weekend Iowa City that summer, and I’ve been advising him on entrepreneurial ecosystem building since he returned to his hometown in Uganda. We submitted the application in mid-October, while I was in Des Moines for the Startup Champions Network Summit and hoped for the best. Just a few days before Christmas, they let us know that we were successful and were going to be funded for an online course!
There will be an opportunity in late January to apply to convert the course from an online version to a completely in-person version in the late summer, where I would actually travel to Uganda for roughly a month, with expenses paid through extended grant funding. Our current funding will purchase the computer equipment and refreshments to allow the cohort in Africa to get together in a classroom, with my portions of the class beamed in over the Internet. It would be a lot more fun (and I think the students would get more out of the program) if I were in person, so we’re strongly considering applying for the extended funding. If we stay online, the program will take place mid-March to mid-April, but if we get the additional funding, the course will be moved to mid-July. Stay tuned to see where this goes!
I was also asked this fall to be part of a couple of selection committees for different programs in 2022. The folks at NewBoCo asked me to join their EntreFest Planning Committee, to help shape the program planned for June 9-10 in Iowa City. The first couple of meetings have covered the basics – what types of themes should we have, how much to charge for tickets, and so on. Next week, we’re going to start reviewing the speaker applications and begin formulating the schedule based off of our discussions during the other meetings. There were a lot of great talks proposed by potential speakers, some I know and a lot I don’t. I’m looking forward to hearing what the rest of the committee has to say about the applications.
A couple of weeks ago, I was also added to the selection committee for the Iowa City Area Development Group’s 2022 Idea Accelerator Winter Cohort, an idea-stage incubator program developed by Heartland Forward and Builders + Backers to fund super early-stage startups and small businesses. It’s designed to fit into the array of “front door” programs, like 1 Million Cups and Startup Weekend, to get people with ideas the support they need to turn those ideas into actual businesses. There were some fantastic ideas proposed in the applications I reviewed, and I can’t wait for the full announcement to go out with the cohort picks early next month.
Other than the couple of virtual conferences I mentioned, everything I’ve discussed happened after Memorial Day this year. I managed to fit an entire year – practically two years – of activity into roughly seven months. There wasn’t much to be excited about in 2020, and this year has been the polar opposite. However, there’s a lot more to discuss and a lot more to be excited about in 2022! Continue on to part 2 and get excited about the new year with me. The momentum is finally back, and it’s time to celebrate!