I don’t usually travel between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, which is probably why things felt so hectic this holiday season. I had agreed to help the folks at Geekdom with their final Startup Weekend of 2021 when I was first there in July, when they were first restarting in-person programming and needed some time to build their own facilitator bench. It was a slightly smaller group in December than in July, but still a strong showing for the community. After we wrapped up on Sunday evening, I got a chance to sit down with Matthew Espinoza, a fellow entrepreneurial ecosystem builder and the original connector between Geekdom and myself. We had a great time catching up over tiki drinks around the corner from my hotel, on the San Antonio Riverwalk. I’m hoping that he can make it up to Iowa City for one of the bigger events we have in the pipeline for the next 18-24 months.
It looks like Geekdom has several people trained as facilitators now, which bodes well for the success of their programming this year and beyond – they have a number of Startup Weekends planned, and need to be able to find facilitators for each event. I’d love to facilitate one more time down there, possibly this summer if they run the university-themed event again. I’ve invited Roger from Geekdom up to Iowa City to facilitate Startup Weekend Iowa City in July, as I promised him when he first started training to facilitate Startup Weekends. I usually leave facilitation to Ian each summer, but he’s decided to take the year off from facilitating and wants to participate in this year’s event. It’s going to be fun to mix things up this summer!
Speaking of Startup Weekends, we held our second annual Startup Weekend Iowa Online event at the end of January, and it was a whirlwind! We had over 125 people register, and of those people, over 75 actually showed up and did work during the event – a vast improvement in retention over the April 2021 event. The crowd that actively stuck around to build things during the weekend was roughly the same number as total registrations last year. Many of the participants were from Iowa, but we had a fair number of people join us from across the United States and across the world, even with the differences in time zones. Based on the feedback we received, people are hungry for these kinds of events near them, but they just aren’t happening. I think it’s great that we can show off the Iowa entrepreneurial ecosystem during these events, and maybe get a few people to follow along with what we’re trying to build (and potentially make the decision in the future to join us in person or join one of our bigger startups as an employee remotely.)
I’ve also locked in three Startup Weekend facilitation gigs in the first half of the year – two I asked for, and one that needed a nearby facilitator after their original facilitator had to back out. A week from Friday, I’ll be heading south to Columbia, Missouri, to a rather large event. When they added me to the event last week as the facilitator, the organizers already had 75 participants signed up along with a large group of mentors and sponsors. Many of the participants look to be university students based on email addresses. So long as the weather holds out, it should be a relatively easy drive and a fun weekend. I’m supposed to have one last meeting with the organizers before I get on the road next week, but it looks like most everything is already done.
Four weeks after the Missouri event, I’ll be flying out to southern California to facilitate a Startup Weekend event at California State University Channel Islands. It’s my first trip to the west coast since the CiderCon 2020 trip to Oakland, right before the rules were made up and the points didn’t matter. The main organizer is a faculty member at the university, and I walked her through my role as facilitator and through the checklist of things she needs to do to bring everything together for the event in five weeks or so. I plan to meet with her at least once more after she publishes the event Web site and opens up ticket sales. I’m not sure if she’s just going to target the students at the university or if she’s going to open things up to the surrounding communities. As I told her on the call we had last week, I’m always available to answer questions as they come up in the next few weeks.
Finally, in mid-May, I’ll be driving to the north end of Michigan’s lower peninsula to Traverse City, to facilitate a Startup Weekend the weekend prior to the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition in Grand Rapids. The timing couldn’t be more perfect, which is why I jumped at the opportunity to facilitate this event. I plan to visit a handful of cider makers near Traverse City in the couple of days between the end of Startup Weekend and when I’m needed in Grand Rapids to either judge or steward GLINTCAP. I finally got around to completing the Certified Cider Professional Level 1 exam – I nearly got a perfect score – so that I would have the necessary qualifications to judge this year. I am scheduled to talk with the organizers of the Traverse City event later this week to see what kind of help they need from me beyond my usual facilitator role, along with the timeline they have in mind to begin ticket sales and promotion of the event. It should be a great addition to my regularly scheduled trip to Michigan in May.
In addition to the normal Startup Weekend events planned for the next few months, I’ve been recruited to facilitate a vastly stripped down, 6-hour version of the program in coordination with the Iowa EdTech Collaborative and the Jacobson Institute at The University of Iowa, designed for high school students and teachers. The “Startup Weekend in a Day” program is being called DesignDash, and my role, on top of facilitating this thing, is to begin to train other potential facilitators from different parts of Iowa, so this event can be run remotely in the future, potentially all at the same time in future academic years. This is an incredibly large project, but I think we’re the right team to pull it off. When tickets are available, we will have to see what kind of reception we get from educators – it would be fantastic to see the available slots fill up quickly.
Speaking of incredibly large projects, I touched briefly at the end of last year on the Mandela Washington Fellowship Reciprocal Exchange grant I won in partnership with program alumnus Gerard Iga, who I’ve known since he went through the fellowship program in 2019 and participated in Startup Weekend Iowa City as well that summer. Along with another fellowship alumnus, he and I are developing a curriculum for new entrepreneurs in his home country of Uganda based on the Business Model Canvas and Startup Weekend. We were beyond thrilled to find out that we had been funded for a hybrid program – I would teach from the United States, and he would host in-person class sessions in Arua, Uganda. Not perfect, but we’d take it.
Then, the program decided to open applications for in-person reciprocal exchanges! We’ve decided to apply for this extra money so I could make the trip to Uganda this summer to teach the course in person, in the venue already chosen by Gerard. No dealing with spotty Internet connections if we’re selected for an in-person exchange! We’ve tried to have a handful of Zoom meetings while we’ve been planning the course, and it’s always been a challenge to keep a steady connection on the African end of the call. I was planning to record all of the lectures and both physically mail a thumb drive with the lectures to Arua, as well as place everything on Dropbox. We will find out in April whether or not we receive the funding and the permission to do everything in person. Let’s hope our luck holds up for another round!
I’m helping design and execute both a 6-hour version of Startup Weekend for high school students and teachers, and a 3-week version of Startup Weekend for new Ugandan entrepreneurs. At times, I feel a bit like a one-trick pony. If you wondered why I haven’t written anything on the blog until now, this is why. With the exception of the first week of February, I feel as though I’ve either been in meetings or had the kids home from school due to school closures or illness. The lone exception was the first week of February, when I was in Richmond, Virginia, for this year’s CiderCon – a welcome break from Zoom meetings and entrepreneurial ecosystem building, but an absolute flurry of activity drenched in both planned and pop-up cider tastings the entire week.
In a way, CiderCon was a welcome reprieve from the other projects I’m working on right now. It was great just to be around other people for a few days, enjoying beverages and talking with old friends and new. I saw a number of people I haven’t seen since the convention was on the west coast two years ago, and other who I haven’t seen since 2019, either at CiderCon in Chicago or Franklin County Cider Days way back in November of that year. I got a chance to sit down and share cider with a number of people who I’d only met online during the pandemic, as I built out Cider Finder’s online presence through social media and our video series The Cider Finder. I don’t show my face too much on our social media channels, so it took a few people a little bit of time to put things together – it usually helped when I gave them my card with the company logo.
I signed up to do a tour of Albemarle County cider makers on Tuesday, and only signed up for one tasting both Thursday and Friday of the convention. We visited three cider makers on Tuesday – Castle Hill Cider, Potter’s Craft Cider, and Albemarle Ciderworks. Of the three, my favorite ciders were at Albemarle Ciderworks – we got to try a selection of single varietal ciders as well as a couple of blends. My favorite venue was Potter’s Craft Cider, even with the trek up to the top of a mountain. Potter’s tasting room is an old church that, they claim, was once a house of ill repute before being converted into a private residence, and then converted yet again into the tasting room. Also, we had both a charcuterie box when we first arrived at Potter’s, and a box lunch before we left. Castle Hill had a beautiful, enormous orchard on the grounds, and were doing some really interesting things with their ciders, including aging one cider variety in these clay urns from eastern Europe that gave the cider a very distinct taste.
The Friday tasting was my favorite session. It featured two ciders each from three southern cider makers – one from Kentucky, one from Virginia, and one from North Carolina. I mainly signed up because of the North Carolina cider maker, friends of the app James Creek Cider. I first met the husband and wife James Creek team at Franklin County Cider Days in 2019, and saw them again in 2020 in California. We’ve kept in touch since then, and it was great to catch up again at the end of the tasting session. At some point here in the near future, I’m hoping to get over to their cidery and taste some of their ciders fresh off the bottling line. Perhaps I can find a Startup Weekend in North Carolina that needs my help in the second half of 2022…
There were no shortages of tasting opportunities the rest of the week. New York cider makers had a pop-up tasting on Friday after lunch, featuring a number of very interesting and very delicious products that those makers had brought south for the week. I had tried a few of their offerings at the Cider Share on Wednesday evening, but with the limited time, I wasn’t able to get to all of them before they ushered us out of the ballroom at the end of the session. The Michigan and Virginia Cider Associations also had trailers set up in the exhibit hall dispensing ciders from their members. The trailers were placed at opposite corners of the recreation area in the middle of the exhibit hall, so one could go back and forth between the two while chatting with other attendees. It seemed like there were a number of missing exhibitors, possibly last-minute cancellations due to the corona. There also didn’t seem to be as much swag around the exhibit hall, probably due to health concerns.
I was able to make it to a number of other cider makers in Richmond before I had to fly home. On Wednesday afternoon before the Cider Share, I walked over to Bryant’s Cider and had a flight of their tap room offerings and got to chat with the staff a bit. They have the ability to produce some cider in the back of the building in Richmond, but right now, they produce everything at their rural location. On Saturday afternoon, I took a Lyft the other direction to Buskey Cider, where I ran into another old friend who I’d met at Franklin County in 2019, where we talked about the week and shared a double order of sliders over flights of cider. I then walked over to Blue Bee Cider and enjoyed a flight and a gourmet grilled cheese sandwich from the adjoining cheese shop. I also walked over to Black Heath Meadery and grabbed a flight of mead before my final stop at a local Asian restaurant.
Over the course of five days, I was able to try cider from around the country, and managed to visit six cider makers and a meadery. I had some great food and shared some great conversations, and I was reinvigorated for the trip back home, to the world of meetings and deadlines. While I am having an amazing time building community here at home, it was a nice break to leave for a week and change gears into in-person cider mode. During the month of January, the kids were off school five days due to extreme cold weather, so it’s been a challenge to get much done. The house is still a bit of a disaster right now – I still feel like I’m catching up after basically going offline during CiderCon.
I would love to be able to take another week offline sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, there’s too much to do right now. However, the plan is to overload the first half of the year so that I can mostly travel and enjoy the fruits of my labor the second half of the year. Most of the startup events I enjoy attending seem to have concentrated themselves in the fall, and if the Uganda trip application comes through, I’ll basically go off the grid for the better part of a month, as spotty as the Internet connections are over there. As of right now, I’m not adding any more things to my plate – the power of NO begins now.
Right now, I’m not sure when the next blog update will be. I probably won’t have time to write anything until I’m back from California. I may not get to it until after DesignDash. Who knows! Either way, there is going to be a lot to discuss, including a number of things I didn’t even mention in this post. There were so many directions I could have gone with this post – I wanted to hit the highlights because I knew it was going to be a long one. On top of things, I have a ton of other writing that needs to be done. There are a pile of books that I’ve read and notes I’ve taken that need to be condensed into book reviews for this blog. I have a number of bug fixes I need to do as the very closed beta of Cider Finder rolls on. Oh, and I have an entire curriculum to create for the Ugandan class. At least Christmas and the kids’ birthdays are in the rear-view mirror, so that takes a couple of things off of my plate.
So, we’ll probably talk again in April, when I come back up for air once again. At least spring will hopefully be here by then. Wish me luck as I dive back into the thick of things!
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