So far this year, I’ve spent 14 days away from home in three different states. Two full weeks out of the first thirteen. I’ve made a bunch of new friends and acquaintances across the country, and 2022 really has just started. I’ve already discussed six of those 14 days in CiderCon in my previous post, and the other eight have been all Startup Weekend – three in Columbia, Missouri, and five in southern California. For now, off with the cider enthusiast hat and back to wearing the entrepreneurial ecosystem building and startup building hats!
The calm before the storm in Columbia.
Originally, I wasn’t going to facilitate the Columbia event, but the original facilitator had to back out a few weeks before the event. It’s only a four hour drive from my house to central Missouri, so I agreed to help with that event. It was by far the largest Startup Weekend event that I’ve ever facilitated, and one of the largest that I’ve ever attended – roughly 100 participants split up into 11 teams. Usually, I’m working with groups of 20-30 people (with the exception of Startup Weekend Iowa Online back in January.) Most of the participants were college students, but there were a decent number of community participants as well. It was a great turnout for the relaunch of the program in that area after a long absence.
The Columbia event took place at the EquipmentShare headquarters, a repurposed big box furniture store on the edge of the city. EquipmentShare came out of Columbia’s 2014 Startup Weekend event, and it was their way of giving back as they relaunched the program – the same reason Cider Finder donates beverages to Startup Weekend Iowa City each summer. With the size of the event, it was nice to have such a large space in which to work. I found a “home base” spot near the stage, in the middle of the action, while the teams found different nooks in which to work. Rather than bringing in catered food, the onsite staff cooked all of the meals during the event – much more sit-down food rather than sandwiches or pizza. Also, they had a fancy coffee machine that would make just about any coffee-based beverage you could imagine – I definitely took advantage of that perk!
Startup Weekend Iowa City needs its own cider.
I haven’t been to a Startup Weekend event nearly as large as the Columbia event since Cedar Rapids in 2017 or Iowa City in 2016. The ideas seem to be just as good, no matter the size of the event. As a Startup Weekend participant, I really enjoyed the energy of the larger events and building something with more people involved. As a facilitator, I’ve really grown to love smaller-scale events, because I feel like I get to know the teams and the participants better over the weekend. The two events in San Antonio last year were on the smaller side, and I had a blast getting to know the college students in July and the community participants in December. Startup Weekend Iowa Online felt more like a “family” in the 2021 event with only a handful of participants, rather than the 75 we had go through the program this past January.
I usually stay in a Startup Weekend community on Sunday night, after the event concludes. However, they didn’t include Sunday night on my hotel reservation in Columbia, so I left about half an hour after the program concluded. On one hand, it would have been fun to be able to stick around and enjoy a couple of beverages with the participants, but it was nice to get home just before midnight and not have to burn an extra day traveling. I had only been plugged into the event about three weeks before it took place, so I wasn’t intending to be gone from home that weekend and had some work time planned on Monday. I made a lot of great connections while I was at the event, and I’m glad that I was able to help out with the relaunch of Startup Weekend in that market.
Not too bad an assignment for a Startup Weekend.
Four short weeks later, I was back in the air, on my way to southern California to help launch Startup Weekend at California State University Channel Islands, located about an hour or so west of Los Angeles and just a couple of miles from the Pacific coast. I had only been out to California once – for CiderCon in Oakland, right before the beginning of The Virus. It felt surreal the moment I got off the plane in Burbank and walked down the ramp to the airport building – no jet bridges at the nearly 100 year old airport, which is roughly the size of the Des Moines airport but with 20 times more people inside. The baggage claim area was also outside the building, which was the first time I’d experienced anything like that.
Camarillo was about 45 minutes from the Burbank airport, and traffic wasn’t nearly as bad as I was expecting. I checked into the hotel and had time to grab some In-N-Out (much like my stop at Waffle House in Columbia and Whataburger in San Antonio, there are certain stops you have to make when you’re in another part of the country.) My body didn’t adjust to Pacific time until Saturday, so I ended up waking up around 5 am on Friday. I grabbed some coffee and drove to the coast, to dip my toe in the ocean, before driving along the Pacific Coast Highway for a few miles. Once I got to Malibu, I turned around and went back to the hotel and got some work done next to the pool until it was time to head to the campus for the start of the event.
There were roughly 25 people in attendance, and a dozen ideas were pitched, leading to the formation of four teams. Most of the participants were college students, and many of them hadn’t ever done customer discovery before. Of all the groups I’ve led through the Startup Weekend process, I felt like this group was the most ambitious and tried to take the most away from the weekend. It seemed like everyone walked away having learned something, and it seemed like all of the teams were interested in continuing after the weekend – I think they were all great ideas and I think the students could take all of them quite far if paired with the right resources in the area. Hopefully, I’ll hear great things about those startups in the future.
Cheapest gas I could find in southern California.
I had to get up pretty early to drive back into the city to catch an 8:30 am flight, but I took the time to enjoy a couple of beverages with the participants. One of my favorite parts of Startup Weekend is the after-party. Sometimes, you learn the most about the participants during this time, mostly because you’re able to put away some the strict professionalism required during the event. You can have honest conversations about the startup process and about how the weekend went for the participants. The after-party is basically a requirement after Startup Weekend Iowa City – I think nearly everyone attended last year after we wrapped up on Sunday evening.
The next Startup Weekend trip on the horizon is to the north and east in Traverse City, Michigan, in mid-May. This trip was originally planned to coincide with judging at the Great Lakes International Cider and Perry Competition the week following, but things have changed and I’m not going to be able to stick around for GLINTCAP – more on this development later in this post. Traverse City is combining the Startup Weekend with a larger Startup Week program, as a number of locations do. It looks like this is going to be another event on a college campus wrapping up with demo day in a historic opera house in downtown Traverse City. It should be absolutely gorgeous up that way by the middle of May.
I’m planning to make at least one cider stop on the way to that event. Peat’s Cider Social is roughly located at the halfway point between home and Traverse City, and traveling halfway on Thursday would make Friday much easier. The trip back is going to have to be done in one day, the Monday after the event, as I’m expected back in Iowa City to help with the Hawkeye Student Accelerator – the reason I can’t stick around Michigan for GLINTCAP. I’ve been hired on to mentor and teach the students in the program this summer, and it’s all hands on deck the first two weeks of the program, starting the week of May 16. I’m incredibly excited to be involved with the program this summer, and potentially other teaching opportunities in the semesters ahead! (Of course, I’ll be documenting my experience with the cohort here in the blog this summer, so stay tuned.)
It’s a bit of a bummer that I won’t be making the trip to Grand Rapids in May. I’ve really come to enjoy my time at GLINTCAP, and even with the somewhat rushed schedule last summer, it was so nice to see a number of cider industry folks who I hadn’t seen since Oakland in early 2020 or even since 2019. I did get to see a number of people in Virginia a couple of months ago during CiderCon, but GLINTCAP is a different vibe than CiderCon. Hopefully, another opportunity will pop up in the next few months where I can put my judging skills to the test.
The student accelerator is but one thing on the calendar for this coming summer. Startup Weekend Iowa City is always the biggest highlight of the year, and the dates are set for this year’s event: July 15-17. While last year’s event was ed-tech focused, I’ve decided to run an industry-agnostic event again this year. I’ll be inviting a bunch of the ed-tech folks back to help out and put an emphasis on that sector, but there’s a desire by a number of people to have a regular Startup Weekend again this year. I already have the team lined up to put the program together – probably the earliest this has ever come together. Tickets will be going on sale in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on the Startup Weekend Iowa City Twitter feed for that announcement.
I’ve also been included in a potential online Startup Weekend being planned for late May, focusing on low-code and no-code technology. It will be interesting to see how much of what we’ve learned from the success of Startup Weekend Iowa Online the past two years (or if they use any of those learnings at all – the lead organizers haven’t asked about it.) Unless things start moving significantly faster, I don’t expect this event to actually happen at the end of May – the ticket page is not up yet, people and prizes are not yet lined up, and the first introductory meeting was just last week. There was a bit more momentum at this point when we put together Startup Weekend Iowa Online in 6 weeks in 2021, and we only had 20 participants. I’m going to hang with the project to see if it goes anywhere – I have my doubts, though.
A lot of projects that involve more than 2 or 3 entrepreneurial ecosystem builders at a time tend to perpetually move in circles, especially the projects that try to have a “supergroup” of more than 6 before launching anything. It’s probably the most frustrating thing about this profession. Just build a thing, line people up, and run the experiment. Don’t over-engineer things, and don’t start analyzing things until you’ve run the program. There’s a weird perfectionist streak that I’ve noticed among entrepreneurial ecosystem builders that runs completely counter to the lean methodology used to build most startups. I think a lot of it is academics versus practitioners – ecosystem builders really do need to jump in head-first and try to get the startup founder experience. Startup Weekend is a great way to do this, but there needs to be something beyond that – maybe a temporary one or two month-long internship-type experience in a fast-scaling startup for an ecosystem builder.
Seriously, guys. Don’t make me build something else.
Speaking of building something new – I’m going to be pitching the Iowa Entrepartners non-profit idea to The James Gang, a non-profit organization incubator here in Iowa City. After talking with one of the board members, I feel like this is the fastest way to get the organization off the ground – I provide the idea and the momentum for the project and they provide the infrastructure. As I’ve discussed before, I run a bunch of programs that need a home, and a non-profit home would allow me to fundraise more easily for those programs as well as future projects, like Iowa Startup Week and evening social events. It’s the right time to launch this – people want to get together in person (for the most part) to build things and make connections.
I’m still waiting to hear whether or not I’m going to be traveling to Uganda to teach entrepreneurship – in the next couple of weeks, I should have this answer. I’ve started to sketch out the basics of the course, and my Ugandan counterparts are starting to recruit people to attend the 10 sessions. I was hoping that I’d have news either way at this point, because it’s going to determine the amount of pre-work I need to do before mid-July. If I’m not going, then I need to write scripts, record, and edit videos to play during the class. If I am going, there are a number of things that need to be done for me to travel. Hopefully, we will hear back in the next few days.
Things aren’t going to slow down any time soon, and next week is going to be pretty brutal with all of the meetings. Once I get beyond the Iowa Entrepartners pitch next week and DesignDash on April 19, my calendar finally starts to clear up and I can finally have a couple of weeks of focused work time before everything picks up again mid-May with the Hawkeye Student Accelerator. I’ll probably pop in one more time before Startup Weekend Iowa City. I now have the opposite problem from 2020 – there’s so much going on all the time that I don’t have a chance to sit down and write posts about everything. I usually have to cut minor things out of these posts, or else they would be twice as long as they already are. In 2020, when everything was locked down and events were all canceled, there wasn’t anything to write about. I had plenty of time, but no material to cover. I will hopefully get back to a monthly cadence in the fall, but that part of the calendar is starting to fill up as well.
Wish me luck in the next couple of weeks. There are a lot of different things in motion right now, but I have high hopes that things will turn out for the best. Even if there are minor setbacks, 2022 has been great so far, and it looks like it’s only up from here!
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