If You Can Dodge a Train, You Can Dodge a Ball

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Never before has it taken me three entire days to get plugged back into life at home after a long trip out of state. Should that be the metric to gauge the success of a trip? Number of days following to get back to normal and back to work on things? It didn’t take me nearly as long to get things going after the big trip I took to GLINTCAP and Monetery this past spring – I needed roughly a day to unpack, get things going with the family and in the house, and to get back to work. However, there was more space in between the two events, even with travel included. I had an entire day in Des Moines before Monetery to get some work done. This trip, I had roughly 36 hours at home between arriving home from the flight from Denver and when I had to be in the car driving to Kansas City, including sleep and repacking my suitcase. Add to that the minimal amount of sleep I got on either trip, and the lack of time to work on anything while on the road – this was the most intense trip I’ve taken in quite some time.

So, buckle up folks. This is going to be quite the post.

The flight to Denver was relatively uneventful, and the AirBnB where I stayed for the week was fantastic – it felt a bit like a cave perched just on the edge of the action, since it was a basement apartment in a house across I-25 from downtown Denver. For the little bit of time I was there to sleep and shower in the morning, it was incredibly peaceful, and I could barely hear any noises coming from outside the apartment. I really wish I’d built in an extra day where I could have just relaxed and gotten a bit of work done in the apartment and toured the neighborhood I was in just a bit more.

The Kickoff Celebration was much different than previous years, with no breakfast provided to attendees, and the programming taking place in a different venue than the past two years, in a theater instead of a convention center with tables. This was the first in a number of changes the Denver Startup Week organizers made this year, as compared to the previous two years I’ve attended. Even though there was no breakfast, the coffee was still plentiful, and the speaker line-up didn’t disappoint. It was a great way to kick off the week.

I then walked over to Basecamp, which had moved from the Commons on Champa to the park off the 16th Street Mall where the Opening Block Party was held last year (and again this year.) Having Basecamp in a more centralized location was a huge improvement over previous years, and I hope they choose to stay there in the years to come. At Basecamp, I attended Matt Mayberry’s talk about goal setting and walked away with a free copy of his book, which I’m planning to read and write a review to be published on this blog in the coming months. He has a fantastic story, and I walked away from the session with some serious goals in mind for the coming year, and some great strategies to tackle those goals.

Instead of immediately going to another session as planned, I decided to take a lunch break. The session I’d planned to attend had been moved way out to the RiNo neighborhood, and it just wasn’t feasible to get out there – this happened with a couple other sessions that I ended up skipping that had either been moved to the outskirts of RiNo or well south of downtown. (I missed another session because I didn’t sign up quickly enough and missed the 50-person cutoff.) I received a DSW Field Guide for free this year because I was one of the first registrants for the big week, and I intended to squeeze as much use out of the passport as possible. I found a pizza place that had a 2-for-1 deal on slices, so I made the walk there. It was in the Dairy Block, which was the home of several other events during the week, so I put that information in the back of my mind for later.

A good chunk of the sessions I attended had something to do with legal information. I learned about some ridiculous things founders have done with regards to their businesses (if it seems wrong or stupid, it probably is); how to run things once your company has started (pro tip: make sure everything is in writing); earned about the ins and outs of business insurance, finding the right lawyer, and trademarks versus copyright; and what the CCPA means for the future of business here in the United States. The rest of the informational sessions covered things like working with public relations experts (didn’t really learn much from this one – already knew that most business journalists are the absolute worst), tracking customer opinions of your business; tracking key performance indicators (track early and often); managing workplace culture (set expectations early to be the boss, not the babysitter); building sales teams (keep things simple and have policies in writing); and compressing and stripping product design sprints down to their most basic elements. It was a ton of information compressed into just a few days, and I’m still figuring out ways to implement some of the strategies and tidbits I learned into my current projects.

The social events during the week were amazing, as usual. However, I don’t think the Denver Startup Week organizers realized that so many people were going to attend this year’s events – they ran out of beverages at both the Opening Block Party on Monday and the Closing Bash on Thursday before each event was scheduled to end. At both events, I managed to run into people who I’d met at previously at Denver Startup Week. It was fantastic to reconnect with them and find out what they’ve been up to since we last talked. I also made it to a couple of the stops both nights of the Startup Crawl – Slack, Quizlet, and CyberGRX on night 1; and BluPrint and Pie Insurance on night 2. I also made it to the Designer Track After Party on Monday, which was a very interesting interactive art installation in a repurposed warehouse in RiNo, complete with music and beverages.

I made it to two of the three fireside chats during the week – the one I didn’t attend overlapped with the first night of the Startup Crawl, and I ended up having a ton of fun startup crawling. I did make it to Startup Grind on Wednesday and heard about the story of Snooze, an AM Eatery, which now has locations in five states. Hearing how she helped build the concept out from the original location to the present was fascinating. I also made it to Scoring Big in Business featuring John Elway, and managed to make it into the meet and greet session after the fireside chat. Main takeaway from that presentation: make sure you always have your next steps in mind, because the future will be here before you know it.

I woke up late on Friday, as I didn’t have anything scheduled, and just had to get to the airport a reasonable amount of time before my flight left. I checked out of the AirBnB, walked the few blocks over to Union Station, and grabbed some coffee and a ticket on the commuter train to the airport. I was able to get a bit of work done that needed to be turned around quickly before I got on the plane back to eastern Iowa. As opposed to the big trip back in May, where I didn’t stop at home between the two parts, I was able to spend Saturday at home with the family before getting in the truck and driving the five hours to Kansas City for the 1 Million Cups Organizers Summit.

Last year’s 1MCOS was a lot of fun and I felt like there was a great deal of camaraderie between the different organizers and chapters. This year had a much more formal and subdued feel to it. I didn’t make it to Kansas City before the bus left for the Sunday dinner and programming, so I ended up grabbing some barbecue in the neighborhood and going to bed early – probably a wise decision, as it looked like most of the programming on Sunday was focused on speakers, and less on getting to know the other attendees. I feel like I dodged a bullet missing the bus by a few minutes.

On Monday morning, I was able to get my registration badge and 1MC swag after I got to the conference venue. They had us download some strange app to find our initial small group, but then we didn’t use that app at all afterwards – a completely pointless maneuver, honestly. It took forever to get that app downloaded, since the wireless Internet signal was cutting in and out. Then, we had a separate app with the agenda and everything else we needed to know for the following two days. Every time someone said the phase, “use the app,” most people replied, “which one?” Hopefully, they just stick to the main app in the years ahead.

Much of the information presented during the summit seemed a bit contradictory. Out of one side of the mouth, the folks from headquarters talked about hyperlocalization of the 1MC event, but out of the other side of the mouth, they were handing down edicts on how we must conform to the 1MC brand. Hyperlocalization of 1MC can’t exist if the event must follow so many “guard rails and pillars,” as they phrased it. 9 am doesn’t work in some communities. Many communities struggle to find two presenters each week (also, in Iowa City, we found that only having one presenter each week leads to much better discussion from the audience, and doesn’t feel rushed.) What about panel discussions and town hall events? No discussion of that. It feels like the laser focus on the 1MC brand over everything is going to hurt the program in the long run.

The two full days of the summit felt like a massive info-spew, and there was really no time for discussion of best practices or exchange of ideas, as there had been last year. This was probably the most disappointing part of the event. I walked away from my time in Kansas City with many more questions than answers, and I hope the organizers of next year’s summit allow for more discussion during the two days. (Honestly, with as much information as we had to take in, 1MCOS should be a three-day event.) Don’t get me wrong – the breakout sessions I did attend were fantastic, and I took a great number of ideas back with me. However, this stuff would have been a great addition as a third day, after we all attended 1MC Kansas City.

Overall, I wouldn’t be surprised if the program contracts over the next year. The “core guard rails and pillars of 1MC” theme of this year seemed like a strangely passive-aggressive way of discouraging certain chapters from continuing with the program. Enforcement of the “core” is going to hurt small, rural chapters the most – the chapters that most benefit from being part of the 1MC network. Urban chapters that aren’t meeting the guidelines won’t have any difficulty continuing the same programming but without the network, as they already have plenty of presenters available in the area. They can just drop the brand and continue doing their thing each week. I’m not terribly worried about Iowa City’s chapter, as we’re already meeting more of the standards than any other chapter in the state – our deficiencies are minor and easily correctable if headquarters really starts enforcing this.

Cedar Rapids’ format, on the other hand, might be the first chapter to come under some scrutiny by headquarters. It’s a format and time that works for their community, but it doesn’t meet the strict guidelines laid out during the conference. I think they are going to be the test case in the Midwest region for whether or not a chapter is forced to detach from the 1MC organization, and if detached, can continue their programming. In my opinion, I think they would do fine outside 1MC, and it might offer them more flexibility. As it stands from the few organizer phone calls I’ve been on, the relationship between the Cedar Rapids organizers and the higher-ups in 1MC seems a bit tense, and I don’t see it getting much better if headquarters starts enforcing the rules strictly.

Speaking of Cedar Rapids, I made it to the CR Tech Crawl on Thursday after I’d returned from Kansas City. There were 5 stops along the tour in the NewBo district – stops 2 and 3 (Collective Data and Involta) were in the same building, and stops 4 and 5 (NewBoCo and Geonetric) were also in a building together. Those of us who completed the entire crawl finished the evening at NewBo City Market and received pint glasses. (I wanted the pint glass to complete the set with my Des Moines Tech Crawl glass.) I saw some of the usual suspects on the tour, but I was surprised and a bit disappointed that there weren’t more familiar people participating that night. Don’t get me wrong – it was great to meet so many new people during that event. But, where were all of the folks who run things like 1MC and the Freelancer Meetup in Cedar Rapids? If an event like this comes to your town, you should support the effort, not ignore the work of outsiders helping to build your entrepreneurial ecosystem.

This ambivalence toward outsiders is the vibe I got from the trio of organizers from 1MCCR who were at the summit in Kansas City. I ended up talking significantly more with Gracen from the Ames 1MC chapter than I did any of the three Cedar Rapids organizers. If I didn’t have a business relationship with the company that employs one of the three organizers, I don’t think any of the three would have bothered talking with me. It seemed like none of them wanted to be there, and they went missing for a good chunk of Tuesday afternoon – we only noticed this because we wanted to get a picture of all of the Iowa organizers together, and “the trio,” as we started referring to them, was nowhere to be found. Here’s hoping, in the future, that the 1MCCR organizing team will start looking to quality of organizer personality over quantity of organizers.

Now, after two weeks of running at full speed and only just now having a chance to rest, it’s finally time to get to work on some serious entrepreneurial ecosystem-building projects that I’ve had floating around in my mind for the last few months, and I’ve only shared with a handful of people up to this point. At 1 Million Cups Iowa City, I’ve been asking for people to help me expand the scope of Iowa City Open Coffee beyond Wednesday mornings. One of the biggest issues people have with attending Open Coffee each week is the time of the event – many people can’t make it to an event at 8 am on Wednesday mornings. I want to continue having an event at this time, because we do have a fair number of regulars who attend each week or most weeks. However, there are people who would attend meetups during the lunch hour or after work.

In the past, there were events at these times. Most of them have faded away over time – a lot of this happened because people moved away without handing the events to other organizers. Some of the events were discontinued when the nexus of the startup community shifted to Cedar Rapids several years ago, before Iowa City’s entrepreneurial community had fully formed. The energy and enthusiasm to run these events in Iowa City seems to have returned, and now is the time to launch regular lunch hour and after work meetups. I’ve started to compile a list of interested organizers, but we could always use more voices in the process. Contact me if you’re interested in joining the team.

The other large-scale project that I’ve been thinking about is something I’m calling Johnson County Entrepreneurship Week, planned for July 13-17. It’s going to be similar to events like Denver Startup Week with events throughout the week, throughout Johnson County, but has a broader focus beyond the startup community to encompass small businesses, freelancers, and others who would consider themselves “entrepreneurs” who may not work in a traditional startup. Like the Iowa City Open Coffee expansion, I’ve started reaching out to people who would be great additions to the organizing team and who might be willing to run small group sessions over the course of the week. The plan is to have most of the events during the week either free or very low cost, in order to bring in as many people as possible. The week will finish out with the Iowa City Tech Crawl on the evening of July 16, and Startup Weekend Iowa City, running from the evening of July 17 through July 19. Again, if you’d like to be part of the process of creating Johnson County Entrepreneurship Week, contact me. In the coming months, I’ll write more about both the expanded Iowa City Open Coffee and Johnson County Entrepreneurship Week in this blog.

So, what’s on the horizon for the next few weeks? At the end of the month, I’ll be traveling to western Massachusetts for Franklin County Cider Days, a days-long celebration of cider, now in its 25th year. This is my first ever trip to New England, and it should be an amazing experience. I’ll be within a couple of hours of half a dozen states, and I plan to make the most of this. I’ve signed up for the New England Cider Tour, traveling between Massachusetts, Vermont, and New Hampshire. I’m also planning to get over to the Albany, New York, area to visit a couple of cider makers there (and maybe grab a steamed ham or two.)

Here are some other events that I’ll be attending during Franklin County Cider Days:

• Tasting of Calvados and Apple Brandy – I briefly got the chance to sample both Calvados and Apple Brandy during the Chicago Cider Summit in February. I’m trying to figure out how to position these beverages in Cider Finder and future apps focusing on different adult beverages. In the cider world, there are a ton of overlapping beverages that aren’t specifically cider, and it’s tough to decide where to draw the line for inclusion. I’d like to do a bit more sampling and learn significantly more before I decide where to classify these drinks.

• Cider Schmooze & Tap Takeover – I’d be a fool to miss a schmooze.

• Cyser: Pro Tips on Making It – Again, where do we classify cysers and meads? I’m including them in Cider Finder because they’re close enough to ciders to qualify. I’m fascinated about how these drinks are made, and this should be a great opportunity to learn more.

• The Wild Apple Forests of Kyrgyzstan – I, for one, did not know there were wild apple forests in Kyrgyzstan. This should be interesting.

• Cider Pairing Lunch with Artifact Ciders at North Village Smokehouse – Smoked meats and ciders. There are no losers in this situation.

• USACM Cider Salon at Unity Park – Similar to the Chicago Cider Summit and the Grand Rapids Cider Festival, this should be an amazing opportunity to sample products from New England cider makers.

• Cooking Demos at Clarkdale Fruit Farms – Continuing the theme of pairing food and cider, this should be a fun way to combine education and some fresh New England country air.

• North vs. South Apple Tasting Smackdown – Much like a schmooze, I’d be a fool to miss a smackdown.

• Cider and Cheese Pairing with Provisions of Northampton – One more pairing event, this time featuring cheeses. Yum.

These last 3 months of 2019 are going to be busy, but everything done now should lay the groundwork for an amazing 2020. My next narrative blog post will cover my travel to and from New England and will discuss how I’m wrapping up the year as we move into the holiday season. At the end of December, you can look forward to my recap of the past year as well as my thoughts on the coming year. I’ll also be posting a couple more book reviews before the end of the year, and expect more of those going into next year. Stay tuned, because the next 3 months should be eventful.