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Building A Community
Presented by: @davidgosse & @jennifergosse
LaunchUP LV September 14th, 2011
Communities need to do, not just talk about, but actually execute on for us all to benefit from
what entrepreneurship can deliver. Everyone needs to get involved.
Startup Weekend LV Photo Courtesy of Jonathan Mumm
Building an Entrepreneurial Community
1. Team of dedicated leaders.
2. Pool of available talent.
3. Access to funding.
4. Community base of early
adopters.
1. Dedicated Team Of Leaders, 15+ Year Path
• First is the recognition that Silicon Valley is a special place. It’s futile to try to be the next Silicon Valley.
• Incorporate the strengths that fit with your community and play to those strengths.
• Experienced entrepreneurs and investors should want to work with new entrepreneurs.
• The leaders have to keep caring about the place they live in, their community, and the dynamics amongst them, the people in the community.
“The problem with the Internet startup craze isn’t that too many people are starting
companies; it’s that too many people aren’t sticking with it.” – Steve Jobs
1. Dedicated Team: Rock Stars!
• “Tony Hsieh is someone with the will, the vision, the connections and the capital to get stuff done. He’s clearly decided this is his next big project.”
• “Unlike most revitalization projects, there’s no need to hope that if you build it, they will come. Tony is both building it, and bringing the people to make it work.” (“Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh named the
‘smartest’ in town,” Sept. 5, 2011, vegasinc.com)
• There are a lot of great people making Vegas Tech happen.
Great start-ups emerge from great start-up culture.
Find the leaders on Twitter using #VegasTech, baby! Tony Hsieh,
CEO Zappos
Ideas can be stolen and replicated, but execution is unique and truly valuable. Talent makes
execution. It makes good products. It creates opportunity. It provides vision.
2. Talent Pool: Building A Startup City
• Entrepreneurs need a place to call their own. Space matters – it connects, enables and inspires.
• Successful startup cities must have space that can accommodate the startup population.
• Tony Hsieh closed a deal, to be announced mid-September, for a project that would fly small jets back and forth from the Bay Area to Las Vegas to get more educated, innovative, smart-dude, techie-types in Vegas more often. It’s happening, folks!
Vegas Jelly - #VegasTech Thriving!
2. Talent Pool: Successful Entrepreneurial Culture
Work openly: bringing together entrepreneurs has been made
exponentially easier by the co-working phenomenon.
2. Talent Pool: Tech Giants Birth Successful
Startup Founders
At UNLV, David Williams (instructor), Neal Smatresk (UNLV president) Dominic Morocco
(entrepreneur in residence), are all aggressively increasing entrepreneurial and computer
science enrollment numbers.
Venture capital investments continued to grow at a rapid clip in the second quarter of 2011,
with VC firms investing $7.5 billion across 966 deals. $2.3 billion into 275 web companies.
3. Funding: VC Investments in Web Reaches 10
Year High
Startups outside of the Bay Area were largely overlooked or ignored. Lately, that myth has
been exposed, and startup ecosystems have sprung up all across the United States.
3. Funding: Embrace Uniqueness Of Your
Community
“Everyone's door was open and everyone was rooting for our success. Due to everyone's
efforts working together, Boulder has become one of the top cities to start and build a
software business.” – Kimble Musk
• Benchmarks: 10k, 100k, 1mil users.
• Speed is important, can impact funding.
• Community is part of hitting numbers.
• Vegas must focus on building an early- adopter community support system.
4. Early Adopters: 10,000 Users Benchmark
4. Foursquare Focused On Local Communities
Many startups leverage early adopters in local
communities to spread the word and fuel growth.
They launched at SXSW which really kicked off their growth,
they added around 4k users that month. Their growth died
down for the following two months. They started growing
exponentially in June when they began aggressively adding
new cities. This growth was probably further driven by press
around their initial fundraising in September. The new cities
along with the press allowed them to pick up latent demand
for the product by users who had been exposed to it but not
able to use it prior to that time.
Vegas Is A Startup Community!
You can make a difference in this community. There are an
unlimited number of ways that you can get involved. Support the
Vegas entrepreneurial startup community!
www.vegasstartups.com
1. We have a team of dedicated leaders.
2. There is a growing pool of available
talent in and moving here.
3. The funding is starting to flow in.
4. We’re building an amazing community
base of early adopters!
