How to Grow the Startup Ecosystem in Your City

Hey, guys, Matt Paulson here. Most of you know, I live in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and one of my favorite things about this city is that everybody in the business community wants to help see the city grow and kind of help the next generation of business leaders either start their own businesses or just succeed in their careers. There is a great culture of volunteerism and generosity that you don't always see in the city. Between kind of the local chamber of commerce, the city itself, the development foundation, and the local entrepreneurship center, they all kind of work in concert to help Sioux Falls just attract more people to the community, attract jobs, and help develop local businesses. Personally, I help kind of this cause by serving on a board of the Zio center for Entrepreneurship, by leading local community, group of entrepreneurs, and by just helping organize our weekly One Million Cups networking events. I do. Some of these things I do are kind of visible in community, and that leads to a lot of people asking when they want to get involved and help grow the business community, the startup community. Some people come to me and just say, hey, I want to help. What should I do? What can I do to help grow startups? What can I do to help attract local businesses? What can I do to help the startup community? The natural answer that you might expect somebody like me to give you when asking you how can I help? Might be to serve on a board or a committee of an organization that helps entrepreneurs like Zio or 1,000,000 cups. I don't give that answer. And the reason I don't give that answer is because these things, people are already doing them. One Million Cups already has an organizing team of five people. And. And we just don't need a giant team to run a weekly event that gets 50 to 100 people to attend every week. So when somebody wants to help entrepreneurship but they're really not sure what to do, I tend not to give the answer that people expect. So there are kind of three different ways that I suggest that people in our community can help our community foster more startup companies and help startups grow and develop the local economy from the ground up, rather than just trying to lure outside talent and outside companies. So if you want to help startups grow in Sioux Falls, or any other community for that matter, there are three things that I think you should try to do, or any combination of these three, or even one of these three. The first is get some entrepreneurs together. Entrepreneurship. It's a pretty lonely game. You tend to work by yourself, and nobody really understands the story struggles that you face. But when entrepreneurs get together just for coffee or networking event or lunch. They have an opportunity to commiserate with people that have the same challenges that you do. You kind of feel like, hey, I'm not alone in this. Other people are facing the same problems that I face. It also creates the opportunity to create kind of random collisions. So when you get entrepreneurs talking together, they naturally form partnerships. They create business together. I can't explain it, that's just what happens. People get talking about business and then they figure out how they can work together. So I had a coffee event a year or two back. We called it Open Startup Coffee. A couple ladies at the event just started talking and at that event, they decided to launch a conference together. Just because they were both at the same networking event, they started talking about the idea and they decided to do it. My kind of collision story that I like to tell is, is that at one of the very first 1,000,000 cups event in February, March of 2014, I met a guy named Andy Traub. And Andy had written a book. And I thought, well, you know, I kind of want to write a book. Maybe Andy can help me write a book. So I paid Andy to be my book coach. So I had the idea to write a book. I met Andy at a networking event that I otherwise would probably not met him in person for a while, but we met, we talked, we decided there was a business arrangement that made sense for both of us. So he was my book coach for my first book and then I wrote a book. So that's kind of my collision story. You know, it's really not hard to get entrepreneurs together. If you make an event for entrepreneurs and you make it halfway decent, have it at a good place, at a good time, people are going to show up and good things happen. When entrepreneurs get together, there really just needs to be somebody being that catalyst, saying, hey, let's all go for coffee or let's have lunch or let's have a networking event. Most entrepreneurs are super busy. They might have some time to go to a networking event, but they probably don't have time to organize one themselves. If you want to help, consider just throwing a networking event or any kind of event where you can get entrepreneurs together. The second thing that you can do if you want to help grow the startup community in Sioux Falls, or I guess pretty much anywhere, is to build a great business in your community. There's probably a lot of different reasons why there aren't more high growth or high tech startups coming out of Sioux Falls. We don't have a fantastic university base and we don't have as much capital or risk capital as you might like to have available. We're pretty much the only angel fund in our community. And then there's some individual angels, but compared to bigger cities, there's just not a lot of capital sources. One of the reasons that maybe we don't have more startups that less people think of is that we just don't have a ton of success stories of people that have built startups in Sioux Falls and then grown them to 10 or $100 million in revenue. The best example we have in recent history is Docutap. And companies like Docutap maybe come along once every 10 or 20 years. They just don't happen that often. If we had a new company coming out of Sioux falls that generates $10 million a year or more in revenue and they all tell their stories, people are going to get inspired by that. They'll see those success stories from people that have kind of gone through the wringers of entrepreneurship and came out successful and they'll say, I want that for myself. I'm going to give a stab at it too. Don't always think that your involvement has to be helping put together events or doing networking things. Sometimes you just need to set an example for people and tell your story. The third thing that you can do is think about what existing skills that you might have and then just apply them to the startup community. When it comes to helping grow startups in Sioux Falls, I'm probably seen as one of the two or three people that really kind of move the startup community forward. But they but there are only a couple things that I actually really do. One is I invest in startups because I'm a half decent angel investor. I've got the capital to do it. I've been there myself and I'm pretty good at identifying the next steps a company should take. The other thing I do is I help create community. I'm pretty good at organizing, promoting events and getting people to talk to one another at events. I don't do a whole lot of other things. I don't run an accelerator program. I'm not trying to do technology transfer. I'm not trying to do post seed stage venture capital. I'm not helping the development foundation lower companies to town. I just do the two things that I'm uniquely equipped to do because no one person can do everything or should do everything. And I wouldn't do a good job if I was trying to help startups in a way that was just outside of my natural skills. And abilities. Think about what gifts and abilities that you already have. Think about how you might be able to use those abilities to help grow the startup ecosystem. So maybe you're an accountant and you can help startups create financial projections. Maybe you're an amazing marketer and you can help companies develop their strategy to market on Facebook or Google or wherever else. Maybe you're even just a good baker and you can bring cupcakes to startup events. You don't have to do anything all that unique or all that special because the way that the startup community succeeds in Sioux Falls is. Is kind of by having everybody help in some small way. Good example. There's a gal named Kim Vanderpoel. She asked me this question about a year ago. I want to help the startup community. What do I do? And we talked about it and talked about what her talents are and her abilities are. And she kind of came up with the idea of having a women's Entrepreneur's coffee meetup every month. It's not a major thing, but it's a point of connection, and it's something she can do, and it uses her gifts and it helps the ecosystem. If you get 30 women entrepreneurs together for coffee at Queen City Bakery, they talk about their ideas. You know, some of them are going to start businesses together or at least be encouraged by knowing that they're not in it alone. So if you are interested in helping grow the startup community in Sioux Falls or your city or wherever, you know, really, it's not rocket science. It can be as simple as getting some entrepreneurs together and then just let those collisions naturally happen. You can also set an example for other people by just building a great business and telling your story. Then finally, just think about what you're already good at and apply a skill or a gift or an ability that you already have and then use that ability to help startups grow in your community. So hopefully this video will give you some ideas and encourage you to think about how you might be able to grow your startup and business community in your city. So I think that's it. Thanks for watching.