Together: Startup Communities Can Change the World

Together:Startup Communities Changing the World

(Global Entrepreneurship Congress, 2015)

Confidential and Trade Secret

1776 is a global incubator and seed fund focused on startups tackling major world challenges in areas like education, health, energy, transportation, and smart cities.


We are headquartered in Washington, DC but our community, members and focus are global.

1776 at a Glance

1776 is a global incubator and seed fund focused on startups tackling major world challenges in areas like education, health, energy, transportation, and smart cities. Our incubator program is headquartered in DC, but we’re a global hub.

1

We believe many of the most promising ideas for solving major world challenges lie with entrepreneurs who live outside of Silicon Valley. To realize this untapped potential, entrepreneurs around the world need both a robust local community of support and global access to the resources and connections that can power their growth.


Our platform has multiple elements that to create an entirely new model for identifying and scaling tomorrow’s most promising companies from wherever they emerge on the planet.

In the last five years, the world has made great strides in recognizing, celebrating and encouraging entrepreneurship, but there are major questions left unanswered:

• Why, if we believe the data around the correlation between entrepreneurship and job creation, does so much that drives entrepreneurial success get left to chance?

• Why, when we all say we want our startup ecosystems to be “better”, do we still focus our definition of better on access to capital when, even in a developed economy like the United States, less than 0.02% of all companies ever take venture capital funding?

• Why, with the power of today’s technology, have we not made more progress in solving our world’s challenges -- how we educate our children, provide healthcare, access efficient sources of energy and deliver so many other government services?

• Why, in today’s hyper-global and hyper-connected economy, does geography still matter so much as to why some startups succeed and some startups fail?

Thesis #1 – How do we help one startup?

There are many key people in every community who are beginning to recognize the importance of entrepreneurship. Today, that role is largely celebratory. Chance is often the driver of whether these actors know, engage with and actively help a particular startup in their community.

• Entrepreneurs, especially successful ones

• Mayors, governors, elected officials

• Economic development agencies and staff

• Universities, schools and other training programs

• Co-working spaces, incubators, accelerators

• Angels, angel groups, venture firms and other investors

• Corporate executives

• Community organizers

• General public, friends, family

EXERCISE: Let’s BrainstormMeet Sarah…She has an idea. How can the community help her?

• Growing up, Sarah had a pen pal who lived on the other side of the world. They would continually write letters back and forth and share what their lives were like in their home countries. It was a great way to see the world!

• Now, Sarah is a teacher and a mother of two. She can give her children the same experience, but it’s harder for Sarah to figure how to make this work for her students.

• A friend of Sarah’s from teacher’s college lives in another country, so the two started pairing their classes to discuss current events and do basic language lessons.

• Their students love it, and other classrooms are asking to get involved.

With the community’s help, Sarah has decided to jump in and start her company. Now she’s faced with the task of doing discovery to find out if others think there is merit to her idea. How can the community help?

• Sarah decided to launch her company and she named it LetterLearn.

• As she’s started talking to her friends who are teachers, she’s hearing they are really excited about the concept.

• She thinks she is on to something, and now she needs to figure out what sort of product LetterLearn needs to be, and more importantly, how she might build a successful company out of the idea.

• She knows a lot of teachers, but they are all family and friends, so it’s hard to know whether the idea really one that could scale, or if they are just telling her they love the idea because they are friends.

Sarah has uncovered a lot of opportunity– both for features the product could have in it and options for potentially building a company. Now she has to validate them and, more importantly, start making decisions. How can the community help her?

• Sarah was able to talk to and interview hundreds of teachers, school administrators and technology experts.

• They loved her ideas and gave her a ton of input on what the product might be able to do, the features that would valuable and thoughts on how she might scale.

• She’s swimming in ideas and not sure how to choose the right path forward.

• What to build and not build? Which business model makes sense?

• And, she’s feeling like she’s in over her head. Building a company is a lot different from teaching!

Sarah has made decisions about the product features and business model for LetterLearn. She’s gotten some beta customers, who are giving her great feedback. Now it’s time to put everything in to motion to start scaling. How can the community help her?

• Sarah has made her decisions on what to build and the ideas for scaling that she thinks will be most effective for growing her company.

• Now the challenge is actually putting it into motion.

• Until now, Sarah has worked full-time as a teacher and worked on LetterLearn in her spare time. And she’s convinced a lot of people to do work for her for free, but that goodwill is running out. Time to start paying herself and a team but the bank account is nearly empty.

• And, she knows from all of the work she’s done so far, that she needs to start executing on the sales and marketing strategy before a competitor emerges.

How do we help one startup?

• The community must play an active, not passive role in helping startups

get connected to the resources they need to scale or solve their challenges

• The things a community can do to help a startup vary by stage. There are

many interim milestones startups need to achieve on their path from idea to

scale. What an entrepreneur needs help with will vary dramatically from

idea, to customer discovery, to validation to growth.

• There are clear signals that an entrepreneur is succeeding or struggling at

each stage.

• We cannot successfully, systematically help the startups in our

communities if we don’t know who they are, understand the stages of

startup growth and the signals each present, and take an active role in

helping remove barriers at each of these stages.


Startups have common needs as they seek to transform their ideas into successful, high-growth businesses: training, advice from mentors and peers, access to customers and channels, access to capital, and media attention. But the type of help they need varies by their stage (concept, customer discovery, growth)

Curriculum Mentors and Peers Market Access Capital Media Attention

Nee

d

Concept GrowthCustomer Development

Progress


Startups in the concept stage primarily need education about how to build a startup and about their industry. They need to quickly become oriented around “the right way” to build their type of startup.


Nee

d

Concept

Progress

1776 has built an exhaustive curriculumthat melds Lean Startup concepts with deep domain expertise and functional training to create a highly effective, just-in-time, self-directed model of learning.


Startups in the customer development stage require access to mentors, industry experts, and potential customers. They need to test their ideas with experts in their industries and with target customers.


Nee

d

Customer Development

Progress

The 1776 mentors & partners network ensures our members have access to experts and potential customers and channel partners, each of whom can help them test and refine their ideas.


Startups moving from customer development into growth stage need access to markets and capital in order to drive scale. This can be co-marketing opportunities, channel access, media engagement strategies, assistance raising capital and more.


Nee

d

Growth

Progress

1776 plays an active role in co-engineering success with our members. Our programs and partnerships ensure that our members have dramatically faster access to market, capital and media attention.

Thesis #2 – How do we systematize helping startups in our community so we

can help many?

What does a community look like at scale? What can communities do to systematically help all their startups?

• Support must become systematized. We must shift from relying on unplanned collisions to creating collisions. Subtle but important.

• Who are our startups?

• How do we know who is starting to succeed versus fail? (leading versus lagging indicators, at each stage of startup)?

• What can we do to shore up those who are failing (or transition them so failure becomes part of the process, not a dead-end)?

• What can we do to accelerate those that are showing positive momentum? How to systematize it so we are neither relying on good luck or “choosing favorites?”

We need two layers of Ecosystem Building to truly realize the opportunity for job growth in our communities.

• V1.0 -- Ecosystem building has been focused on creating the conditions– Convening

– Building Density

– Creating opportunities to connect

– Ensuring support services exist

– Make more capital available

– Getting mentors to participate

– Etc., etc.,

• V2.0 – “Better” has to be about achieving outcomes– More starts

– More successfully scaled companies

– Creating companies that have an impact – financially and/or socially

We’ve been studying this and executing on this for the last five years, through Startup America and 1776.

1776 at a Glance

1776 is a global incubator and seed fund focused on startups tackling major world challenges in areas like education, health, energy, transportation, and smart cities. Our incubator program is headquartered in DC, but we’re a global hub.

1

Thesis #3 – How do we drive global scale for the world’s most promising startups?

We’ve purposely built a global hub. We’ve built the Startup Federation, our affiliate network of top tier incubators with whom we share membership and mentors. The Federation allows us to identify the most promising startups in education, health, energy, transportation, & cities around the world.


We’re expanding the Startup Federation to hundreds of ecosystems across the planet so that it includes a top-tier hub partner in every major startup market in the world by the end of 2016. The entire purpose of the federation is to create action-oriented collaboration between cities.


Amman ParisDetroitIndianapolisBrusselsSeattleRaleigh-DurhamVancouverMexico CitySantiago

DenverSydneyMelbourneSingaporeHong KongBangaloreRichmondCharlottesvilleNew OrleansDozens of others

Through the Challenge Cup competition we are actively looking for highly scalable companies in every corner of the globe. Finalists and winners get mentoring, coaching, connections to potential partners and customers, media exposure and access to capital.

We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the great unanswered questions, both at Startup America and at 1776. We believe that, together, startup communities can indeed change the world.

• High growth entrepreneurship should not be left to chance. We must play an active, not passive, role in identifying the companies that are gaining momentum and surround them with an active layer of support.

• The single thing startups need most is connections – to customers, partners, and smart mentors – people who can help them advance their thinking and hone in on the products and business models that will most likely result in scale. With the right connections, startups will build capital-ready businesses.

• Startups can and should be innovating in areas typically the domain of government. New thinking will not come from wtihin the governmental system and we have the opportunity to drive disruption in our lives as citizens in the same way our lives as consumers have been changed.

• The only way we can truly realize all of the opportunity at hand is to create both a hyper-local and hyper-global startup community that is based on action-oriented collaboration across cities

Donna Harris@dharrisindc

@1776

Small Business & Entrepreneurship

Together: Startup Communities Can Change the World