Wednesday, October 21, from 5:30-7:00 pm Mountain Daylight Time (MDT). Check for the time in your area here.
The second Crash Course of the fall will spotlight ideas from the new book The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem. Brad Feld, who co-authored the book with Ian Hathaway, joins host Brad Bernthal live for what is certain to be an engaging conversation.
The Startup Community Way builds upon and refines ideas from Brad Feld’s 2012 widely read book, Startup Communities. Feld and Hathaway explore ideas about economic geography – the relationship between location and economic production – with an emphasis on startup activity and innovation while applying tools from complexity theory to better understand how startup communities evolve and adapt.
The release of Startup Community Way comes at a unique moment in economic geography and innovation. Reaching back over the past 40 to 50 years, the geographic advantage associated with talent concentration – particularly in places such as Boston and Silicon Valley – has been an accepted truism. The density of startup companies, employee talent, and risk-taking investors create a virtuous cycle that advantages companies located in startup hubs relative to fledgling entities elsewhere.
Changes rightly lead observers today to question this conventional wisdom. Skyrocketing real estate costs, traffic congestion, and other factors take some of the luster off existing startup hubs. Meanwhile, strong, viable second-tier locations for startups have emerged over the past decade. Other intentional efforts, such as Startup Colorado, born here at Silicon Flatirons, attempt to spur economic innovative activity in rural areas. Moreover, a variety of trends – spanning work from home, distributed teams, and tools used during the pandemic – seem to favor the ability to build companies from anywhere.