How To Create an Exceptional Startup Community

Was reading this piece on the founding of America and I think it has great lessons for building great startup communities.  Here are a couple of contrasting sentences from the piece.   It highlights what I have been blogging about recently when it comes to networks.  Quotes from the piece in bold, my adds in italics.

“Believe me,” prophesied Otto von Bismarck in 1870, “one cannot lead or bring to prosperity a great nation without the principle of authority—that is, the Monarchy.”  (Centralized authority and systems, centralized bureaucracy, hierarchy)

Great sustainable startup communities aren’t created by monarchies.  Otherwise countries with monarchies would have them.  They also aren’t created by centralized bureaucrats.  Otherwise, lots of communities would have them.  If it was a simple turn of the switch, grab a little of this and a little of that and a pinch of this, they’d be simple to create and sustain.

Americans compensated for the vacuum created by monarchs and nobles by inventing a cornucopia of private, voluntary associations. “The extraordinary fragmentation of administrative power” in America, wrote Alexis de Tocqueville is offset by the proliferation of “religious, moral . . . commercial and industrial associations” which substituted themselves for the lords and bureaucrats that choked European societies.  (no hierarchy, networks, open and tolerant communities-not just of different people but different ideas)

No hierarchy or centralized planning means the responsibility, and more importantly the opportunity transfers to the individual.  You can be a self made person.  No limits, no shackles.

There is no central plan to create a startup community in Austin, TX.  Boulder, CO.  Silicon Valley.  NYC.

Startup communities need to pay close attention to the ethos behind Bismarck and the ethos that de Toqueville outlined because they are very different.  Bismarck’s heart might have been in the right place but that structure crushes entrepreneurship.  It has consequences for startup communities.

It also had consequences for WW2.  The Allies were more decentralized than the German Army.  The Germans always had to wait for high command.  The Allies made decisions on the fly in the field.   This was one of the reasons that the Allies won the day at Normandy, and over and over again in the Pacific.  The Japanese Army had a lot of hierarchy.

Startup communities that are sustainable and open are led by individuals that prize the individual over the community.  It’s a weird paradox but it works.