On a regular basis I talk to someone that wants to be an entrepreneur or wants to help entrepreneurs. I like to ask what steps they’ve taken to make that happen and there usually isn’t as much concrete progress as I would hope. My response is always the same: get involved with the startup community and begin participating. There are so many good resources, places, and programs now that it’s super easy to get involved.
Here are a few ways to get involved with the Atlanta startup community:
- Follow the Atlanta Tech Village, Hypepotamus, and ATDC on Twitter
- Subscribe to the Atlanta Tech Village, Hypepotamus, and ATDC email newsletters
- Attend the regular Atlanta Startup Village and TAG Entrepreneur events
- Grab the event calendar feed from Startup Atlanta
With so many events, it actually becomes easy to attend too many events and not make enough progress on your startup. Find the right balance with respect to getting involved but most importantly just start.
What else? What are some other ways to get involved with the Atlanta startup community?
I agree but one of the big problems is that Atlanta has so many events that have no structure, no extended network, and no real benefit and it creates what Hypepotamus has coined as “fragmented awesomeness” instead of a “connected awesomeness.” When I moved back from Oregon I was looking for any way I could to get involved in the startup community and I was lucky enough to be able to bring the Startup Grind, an event with a national support to Atlanta. After attending a few Startup Chowdown lunches at the Atlanta Tech Village I had found a venue, a speaker, and a group of budding entrepreneurs all interested in attending our events. It shows how easy it is to get involved with just a few “serendipitous interactions.” We had our inaugural event last Wednesday with an interview from Co-Founder and Head of Product at Scoutmob, Michael Tavani, and catering from Farm Burger and SweetWater, and it was a huge success. We will continue to have monthly startup mixers with fireside chat style interviews, with our next event scheduled November 14th at the Atlanta Tech Village, but our goal is to build a network that helps the amazing startups of Atlanta that are already doing great things to collaborate with each other. This will help to build an event that educates and advances the startup community instead of just fragmenting it more.
Great ideas, David. Another good resource is (your colleague at ShotPut Ventures) Sanjay’s Parekh’s startupgossip email list:
http://atlanta.startupgossip.com
and on twitter:
https://twitter.com/startupgossip
and the yearly conference he puts on – http://www.startupriot.com/
Reblogged this on Ned Morgens and commented:
I found this article to be quite helpful. I’m not the world’s biggest extrovert (might be on the introverted side), so know where to start can be invaluable.