Over the past four days I’ve attended three different startup events. Each event served a slightly different purpose and had overlap in attendees. One of the benefits of a medium-sized tech startup community, like what’s found in Atlanta, is that there are a tremendous number of events and get togethers. Only, there’s a real risk in people attending events and equating that to making progress as an entrepreneur.
Attending events is for learning, networking, and helping each other. If someone’s repeatedly attending startup events, and not actually in the startup game, it becomes startup theatre: a form of entertainment and enjoyment with no advancement. Even worse, it can bring a sense of accomplishment that you’re doing something, when, in fact, no progress is being made.
Here are a few thoughts on startup theatre:
- Entrepreneurship is best learned by doing and accelerated by the quality teaching, mentoring, etc
- Attending events is a great way to get to know people in the community, but shouldn’t be a substitute for actually working on something (see 3 Next Steps for an Entrepreneur Without an Idea and Finding a Startup Idea)
- Accountability is an important component of a health startup community, and starts with repeatedly asking direct questions like “what have you accomplished in the last 30 days?” and “how close are you to product/market fit?”
Startup theatre is a very real challenge for startup communities around the world. Startup communities should work hard to maintain a bias towards action and not theatre.
What else? What are some other thoughts on startup theatre?
Hello
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Best regards,
Susan
Susan Krauss President and Founder Green Corsair Tech Labs LLC. Suekrauss@urgrad.rochester.edu Greencorsairlabs@yahoo.com
Confidential Communications. Trade Secrets. Non Compete. Non Solicit. Non Disclose.
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I find this post super relatable. Too often I got to networking events and just end up huddling in a group with people I already know.
It’s important to remember the reason you go to these events…to make new contact and expand your network.
Thanks for the post.
We could learn a lot of things thanks to this kind of events. Here, in Paris (France), we have a lot of them and it really helps entrepreneurs.
i like to get out and about and connect with other people. sometimes I get out and about too much and i don’t get back to work
Thank you for highlighting this “epidemic” in the Atlanta tech community.
I have attended functions but my attendance has waned due to the lack of “deal making” opportunities versus the water cooler talk.
Some people in attendance are very focused on business, but the ones really “doing” business aren’t at every function.
I wish Atlanta had more functions focused 100% on debuting new technologies and inviting business leaders (potential customers) to evaluate startups.
I wrote about this four years ago here http://blog.weatherby.net/2010/02/nobody-told-me.html. Truth be told there are about four times as many events today then there were then. I made myself a rule. No more then one event per week. That is more than enough, if you are doing more than that you are focused on the wrong things.