WILEY The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

This book is a great coda: complexity, entrepreneurship, ecosystem innovation, startups, venture capital and local development all in the same book. I fully recommend it.

Brad Feld has written a series of must-read books for entrepreneurs and investors — from fund raising to the essence of what a startup community is. He is joined by a great entrepreneur and researcher in related fields for this excellent new effort. They hate when I saY this, but it is a play book on what are the elements to make communities thrive to unleash innovation and economic growth - what has worked from Indianapolis to Lagos - and where policy makers, entrepreneurs, business leaders and more trip. Often it is because we are trying to check boxes, stuck in our own narratives or lazily looking for the next “Silicon Valley” rather than focusing on what are the unique dynamics of one’s city and community and what factors can come together to unleash them. This a wonderfully readable but actionable book with concrete data and examples which should be a must read for anyone leader in their communities now everywhere in the world.

What a gem. Built off the work Brad Feld first put together with his book Startup Communities, he and Ian Hathaway take all the lessons learned since the first book was published, throw in a heaping amount of research, and do a deep dive into systems thinking. The result is an easy-to-understand guide for anyone putting in the work to grow their startup community. If you're expecting a "5 Easy Steps" kind of book, you're out of luck. Community cannot, and should not, be built that way. Community building is more like being a meteorologist. You read the signals, measure your inputs, and plan accordingly. It's a chaotic system, so instead of trying to control it, learn to embrace the chaos. The Startup Community Way will be a book that go you back to again and again. Make sure to bring your highlighter and post-it notes to make going back easier.

The book’s in-depth look at the networks and the inner workings of such networks is insightful. It examines the effects of “knowledge spillovers”, “co-locating”, “self-organization”, “nonlinearities”, “spontaneous orders”, “velocity of interactions” among many intriguing observations by Brad and Ian, the authors, who are not just theorists but practitioners in venture investing and community building. This book provides a thought provoking blueprint in creating and maximizing the startup community dynamism and network effects of your ideas, products and impact. A fascinating read!

The knowledge of complex systems is key to entrepreneurs and startup communities. As a CU-Boulder alum and investor/entrepreneur, I'm glad to see the "Boulder Thesis" developed by Brad is empowering numerous entrepreneurial communities around the world.