I enjoy reading Brad Feld’s blog. He is a VC from Boulder, Colorado who is best known for his thought leadership on ‘Creating StartUp Communities’. He is also very open about his struggles with depression and life in general. It looks like he has also made plenty of successful investments. He knows his onions.
He blogs every day - and I thought today’s was worth sharing: The Tucked & The Untucked
Here is a slice:
The line I heard in the context of startup communities was “the collision of the tucked and the untucked.” This referred to the startup community entrepreneurs in untucked t-shirts interacting with the startup community feeders (government, academics, big companies, investors, and service providers) who tend to have their shirt tucked in, even if they aren’t wearing ties.
The magic in growing the startup community is to get the tucked and the untucked to hang out. Your goal should be to generate endless collisions between different perspectives, ideas, peoples, and culture. Rather than segmenting things into the old guard and new guard, mix it up. Get everyone working together.
Don’t let parallel universes evolve – you want one big, messy network continually changing. Make sure you are creating situations for the tucked and untucked to get together, be together, and work together. Have some fun with it, including formally reversing roles at a Sadie Hawkins like event, where the tucked wear t-shirts and the untucked wear suits.
This struck me as good advice for the vision of Kingdom Code. Our one word vision statement (or is it a mission statement?) is “Serendipity.”
We want to be intentional about maximising the chances of serendipitous ‘collisons’ that encourage each other, as people in our faith, our work and in seeking to make an impact for the Kingdom.
Who are the ‘tucked and untucked’ in our communities. How can we optimise for collision to generate serendipity? How can we help build ‘one big messy network?’ All thoughts welcome…
The full Brad Feld post is here. Brad’s book on Startup Communities is on Amazon…