To quote the late, great Madame: I have all these things. In my head? Ideas!
Always fun to come home for a visit and just feel the energy in a city the size of DC. People walk here! To go places! And crossing the street is an exciting contact sport.
And though I haven’t been writing (on here; I’m on fire on twitter), I’ve been collecting ideas and making notes for when I get home to Noke and actually have time to write.
But since all of the Internet is just a first draft anyway, I thought I’d throw this out real quick because the thought is killing me.
Please forgive typos and general sloppiness, as I’m on my phone.
What I’m thinking about are accelerators, and how I don’t really know how they work or why it makes sense for the state to give us 600k to put one in an old medical building.
Don’t misunderstand, I’m not against the idea, I just don’t understand it. Like, who works in an accelerator? I don’t mean the “seed-stage start-ups” the accelerator is supposed to help nourish, I mean the other people. Are there other people? If not, why not? What will they do? And if there aren’t trained professionals there to do start-upy things to help founders get moving, then wouldn’t that make the “accelerator” just start-up focused office space? And if there are people working there, are they government employees? If they are private workers, then they would work for…whom? Because I don’t look around Roanoke and see an existing business that teaches founders how to get a seed-stage venture off the ground, so, wouldn’t that mean that to the extent we do get a private company in there to run the thing, it would itself have to be a start-up business?
Whew! That right there is a whole passel of questions masquerading as a paragraph, ain’t it? Thing o’ beauty, powerful beauty, and fearsome. Ain’t never seen it’s like before, and God willing, I never will again.
The Internet is all a first draft, keep that in mind.
But what really got me questioning the state’s 600k investment is that I found what I believe to be a better model in New York Startup Lab. They are a permanent start-up team. Founders pay them rather than building out a team to work on an unproven idea. Once the idea is up and running, then the founder has something tangible and proven to build a team around.
Isn’t that smart? They are a mature business that never stops working on start-ups, so they know exactly what they are doing. That doesn’t mean the ideas are any good, of course, but even a great idea can’t build itself; you need a team. There aren’t many things sadder than a world changing idea that can’t find a team to support it.
Well, these guys do.
How many teams like this could we put together with $600,000?
Just a thing in my head. An idea!
Grandin Republic 