I’ve been in and around startups for a while now in the UK, and I’m constantly surprised by how disjointed the community seems to be.
Backtracking…
This post started life as a simple tweet asking if there was a Twitter List for UK Startups and gossip around that topic, but it didn’t seem to produce much fruit. A couple of google searches later, and not much more had been found.
So, I started my own lists, and it generated discussion. It seems that I’m not the only person who is intensely frustrated by the state of the startup community in the UK.
Different Culture
What came across is that there are a lot of people wishing that we had a better culture for startups in the UK. There is a wealth of information on how to do a startup in the US but the majority of UK stories are anecdotal or just plain luck rather than to do with any culture.
UK Startup Heroes (and Heroines!)
Given all of this, I decided to put together a list of startup Heroes (which become Heroes and Heroines after @girlygeekdom got this tweet in). Now, I thought that if I tweeted to my (almost) 1000 followers, I’d have 20, 30, 40 people in no time, and possibly a whole lot more.
Take a look at the uk-startup-heroes list on twitter.
The idea was to find heroes and heroines from the UK – people who had either tried multiple times to get a startup off the ground (and were seen as courageous, good guys/gals) or had got a startup going that was used by the community and successful.
But… it took quite a bit of time to get going. I came up with 4 or 5 and then they came in very slowly. The UK Twitterati article from Wired December 09 (which I’m in!) came in useful, but wasn’t totally helpful.
The UK Startup Community Isn’t That Big
As if you didn’t know. And it’s not that organised either! There are a few people who try to pull disparate pieces of information together, but that’s about it. It’s been a struggle to reach 22 people on the Heroes (and Heroines) list.
We need a better organised community for Startups. Currently, we’re not doing ourselves any favours in trying to get VCs and Angels to fund us as there’s nowhere for them to really meet us and know what to do.
And don’t get me started on Camps and Sprints and Event…
@loudmouthman and I had a conversation around this which was basically…
We just don’t need another meetup to find out who we are, and then create a half-baked application in 1 day that really goes nowhere.
Barcamps/Events are great for socialising, but they aren’t great for building brands and applications that will get funding. If that were true, we’d have loads of startups in the UK… but we don’t.
Time to get real and Grow Up!
As a startup community, we need to stop seeing “Business Model” as a dirty phrase and stop complaining about the lack of startup investment support from Government, VCs and Angels and just get on with it.
We need to organise events that lead groups of entrepreneurs together over more than a weekend, and help to develop real, credible businesses.
It’s not just that the startup community needs some sparks to ignite it, but it’s also that startups feed startups. The more you have, the more money is around, the more startups will get created.
It’s time to get real and start building some great British innovative, competitive, collaborative, exciting startup companies… which may just help to get this country out of the economic hole!
Don’t you agree?
(There’s more to come on this… this is just the opening salvo!)
3 comments
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May 18, 2010 at 3:44 pm
Kirk Wylie
I actually don’t think that your methodology is particularly meaningful.
“I’m looking for people I self-describe as Heroes, though some internal methodology I’m not going to document, but MIGHT include characteristics such as X, Y, and Z, who are also on twitter.” Wait 3 hours. “Not enough Twitter links. Startup scene is broken.”
There are a lot of interesting people in the startup scene, but you’re not going to find it all in your methodology. First of all, you have the self-selection bias: are all the people who are following you really in touch with the LDN startup scene? Second, you have the modesty thing: are there any people who follow you who aren’t exactly going to say “yes, I’m a bloody hero”?
The scene is far more active than you might think, you just have to know where to look.
May 18, 2010 at 4:11 pm
padajo
Kirk,
It’s much more a comment on the disjointed nature and culture of the community rather than the size of the community.
I’ve been involved in trying to setup 3 startups in the past 5 years, none of which have got funding, but I learned something in all of them. I’ve also been to OpenCoffee, MiniBar, numerous Barcamps and HackDays and loads of other events of different sorts over many years. In that time, I’ve rarely met people who I could truly say fully understood the needs of startup businesses. To add to that, one of the people on my list said to me that his experience was almost exactly the same as mine. Until you have a successful prospective business, it’s pretty damned hard to get advice or support as a startup especially outside of London.
Also, I did specify in my tweets that it’s up to people to nominate them *and* tell me why they are a hero of the UK startup scene. One of the people I asked looked at the list of 5 and said that he could only think of 2 and I already had them.
Don’t get on your high horse about this – this isn’t a criticism of you or anyone specifically but of the whole startup scene which seems primarily focussed (as far as I can see it) on trying to do as little as possible to get as much investment for as quick a return as possible… which is pointless Too many people think that investment is a right, and not something to be earned.
Also… and this is a big thing for me living outside of London… where are the resources and support for startups outside of London? Answer: there are very very few. Being in London makes it a LOT easier to get a startup going than being elsewhere, and not everybody has the ability (or wants to) move into London to do this – especially if you have a family.
May 18, 2010 at 3:50 pm
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