If I Had A Million Dollars To Invest In the Startup Community
“How can we best support the startup community?”
It’s a question I’m asked regularly. It’s a question we should all reflect on regularly. And the simple answer is that we must put the needs of entrepreneurs first.
If we can all become aligned on the fundamental principles that address the universal needs of entrepreneurs, the actions we need to take to get to our collective goals will slowly become evident.
There’s 3 fundamental principles we follow at Startup TNT to address the core needs of entrepreneurs:
Have Fun.
Make Friends.
Build companies.
Any and all attempts at building, nurturing and maintaining a collective group of individual human beings into a collaborative, friction-free, high performing community must focus on enjoyment and relationships (having fun, making friends).
And if we are serious about economic resiliency in our local community, the only answer is to build companies. Companies that have a global customer base and serve a diversified set of industries.
That’s my guiding light. That’s the question I ask myself every day. How do we build fast growth tech companies that will transform our local economy?
The short answer: we need the best and brightest people in our city, in our province, and in our country all working on that particular goal. If you are an ambitious, educated and highly motivated person—an ‘A-Player’—it is incumbent on all of us to ensure that you view entrepreneurship, or working at a tech startup, as job choice number one!
Entrepreneurs all need the same basic supports for success
Capital
Talent
High-quality relationships (with partners, customers, funders, people that can open doors)
So how do we do this?
Identify the high-potential people in our community that can and should be entrepreneurs
They are graduating from our universities at the top of their class.
They are conducting world class research.
They are leaving their jobs at the government because the bureaucratic machine is soul-destroying to their natural need for creative performance.
They are going through a mid-career transition after realizing the corporate grind is not what they want.
Bring these high quality individuals together in creative ways that focus on building genuine relationships through good times and real-world challenges.
The interaction among these players is what is important. These interactions must be led by private actors that are living and breathing this journey; or else it will all be a charade among ‘startup cheerleaders’ from the government and government-run organizations
These activities will identify the top quality players in the community. These players will naturally form groups of founders and co-founders
Incredibly high quality people that are the most respected people in the community must be the face of these events.
Offer customized support to these entrepreneurs that is tailored to their stage of the startup journey.
All these supports must provide a combination of capital, talent, and high quality relationships.
If you are looking for examples of supports that are working, see
GreenSTEM postdoc program
$231,000+ grant to entrepreneurs to build deep technology companies in the climate space that are built in partnership with an Alberta university
This is the equivalent of a ‘friends and family round of funding’ from the government—we should do more of this
100 hours of one-on-one business consulting and coaching from an experience expert
Expert can literally be from anywhere in the known universe
Supports are tailored to specific business challenges of the company (sales, marketing, fund raising, etc)
This is equivalent to a ‘high quality relationship’ that can propel the company forward
Startup TNT Investment Summits
$6M+ raised for 42 companies directly from a network of over 225 angels in 2 years’ time
This provides capital for entrepreneurs while also building genuine relationships among the participants (introductions).
This also increases the pool of sophisticated investors that can write checks into startups and lead rounds for entrepreneurs.
Amplify their message. Tell the story of our startup community loudly, proudly, and globally. These stories need to be pervasive in our community, and told by the entrepreneurs themselves.
Introduce them to local and international business talent.
Get them into world-renowned accelerators.
Introduce them to local business leaders.
Introduce them to other startup ecosystems.
Make it easy and enjoyable for anyone with the means to invest in local entrepreneurs.
We have millions of dollars of latent capital sitting in bank accounts gathering 1.7% GIC interest rates, or worse, earning awesome returns off the economic ingenuity of other jurisdictions. Everyone wants to invest locally. And there’s no better local investment than a local entrepreneur.
Local high net worth individuals, business leaders, young professionals, family offices - these are individuals that all want to invest in startups. They need to be shown how to do it effectively and efficiently.
Double down on the successful ones.
Offer more, not less support to the companies demonstrating significant traction and massive growth potential.
And until they have raised a Series A round or hit multi-million dollar ARR numbers, they need our continued support.
The reason Startup TNT has been successful over the past few years is simply because we follow these basic principles:
We put the needs of entrepreneurs first. We bring them together weekly to have fun and make friends.
In Edmonton alone, we have met for 160 weeks and averaged 25 people per week. That’s 300 potential unique interactions every single week; or 48,000 potential interactions since our inception!
You only need some of these interactions to result in high quality relationships forming, like when the two co-founders of Zero Point Cryogenics formed a friendship that has led to them building a U of A spin-off providing next generation cooling systems for the nascent quantum computing industry.
We focus on offering introductions, not programming.
“Hey Zack, thanks for the support, I just met someone from Amazon at the last pitch night you held. He’s helping get us into their startup program.”
“Hey Zack, thanks for the introduction to Jill. She recommended a legal firm for us to work with.”
“Hey Zack, thanks for the introduction to John. I got a job interview there next week!”
We enable the entrepreneurs to support each other.
We know that we aren’t the experts. The entrepreneurs that are between 1 year and 5 years ahead of you, those people are the experts. Meet them. Talk to them. They have the most relevant information.
We celebrate our collective successes as a community.
Everyone knows that if you want to throw a party with the startup community, TNT is the place to do it!
Beamdog just celebrated their acquisition by Aspyr with us last week!
We focus our efforts on introducing and training new Angel investors, sourced from the local business community, that can support these entrepreneurs with capital, expertise, and introductions.
After 3 years of hard work, we now have $1.5 million of our own to spend on this over the next 3 years, thanks to the generous support of the Canadian and Albertan governments as well as many corporate and individual contributors to our organization. We view this as our ‘Seed Round.’
The real secret to the success of our startup programming, which is designed to spur economic growth and resiliency, is that it doesn’t actually look or feel like a program to the participants. It’s real. It’s genuine. It’s peer-to-peer. It’s team-based.
It’s how life is meant to be lived: Having fun. Making friends. Building companies.