Startup leadership hack: make an opportunities list

My partner James came up with a pretty good idea for opening up more opportunities for career growth at Staq. We call it the "opportunity list": a priority-sorted list of projects that we should be doing, but aren't, because everyone is busy with day-to-day responsibilities.

Opportunities are thing that could potentially be someone's entire job in the future, and would make the company a lot more successful/comfortable in the short-term. Each project is a chance to step up and exercise leadership outside of one's "day job".

Here's an excerpt of the list I just whipped up:

We have similar lists for other departments, so, wanting to set a good example, I picked "contract volley". I'm going to help figure out how to speed up the end of the sales process where specific details of our contracts are negotiated.

My first idea was "let's throw some tech at the problem". I found that there's a whole niche market for contract management software, but none of it looks geared towards a scrappy startup. (I understand why companies do this, but personally if your app has a "Request a Demo" button, I'm gone. I just don't have time to make appointments, and that also implies a much longer onboarding process. Please just let me give you my credit card and start a free trial!)

A web product startup playbook

I'm presenting "A web product playbook" at BohConf 2013 today. It's a distillation of what I'm considered the most important lessons I've learned during the past seven years of succeeding and failing as an entrepreneur. It's packed with links, and posted to Github! Hope you like it.

More ways to keep the American dream in America

I read Dave Troy's post Keeping the American Dream in America with interest. I agree with everything he says about needing to get aspiring entrepreneurs to focus on solving more important, technically-challenging problems instead of devising endless variations of incrementally-better consumer software.

There are other obstacles to achieving the kind of entrepreneurship Dave wants to see, besides the ones he mentioned. Those hard problems are going to end up being solved by older people not currently enmeshed in "McStartup" culture. Innovation in fields like healthcare, education, biotechnology, or government are likely to come from people working in those fields already. I'm thinking of people like Jess Gartner, a former schoolteacher who just received funding from Accelerate Baltimore to create an new product that will revolutionize the way we fund schools and track funding outcomes. That's not an idea that Dave's "Red Bull-drinking, Ramen-eating young programmers" could think of, unless they had worked as teachers.

To solve the "McStartup" problem, we need more entrepreneurs like Jess or my partner James Curran, people who have established a career and built up some work experience, who have firsthand knowledge of screwed-up situations that could be improved with new technology (using James hard-won expertise, we are attacking a tough problem in the online media industry).

Because these are also people who may have families, who may be the breadwinner, I have a theory that we could encourage more mid-career people to start or join serious startup companies by increasing our support for risk-taking behavior in the United States. Off of the top of my head, some ways to support risk-taking behavior would include:

• Better access to affordable, quality childcare: A big reason I can afford to take the risks I do is that we have a lot of nearby family help, and we were lucky to get our kids into an awesome, affordable preschool.
• More widely-available, affordable healthcare: I know someone who delayed starting his now-highly successful, real-world-problem-solving tech company because he needed to provide health coverage for his wife who had a pre-existing condition.
• Well-funded, well-managed public retirement system: Middle-aged people might be willing to take more risks if they felt they didn't have to save every penny in order to stave off penury in old age.
• Restored public support for higher education: Someone who graduated from college years ago with outstanding, crushing debt is probably not going to jump out of a comfortable job to start a tech company.

You get the idea. I realize these are all liberal causes, and I wonder if liberals have ever tried to position initiatives like these as supporting an innovative culture. Have there have been any studies done that would support my theory? If you take an entrepreneurial, self-starting culture like we have in the United States, and increase support for mid-career risk-taking, do you get more innovation and more new companies?

Thoughts on programming AdStaq's culture

We just posted the Careers page for my new startup, AdStaq.com. We're looking for smart developers of all backgrounds, junior and senior, who want to be part of the founding team. We're primarily looking for people in the MD/DC/PA/VA or NY regions because at this stage we need to get together frequently to compare notes. Later on we'll become a more global/virtual company.

Hopefully it's obvious from reading that page that I've been thinking very deeply about the kind of programming culture we want to build into the company from day one, influenced by all of the reading I've done over the past several years and all of my work experiences as a Navy officer, tech company employee, and founding CTO. I want to create an ultra-professional, stimulating environment that provides fun and meaningful opportunities for programmers who also have a life outside of coding and want to get home and see their families every night.

My favorite line of that page is "no weekly status updates", which someone asked me to clarify. I'm not saying "programmers get to work in isolation without communicating what they're doing". I'm saying we're never going to make people do that kind of awful busywork just to make management happy. Instead we'll keep track of our progress using other tools, like reviewing commit logs and good old-fashioned one-on-one meetings.

Ben Horowitz just wrote a good post about creating the right culture for a startup. It's early days for AdStaq but I think our cultural motto might end up being something like, "We remove all software defects immediately and fix whatever allowed the defect to occur" (we need to come up with something snappier like "don't just fix the bug, fix the process"). For example, right now, James just emailed me a bug in a secondary screen in our app. He said it's not a big deal to fix immediately, so I could blow it off for a few weeks, especially since I'm building a really cool new feature I can't wait to release. But I know better than to allow a bug like this to hang around and get stale. I also know that a small investment of time to improve our test harness to prevent this bug from recurring will act like compounding interest, saving me a lot of time later. Most importantly, since we're a company that makes other software easier to use, we really can't afford to have low quality. We have to set the standard for ad tech company software quality.

We can't do it alone though - we need your help! If this sounds interesting, email me! Instead of a resume, send us some links to stuff you've worked on!

Scorecard for Baltimore's startup community

Update: Killer Events went from B- to B

I used Mark Suster's awesome post about building startup communities outside of Silicon Valley to make a scorecard for Baltimore's startup community. I'm writing this off-the-cuff based on my perspective and would be happy to change any of these grades if readers can provide more data:

• A strong pool of tech founders: A. Just go to any meetup or tech event around town, and you'll meet lots of smart technically-minded, entrepreneurial engineers and business people. There are many tech people in and around Baltimore with national and international reputations, and there are many compelling startups around town (too many to name, I'm afraid to leave someone out).
• Local capital: C. There's a lot of capital available in Baltimore but it does feel disorganized, which Mark addressed. We have several incubators and early-stage investment programs now, and things feel a little too diffused. As a step forward, check out this post Dave Troy wrote about what could be achieved if these smaller, individual efforts were combined into something larger. 
• Killer Events: B. We have tons of awesome events (just check out Baltimore Innovation Week's packed calendar) but I don't see them growing enough to attract people from outside of the region without more investment and support from the city's business, municipal, and NGO sectors. For example, Betascape could become "the SXSWi of the east" if the organizers had more funding (kudos to MICA for being such a great host). In general it's hard to find space for compelling events in the city - what if the city started a program to make the convention center available at low cost to innovation community events? Update: I forgot about Baltimore TechBreakfast which is expanding to Columbia and beyond!
• Access to Great Universities: I'll give us an A- because there are a lot of great universities and thus there is a pool of raw talent and ideas. But I don't have a sense that they're teaching much of value to startup companies. Here's what I think they should be teaching. 
• Motivated Champions: B. This is the role I've chosen for myself and there are many other people who have done so as well. But we need more people of stature/fame to get involved, not just grass-roots people like me.
• Local Press: B. This would have been an D a few months ago but now we have Technically Baltimore and Baltimore Weekly and those guys have been killing it. Special thanks to Gus Sentementes, the Sun reporter whose coverage of the tech scene is what moved us from F- to D!
• Alumni Outreach: F. I'm not aware of any particular attempts to do this, though we make an effort to snag people when they are in town.
• Wins: B. Doing pretty good here: Ad.com, Millennial Media, BillMeLater, and more.
• Recycled Capital: B-. Greg Cangialosi and Sean Lane are setting a great example in this regard. Both are using their success to foster a broad range of awesome new enterprises in the city.
• Second-time entrepreneurs: A. Several interesting companies emerged from ad.com including Millennial. I'm starting a business with someone who was early at ad.com and is using the lessons learned there to help us kick ass. Ron Schmelzer is working on an exciting company after several other wins.
• Ability to Attract a Pool of Engineers: B-. The city has a lot to offer young people but we're competing with all of the other cities that have similar assets, where The Wire wasn't filmed. I'd love to see the city launch an initiative like the ones Mark suggested specifically geared toward recruiting innovators to move and build companies here.
• Tent-pole tech companies: Incomplete. We don't have anything on the scale that Mark describes. The closest we have is Advertising.com but it's now a division of AOL and not on the scale of the companies he mentions. They have really accelerated their leadership in the past 12 months by hosting and sponsoring a lot of events, so I'm holding them up as an model of what a tent-pole company could do for us. 

Was I too harsh? Too gentle? Let me know your thoughts.

Video of Coding for Uncertainty at Ruby Nation

Here's the video from my Coding for Uncertainty talk at Ruby Nation earlier this year, where I talk about techniques I use to build durable, changeable Ruby code:

Looking for an assistant, apprentice, or intern programmer

I have the good fortune of having three awesome software business projects in the pipeline. My idea garden has never been more luscious!  Our goals for these three projects are ambitious and I'd love to get some help with them.

If you've got basic programming ability and are looking for a way to get started as a professional programmer, or you want to get some experience working on early-stage products, or you think I'm an interesting person, I'd love to work with someone who wants to learn the ropes. I would give you lots of mentoring and lots of responsibility for executing different parts of these ideas. We could work out equity compensation if that's interesting to you, but the main benefit would be experiential. By the time we're done you would know a lot about how to launch your own products.

All three of these involve working with successful, super interesting, super smart non-technical entrepreneurs. So that's an additional benefit.

I don't even know if such a person exists, but I think when I was getting started I would have loved to do something like this.

What is the tech community and who belongs to it?

We had some breaking news in Baltimore's tech scene last week: Sharon Webb was replaced as the head of the Greater Baltimore Technology Council (GBTC) by Jason Hardebeck. Sharon was a friend of mine, and I really bought into her plan to reinvigorate the council and make it more relevant to tech companies. As part of that effort she and GBTC board president Jason Pappas recruited me to be the Entrepreneur-in-Residence. To be clear, I'm not speaking for the GBTC in this post.

The news brought out an extraordinary amount of confusion, hurt feelings, and acrimony, expressed in social media channels. Neal Shaffer nailed it when he tweeted: "It occurs to me that the GBTC convo isn't really about GBTC at all. It's about a community with momentum coming to a crossroads."

That crossroads involves a few questions I hope to address here:

1. What is the Baltimore tech community and who is part of it?
2. Do we need to a group like the GBTC to further develop the tech sector in Baltimore?
3. Are Baltimore tech events infected with an unseemly degree of enthusiasm for startups at the expense of other kinds of companies?

WHAT IS THE BALTIMORE TECH COMMUNITY AND WHO IS PART OF IT?

I want apologize to Elizabeth Eadie and everyone else I offended with a comment I made in the heat of the moment during an online chat (you can read about it here) in which I implied that service businesses are not as valuable to the economy as other kinds of businesses. That was a dumb thing to say. When this chat was taking place we were under the misapprehension that the new GBTC leadership was steering away from supporting entrepreneurs and startups in favor of more established, dues-paying large companies, which fortunately turned out to be completely untrue. I was venting my frustration that the startup sector, which I think is very undeveloped, seemed to be getting short shrift. I was actually responding to the disdain for startups I perceived in Elizabeth's earlier post on this subject, a disdain I often hear from independent technologists around Baltimore. 

Now that I've had a few days to cool down, here's how I really feel: everyone who makes technology of any kind in Baltimore is a member of the tech community. Too often we unconsciously emphasize "software companies" or "startup companies" when speaking of the "tech community", but that might be because software people and startup people are  better organized or more vocal than other technologists around town; I'm really not sure who our counterparts in the biotech world are, for example, not because they aren't valued members of the local technology scene but simply because (as far as I know) there's no one blogging about Baltimore biotech, and there aren't that many public biotech booster events.

I also think that the tech community includes companies that make heavy use of technology. Sharon Webb introduced me to a great example of this kind of company on the cutting edge of maritime logistics technology: Vane Brothers. I'd love to go to a meetup where they show off the cool stuff they are doing to disrupt the shipping industry!

DO WE NEED A GROUP LIKE THE GBTC TO DEVELOP THE TECH SECTOR?

The GBTC lost a lot of relevance in the past few years, and their board members know it. Some in the Baltimore Tech Facebook group and in other forums question the very existence of the GBTC, and they are right to do so: the GBTC has some impressive resources including a budget; a small full-time staff; and a large and well-connected board of directors. Have we as a society made a good investment of that social and financial capital?

I think Tom Loveland explained it best on Facebook:

"...sometimes you need an association. Like to fight a tech tax. Or to make sure DBED supports IT and startups instead of just bio and big business. (All that invisible stuff you never see.) And that City Hall remembers us, too. (In her State of the City address last year our Mayor announced I think only one bit of new spending, and it went to the ETC.) And though dozens of smaller events and get-togethers, ad hoc to organized, are fantastic, occasionally it's a very good thing to hold a giant celebration of our community. And to be all it can, a community needs to leverage its old farts and winners, those with wisdom and/or connections, who can assist the next generation. Often it's the association staff who sees a need and knows who can help and can make the connection. The up-and-comers in the throes probably don't know who to ask, and often don't even know to ask, or that awesome help is available."

So, just because GBTC has lost its edge doesn't mean that we should get rid of trade associations altogether. I have personally benefitted from GBTC as a connecting, community-building organization the whole time I've lived here: GBTC was the first sponsor of my first tech event in Baltimore and also played an instrumental role in making the first Baltimore Hackathon so successful. I met a key mentor at a GBTC Face2Face dinner, and I always make many new connections at TechNite events.

ARE BALTIMORE TECH EVENTS INFECTED WITH AN UNSEEMLY DEGREE OF ENTHUSIASM FOR STARTUPS AT THE EXPENSE OF OTHER KINDS OF COMPANIES?

Elizabeth wrote "...I find the tech-start-up-entrepreneur-scene to be toxic and exhausting." She feels put off by the fact that "Too many people in the tech scene are trying to make a bazillion dollars overnight." Elsewhere on Elizabeth's blog Jason Rhodes echoes the sentiment when he says he "...never felt quite at home in the start-up focused Bmore tech scene. Like a lot of the people, but it seems to be focused heavily on things I’m less interested in as far as starting my own company, etc."

I have a mixed reaction to this. First of all, I now have two small kids and so I don't go to many tech events any more. Enough comments like these appeared enough on Twitter and Facebook to make me believe it must have become a common experience, which sucks.

Yet in my opinion, the primary and perhaps the only problem that our tech community suffers is a shortage of startups! Who are all of these "start-up focused" people trying to make "a bazillion dollars"? What companies have they started? There's a pretty small handful of startup companies around here, and all of the entrepreneurs I know trying to get a startup going are not the sort of craven, venal people that Elizabeth and her colleagues hold in contempt. In fact they are some of the most generous, open-minded people around, and they are motivated by a desire to change the world and make something really cool, while incidentally making money. Purely greedy assholes don't really want to live in Baltimore and we're better off for it!

Maybe it has to do with differing ideas of what a startup is. Startups are considered to be glamorous, shiny things in tech culture, and people who aren't doing them might feel jealous of the attention that startups get - especially when you read about a startup company raising tons of money or press coverage on the basis of zero revenue. If I was the owner of a small, profitable tech company in Baltimore, I'm sure I'd feel the same way! Instead of using superficialities to define what a startup is, I propose we stick to Eric Ries' excellent definition: "A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

So if you're in a company and experiencing extreme uncertainty (not knowing who your customers are, exactly what problems you're going to solve, and whether you can make money solving them), congratulations, you're in a startup. It would be very wrong to say you're somehow better as a person or that your pursuit is more noble than someone else who is not experiencing that uncertainty, but it's also very wrong to dismiss such companies the way some people in the Baltimore tech scene have been doing. It's wrong to say we shouldn't be bending over backwards to help people who are considering making the leap of faith required to do a startup.

Why is it wrong? Because with this risk comes the potential for great reward, both for the entrepreneur and for the entire city. Startups can become large, wealth-creating entities in a way that few other kinds of businesses can. Startups make their founders and early employees rich, and those people can then turn around and reinvest in the city as philanthropists, entrepreneurs, or angel investors. We are missing this "virtuous cycle" in Baltimore (but keep your eye on Greg Cangialosi who is starting a new revolution of the cycle). The only way to get it moving is to get more people doing startups. I don't apologize for encouraging people to consider startups because I find it a rewarding lifestyle, quite apart from the potential to make lots of money (which is nice also!), and because a crop of awesome startups would become a rising tide lifting all of our boats. I want small web businesses in Baltimore to have more local clients with deep pockets! Baltimore with a few more companies like LivingSocial or Zappos or Millenial Media or Advertising.com or BillMeLater would be an incredible place to live no matter what your occupation!

I take this charge fairly personally since I don't think anyone is waving the flag for startups in Baltimore harder than I am. If I'm doing something that makes you feel excluded or unwanted please let me know and I will fix it. I'm wondering if there's maybe a small crop of "wantrepreneurs" who make a lot of noise about startups but who aren't "for real"; please don't count them as emblematic of startup life in Baltimore or emblematic for how I feel.

IN CONCLUSION

I've written a lot about Baltimore's potential to become more of a prominent technology hub than it already is. It would be crazy to diminish any part of it; we need everyone here being productive doing what they love and not wasting time squabbling like we've been doing. Like Tom Loveland, I see an important role for a trade group like the GBTC, and that's why I volunteer there. I liked Sharon Webb and was sad to see her go but I'm willing to give Jason Hardebeck the benefit of the doubt. Ever forward!

Should we all move to Silicon Valley?

I keep thinking about this exit interview that Brian Sierakowski did with Paul Capestany, who is leaving Baltimore to move to San Francisco (joining the likes of other smart former Baltimore/Maryland transplants Patti Chan, Clarence Wooten, Paul Singh, Jared Goralnick, and others). He wants to start a high-risk/high-reward consumer Internet company.

I respect Paul and count him a friend. He's done a lot for the cause of entrepreneurship in the city and we all owe him our thanks! I wish him luck. And I can really understand where he's coming from. San Francisco is a cool place for web entrepreneurs to be.

All things being equal, if Paul's dream is to start a big, risky consumer Internet company, he may have an edge by starting it in San Francisco. If you're in a smaller, less-connected city like Baltimore competing head to head with a company based there, you may be at a serious disadvantage (Paul Graham makes the point in an essay about startup hubs).

But are all things equal? Let's break it down.

People in San Francisco Are More Risk-Tolerant

Paul says he can't find enough risk-takers here, but is the talent hunt any easier out there? I assume the main types of people he needs are technical cofounders and designers willing to work for equity in lieu of cash. Those are in short supply across the world, no more so than in San Francisco. Here are two anecdotes:

1. I recently had a vivid conversation with someone starting a company in San Francisco with every advantage you can think of: prominent name-brand angel investors, a beautiful downtown office space, cutting-edge technology, early traction, etc. But this person had interviewed over and a hundred people so far and could not find anyone skilled willing to work for part equity and part salary. Pretty much every day you can find an article on tech blogs about the crazy salaries that startups and established companies are throwing at web practitioners. Competition for talent is fierce. And since all you really need for most ideas is one smart, hard-working coder,  I wonder what the real odds are for finding such a person out there vs. somewhere in Maryland where the community is more close-knit.
2. I've worked with well-respected, experienced entrepreneurs who have sold multiple companies here in Baltimore and in Austin. Despite their track records, rich network of connections, and geographic advantages, they've still had to work hard to secure investment and find talented developers. My point is that all of the problems outlined in Paul's interview are going to exist in any city, even for proven entrepreneurs. If being in Silicon Valley makes those problems 5% more tractable, maybe that's a worthwhile edge to have. But is it really 5%? Who knows? 

Also, no matter where you live you can still get people to build your prototype for not much cash. There's a lot you can do absent a cofounder to develop and test your ideas in the marketplace. See Sivers and Freedman.

It's also worth pointing out that successful Internet companies get built all the time that are based elsewhere. 37signals, LivingSocial, BillMeLater, OtherInbox, Etsy, bit.ly, OpenDNS, Advertising.com, and Millenial Media are a few that jump out at me without thought.

Investors in San Francisco Are More Risk Tolerant

I'm sure this is true, if only because they have more experience with startups and risk. Yet I wonder if it's really relevant. Starting a web company and getting it to the point where your business model is proven, is practically free. Growing a company from that point ("scaling it" in startup parlance) is what costs real money, and it seems vastly easier to raise money for growth than for starting from scratch, especially in the era of AngelList. And mid-Atlantic companies with traction and have real growth prospects can definitely raise money: in our own backyard, LivingSocial, AwayFind, and Shortmail have raised plenty of money from around the country. Locally, I got to meet a lot of angel investors while I was helping fundraise for Startup City, and I found some of them were quite risk-tolerant and ready to commit to funding us on the spot.

Believe me, I've been there

I hope it doesn't seem like I'm picking on Paul or others who have made that choice. I've never felt the urge to move to San Francisco but I was oft-tempted to move to Austin when I was working full-time on OtherInbox. Paul is right that there's something extremely stimulating about being around people who care about the same things you do and have the same imagination you do. It's just not mainstream (yet) for people to be starting companies and (especially as a man) it can be difficult to make friends with people lacking the same obsessive dream. It's just a really nice thing to have in common with your friends.

This may be the most decisive factor making people want to move. We imagine that every coffeeshop we walk into over there will be like the hallway track at SXSW. I know I've dreamed that dream! I once sent Dave Troy a distressed email while sitting in my office in Austin, in a moment of particular geographic jealousy, whose contents were pretty close to Paul's exit interview. I wish I could find Dave's response but it was basically what he later wrote in this post: "Being in 'a' place is more important than being in 'the' place". I take great comfort from that thought. I sometimes fear I've become an apologist for Baltimore, a storied, troubled city to be sure but a place which needs no apology. It's a place in a way that Silicon Valley never can be (have you ever met anyone who grew up there or lived there for their whole lives?). Baltimore has changed me in a million ways, becoming a part of me and I part of it; I'm supported by wonderful friends and family, as well as professional colleagues who form a great (albeit small) community of innovators. That's a huge asset, a massive competitive advantage, one that I was undervaluing until I wrote this essay.

What is your actual goal?

If your goal is to build and own a thriving business producing an awesome, innovative software product that helps helps the world, while building wealth for your family, your employees, your investors, and your community, then I think you absolutely do not need to move from wherever you're living. You just need to think about what sorts of businesses are going to work in your town. There are many, many niches out there that you can dominate without being in California. I would look for unsexy, comfortable industries in your area where there are many competitors but little competition.

I wish everyone thinking about moving to the Valley could spend some time with my friend Chris Ashworth here in Baltimore. In terms of personal happiness, self-actualization, and all-around awesome lifestyle, he's by far the most successful entrepreneur I know. He started Figure53, a wonderful company that makes software for sound designers used in theaters around the world, including Broadway and the Olympics. He makes a good living at it, employs six people, and is very obviously having a great time.

If you absolutely are committed to starting a consumer Internet company I can see the argument for moving to San Francisco, but I would carefully examine your assumptions about what's going to be easier and harder for you when you get there. I personally would try and launch the company right where I am, because when you demonstrate traction you'll have a much easier time solving the "talent + investment" problem in whatever city you're in. People will start seeking you out!

I do think there's a lot to be said for living in a city, any city, because of the intangible benefits that accrue from density (well explored in the book "Where Good Ideas Come From"). You get better ideas if you're mixing with smart people regularly. Here in Baltimore there are a ton of meetups; tons of people with web and mobile and design skills; and tons of companies that make great money using Internet technology. I'm sure most cities are like that.

Good luck!

Paul is a super smart, charismatic guy who is going to be a big success wherever he goes. This essay wasn't meant to try and talk him out of it; I only meant to explore his very understandable motives in light of my own decision to stay put.  I'm sorry to see him go, and I hope someday he and I are sitting on the boards of each other's companies! In the meantime if anyone in San Francisco reads this blog, you better get in touch with this guy now before he gets too connected to have time for you!

Does your city have an innovation community?

I've been searching for a term that to describe all the cool things happening in Baltimore and like cities: something to serve as a shorthand for the energy fueling our projects and the network of smart people making new contributions to city politics, society, culture, business, and technology.

Such a term should include our vibrant tech events and our startup scene as well artistic endeavors like High Zero, Single Carrot Theater, and the Baltimore Love Project. It should also cover exciting, relatively new businesses that are not really startups anymore, large and small, like Figure53 and Millenial Media. It should describe nonprofit and social entrepreneurial initiatives like Techies 4 Good and BmoreSmart. It should call to mind people like J. Buck Jabaily, Amy Hurst, Matt Porterfield, Ben Walsh, and Felicia Pride.

During a recent conversation, Newt Fowler, an attorney who advises a lot of entrepreneurs in this town, recently coined the perfect term: all of the above entities are examples of Baltimore's innovation community.

I know it's a trendy word but it feels very accurate and very apt.  I've been trying it out on people all week and everyone lights up when I say it. So that's what I'm going with: Baltimore has a burgeoning innovation community. How can we take it to the next level? I'm personally interested in seeing more innovation community members use the skills they've learned building events and projects to build companies.  That's one of the main purposes of a new initiative I'm working on with Monica Beeman: Startup City (more details TBA).

Baltimore As a Bootstrapping Paradise

A few months ago I wrote a Startup Baltimore post called Baltimore's Startup Ecosystem. It's almost passe to use the phrase "startup ecosystem" but I didn't know it at the time. I was trying to honestly enumerate the advantages and disadvantages to starting a business here, something I'm now confronting directly with my own venture.

Baltimore’s biggest advantage for entrepreneurs is simply that it is a city, and one of the few places on the East Coast where risk-takers and bootstrappers can afford to live. While it would be a mistake to waste time mimicking other innovation centers like Silicon Valley, it is worth pondering for a moment how a place like Baltimore could compete with a place like Silicon Valley, as described by the essayist Paul Graham (emphasis mine):

"For all its power, Silicon Valley has a great weakness: the paradise Shockley found in 1956 is now one giant parking lot. San Francisco and Berkeley are great, but they’re forty miles away. Silicon Valley proper is soul-crushing suburban sprawl. It has fabulous weather, which makes it significantly better than the soul-crushing sprawl of most other American cities. But a competitor that managed to avoid sprawl would have real leverage. All a city needs is to be the kind of place the next traitorous eight look at and say 'I want to stay here,' and that would be enough to get the chain reaction started."

Read the whole article here.

The best thing you can do to support tech in your city...

...is to make tech in your city.  Success begets success.  I think in Baltimore we're doing a great job of burnishing our brand as an exciting place to work with technology, but nothing will help our reputation more than increasing the number of successful technology product companies and practitioners who reside here.

That's why in 2011 you'll see me focus my organizing and advocacy efforts around events and activities that involve making technology or funding technology development in Maryland:

• I'll be attending the InvestMaryland summit in Annapolis next week
• I'm teaming up with Monica Beeman and others to plan Startup City (a Baltimore version of successful investment-mentorship programs like Techstars and Y-Combinator)
• I'm helping organize Startup Weekend in the Spring
• I helped organize the Baltimore Hackathon last fall, which will come back again sometime this year
• I'd like to start a salon-style event called "Secret Software Society", styled after New York's Secret Science Society, where we have interesting cross-language and cross-platform talks about building software given by people working at product companies, especially people we don't often hear from on the tech scene.
• I'm starting a new product company that I hope will grow into an exemplar, an employer, a responsible member of the community, and a supporter of existing tech events and organizations as well as new initiatives yet to be planned!

I call this strategy "Bias for Action": now that Baltimore's technologists and entrepreneurs have a variety of ways to connect, I want to focus on projects that directly lead to them taking action!

How To Recruit Developers and Technical Cofounders

I forgot to cross post a couple of posts from the Startup Baltimore blog.  In "Finding a Technical Cofounder" I answered a question I get asked all the time: how do I find a developer to work with my startup?  My typical answer is excerpted below, but since I wrote this I have added a pithy but accurate preface: "You make friends with a bunch of developers two years ago using real-world networking as well as social media tools".  As Dave Troy put it: "In Entrepreneurial Ecosystems, Cofounders Find You!"

1. Know who you are looking for: Sometimes people start off by saying “I need to find a Rails person” – they’ve heard Ruby on Rails is a great framework for building web products, so they’ve pre-decided to use it.  But in my limited experience, the tools that get used in your business tend to be the ones favored by the first hire or by the technical cofounder.  I’m not saying you should take such decisions lightly or by default, but I’m encouraging you to focus on the cofounder’s personal attributes and not their preferred tools.  The right person can learn whatever tools are needed on the fly.  You are not looking for a Rails guy or a .NET girl or a Pythonista: you are looking for someone who writes good code but is also versatile, hard-working, and self-directed, who listens well and communicates effectively.
2. Go where the software people are. Sounds obvious, right?  But if you just do this one tip you will be way ahead of most other people.  In Baltimore, I’d start by working at the Beehive coworking space, attending some Bmore on Rails events, searching for other technically-themed meetups, visiting the Node, and getting involved with Betascape.  Of course here at Startup Baltimore we have the Startup Breakfasts but I’m not sure how many programmers you’ll find there (it’s still a great way to network with kindred entrepreneurial spirits).
3. Start an event or project. Baltimore’s startup community has plenty of room for new leaders.  You can attract technical talent simply by being known as an outstanding, generous, helpful business person.  There’s still tons of work to do in building up a robust environment for Internet companies here.  For some ideas, see these lists of projects that I’d like to see someone taken on.
4. Get involved in social media. You want to scale up your search to form as many friendships with software people as possible.  There are a ton of programmers in this region and a lot of them are toiling away outside of the communities I highlighted in #2.  They won’t even hear about your efforts with #3.  But some of them are on Twitter and other platforms.  Right now you could sign up for a Twitter account and search for every person in MD, DC, VA, and DE who has the words “software” or “programmer” or “hacker” in their bio. You could start a blog all about your idea and the struggle to bring it to fruition.  You might not get a lot of notice right away but over time this will cause hundreds of potential partners to get to know you.
5. Get started on a prototype anyway. Even if you meet a qualified, available person, you will have a hard time convincing them to drop everything to work with you.  The best way to prove that you are for real and that your idea has legs is to get started now!  You could hire someone overseas via Elance. You could find a local freelancer to build something super simple via Craigslist.  All you really need is a URL you can give to potential cofounders to check out the kernel of your idea! Read Derek Sivers’ advice on how to do this effectively.
6. Have you thought about building it yourself? One of the most bad-ass entrepreneurs in Baltimore is Scott Messinger. He quit his job as a Baltimore City school teacher to create his company,Common Curriculum.  He’s not a programmer by trade, but instead of waiting around for a cofounder to appear, he taught himself Ruby, Rails, and MongoDB!  Eventually if he does need to hire a programmer to help he’s going to know EXACTLY what to look for.

Solo Founder Startup Wisdom

Several friends have asked about what the company I am starting will do.  I don't know yet.  I am actively exploring a few interesting ideas, though if I've learned one thing from startup literature, it's that the initial idea counts for very little.  I'm having fun searching for a problem that intrigues me, that I could imagine being passionate about solving, and that has the potential to grow into a financially-sustainable opportunity.

It's all complicated by the fact that I'm a solo founder. I don't have a business partner with whom to vet these ideas. I'm lucky to have encountered a few inspiring blogs and people to be my lodestars:

• Josh Baer, Gabriel Weinberg, Dave Troy, Jason Cohen, Chris Ashworth, Scott Messinger, Paul Capestany, Brent Halliburton, Rob Wray, Ben Walsh: an incomplete sampling people I look up to who have taken this risk before me, who have done it alone.  Just having friends do this, even if they haven't all succeeded wildly, is by itself a powerful encouragement.
• Gabriel Weinberg's Will single founders please stand up? and his history of mostly failed projects.  Pretty awesome example of trying doggedly to achieve what I'm doing and eventually succeeding.  I'd recommend reading all of the startup posts on his blog.
• Dave Troy's idea gardening: argues for an incremental, diverse approach to starting new projects. Instead of rushing in to build one thing, spend some time developing a few ideas to see which one gets traction.  A very good complement to Gabriel's history of failed projects.
• Startup Lessons Learned is probably my favorite blog because it had such a transformative, teaching influence on me.  Eric Ries explains how to apply lean manufacturing techniques to new business formation - which may sound boring on first glance, but it's actually a revolutionary and exciting theory that encourages you to make your efforts all about learning as much as you can as quickly as you can about the problem you're trying to solve.  I would every post on this blog.
• Ash Maurya's The Fallacy of Customer Development describes applying Eric Ries' lean startup techniques and the Four Steps to the Epiphany model of customer development to a web startup.
• Jason Cohen's blog: very personable advice and war stories about entrepreneurship.  Be sure to check out his recent post about the systematic process he used to start his most recent company (a process I am trying to emulate now).  I often recommend to people his post "You're a small company, now act like one".

I hope this list helps others considering this path!

I'm Starting a New Company, Improv Style

When people hear that I teach and perform improv theater, they often ask about the practical benefits of improv.  Different people take improv training for different reasons, but the improv lesson that's
helping me most as a software entrepreneur is the aphorism "Leap and the net will appear": if you stand on the sidelines during an improv scene, waiting for your scene partners to create an opportunity, or waiting for some brilliant premise to appear in your mind, you will fail.  Good things only come from taking risks, from opportunities you create for yourself.

In this light, I have decided to reduce the time I spend working on OtherInbox, which I cofounded three years ago, to build new products that may lead to new companies based here in Baltimore.  I was the
only remote developer working on OtherInbox, which is based in Austin, and as the local team gelled and our application became more complex, it seemed like a good time for me to try something new.  I'll still be involved in developing and maintaining OtherInbox code, but I'm now actively searching for other interesting problems to work on, problems I can solve from my home here in Baltimore.  It's time for me to practice what I preach here on this blog and what I teach to improv students.

I'm really proud of what the OtherInbox team has accomplished and I'm psyched to see what 2011 has in store -- if you're looking for a web development job in Austin you should definitely check our company out!

Speaking of taking big risks, my friend Josh Baer took a huge risk on me by inviting me to start OtherInbox with him.   Although we knew each other in college, I was very green and untested at the time as a professional developer.  I'm forever grateful for what I've learned firsthand from Josh about building a company and a software product from scratch, and for the chance I've had to build my reputation by blogging and presenting about the technology we use.

If you are experiencing some kind of life aggravation that you think could be solved with software, I'd love to talk to you!  No aggravation is too big or too little!  Email me at mike@subelsky.com.

Some Baltimore Technology Heroes

I'm very grateful to have been nominated for a few nice awards this past year because of my work with Ignite Baltimore and other ventures. But there are others in Baltimore who are doing as much or more than I am to encourage Baltimore's development as a technology hub. Since these are annual awards, I'm hoping the organizers will check them out when it comes time for the next round of nominations. They've all got my vote!

• Heather Sarkissian: I profiled her on BaltTech a few months ago. She deserves recognition for starting BmoreSmart, leading the Betascape effort, being one of the main organizers of Techcrawl East, and being one of the organizers of Ignite Baltimore.
• John Trupiano and Yair Flicker: These guys own SmartLogic and have donated a considerable amount of time, money, and resources to the tech community. They have led the growth of the Bmore on Rails group from a mere monthly meetup for Ruby enthusiasts to a full-fledged networking and teaching society with weekly events for web programmers. They spearheaded the welcoming committee for June's Railsconf convention, and they funded the organization of a highly-regarded free unconference called BohConf. On top of that, they were also principal organizers of TechCrawl East.
• Mike Brenner: He's just getting started but by the time 2011 rolls around he will be a serious contender. Baltimore was lacking a specific group that focused on technology entrepreneurship and he has taken up the charge with Startup Baltimore. They've had several well-attended startup breakfast meetings followed by workshops. This is probably the most energetic long-range community organizing effort we've seen to date.
• Nate Mook: He was the co-organizer of TEDxOilSpill and one of the main organizers of TEDxMidAtlantic. These events are some of the highest-profile, highest-quality happenings in town and have brought a lot of outside attention to the city.
• Baltimore Node Organizers: These people have built a mecca of Maker culture in Station North.  The key players that I know of were Adam Bachman, Jon Lesser, Mark Huson, Kelly Egan, Matt Forr but let me know in the comments if I left someone out.

Who did I miss?  Let me know and I'll update the post!

Side note: Baltimore is an extremely friendly town that embraces new projects and new leadership.  There are lots of other cool things that could be done to keep our momentum going, and you can expect that even a modest amount of effort on a meetup, hackathon, cofounder dating event, blog, podcast, or whatever will be recognized and celebrated!  That's been my experience with Ignite and the Baltimore Improv Group.

Ruby for Startups Talk at Lone Star Ruby Conference

Today I gave a talk about my experiences writing the code for OtherInbox, called Ruby for Startups. The slides are below. Hope you find them interesting!

The design principals from the first slide come from Russ Olsen's book, Design Patterns in Ruby (and originally from Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software).

Ruby For Startups

View more documents from subelsky.

Maryland Software Entrepreneur Survey Results

Last week I asked all of the software entrepreneurs I know in Maryland to fill out a quick survey about what they kinds of help they'd like to receive in building their companies. I asked this because I want propose a project to help my fellow entrepreneurs in Maryland, but I felt I should do more listening before I do any more talking.

I promised I would anonymously summarize the results of the survey, so here's what people had to say. Ten people of very different backgrounds responded. It's totally unscientific but I think it was a fairly diverse sample.

What type of assistance would be most useful to you in starting or growing a software business in the greater Baltimore area?

• "...an organization, funded by the state or outside investments that acts as a seed funder for startups...an Angel-like organization that invests time/resources rather than capital. Local people with ideas for new software would submit proposals and the team would decide on the top 1-3 and develop a beta. So rather than having a group of investors involved, it would be a group of developers that invest their time in exchange for equity."
  
  
• "A mentor match-up service of some sort might be good. With our startup, we have basically had to teach ourselves everything because we didn't really have anyone to talk to who's already been through it."
  
  
• "I think the most needed type of assistance, in my opinion, is business/legal administration. Such things as incorporating a business, accounting, taxes, payroll, accepting credit cards for products/services, etc. I might have a great idea and working app, but then need to put in almost as much work to setup and manage the business side."""
  
  
• "A real calendar of tech events, with .ICS (so I can import into Google Calendar or Outlook or whatever I use), embeddable (just via GCal), RSS feed, twitter feed. Something where I can actually go and see a list of events hosted by Refresh, Bmore on Rails, etc...You'd think this problem was solved already, but apparently not."
  
  
• "...some forum / roundtable type of thing where people can just talk ideas would be neat too. Perhaps OpenCoffee, with some more structure, up in Baltimore somewhere. It would be nice if something like this varied in location, so that for example, it's not always down at the hive. Then again, there is arguably some benefit in having it at a standardized location."
  
  
• "Funding...Baltimore Angels is good, but they only meet every other month."
  
  
• "Exposure. Needs to be more talk about what local entrepreneurs are building...have to raise the profile of Baltimore for outside money. People have to hear about what is going on in Baltimore and see it as a hub of growth and activity, and look at startups in the area as worth investing in."
  
  
• "Support - I love the local Open Coffee...it's less than 5 people, and everyone is doing their own thing, so no one is afraid to be open and talk. It's been very helpful for me and I've found the atmosphere great."
  
  
• "Peer groups/advisors/coaching, all of which I have found in the area."
  
  
• "1) access to capital
  2) talented technologists
  3) universities that are engaged in the entrepreneurial world
  4) service providers (lawyers, accountants, insurance agents, PR firms, recruiters, etc) who understand start-ups, and have appropriate business models
  5) mechanisms which support the free flow of talent
  6) a cheerleading environment where mentors are easily found and entrepreneurs benefit from the region's self-promotion
  7) a culture which recognizes those who try -- even when they fail."
  
  
• "...my greatest challenge was in recruiting talent. Finding people who have actually marketed software, or developed commercial C++ applications was an enormous challenge!"
  
  
• "We are terribly underserved by the absence of an entrepreneurial culture at JHU. Perhaps, that's beginning to change, but it will take time to play out. I recently attended a discussion on the macroeconomic impact of entrepreneurialism at MIT; it's simply staggering!...Without the active engagement of our local universities, we'll never build a sufficient flow of new companies into our region."
  

What are your biggest challenges?

• "The biggest problem is tapping into true seed money. It seems that seed money for early stage startups is virtually non-existent. There are various Angel groups in the area and there is money to be invested, but rarely are the investors ever interested in being the first dollars spent by the company.
  
  "Given this, it seems that a development based Angel group could help mitigate the high risk of true early stage companies such that more good ideas would get off the ground"
  
  
• "Again, never having done this before, our biggest challenge is knowing what it is we're supposed to even do or not do as a 'real' business."
  
  
• "One big problem with not knowing what to do, is not immediately knowing who can help you sort those things out. With regards to legal issues, we've already been through two big-name law firms that charged big $, but they had almost no experience with startups and were not able to guide us well at all."
  
  
• "I think my biggest challenge is once I have established business and working app (which is a challenge in itself), is marketing and getting the word out as well as creating a sustainable revenue model."
  
  
• "Knowing who to trust....and whose referrals to trust."
  
  
• "Finding talent. Dealing with taxes."
  
  
• "...finding leads is of course a big thing."
  
  
• "As for products, hashing through marketing and sales plans...Putting processes in place to fill a pipeline, getting the word out, building sales efforts, etc. And 'getting the word out' - and marketing and sales in general - is different for products for a niche vs. products for the online masses. Looking for money too is a challenge...but it seems like Baltimore Angels is trying to address that."
  
  
• "Money. Finding good people. Money"
  

Is there anything else you'd like to say?

• "Go Baltimore. All of this stuff is wicked exciting. I moved here because it was the closest city to home. I'm staying because Baltimore is poised to claim a huge stake in the future of big tech happenings."
  
  
• "I think some kind of Y Combinator in Baltimore would be great. The combination of funding, help creating a company, and ongoing support is what I would really need to create a successful software company. I also like the idea of having a group or association of small, local software companies that have weekly/monthly meetings to discuss and brainstorm and help each other out with their ideas and possibly code."
  
  
• "I think there is still a gap between the money and then entrepreneurs. It's a hard gap to bridge."
  
  
• "I've heard many times that there just aren't enough companies in Baltimore to justify more private equity. That's just not true! Moreover, there are micro communities emerging - such as with gaming or social media...Growing these communities brings more talent to the region, which leads to more successes."
  
  
• "...individuals are vitally important to an entrepreneurial success. When they come together, they create new companies. When they network, they're looking to challenge themselves, often by changing jobs. Changing jobs in Baltimore's tech world is difficult due to its relatively small size and lack of a networking forum. Making it easy for individuals to meet and network not only eases the free flow of talent (one of the things that makes Silicon Valley so successful), but causes people to want to continue their association with the networking forum that's proven helpful."
  
  
• (Several respondents graciously offered to help out or be included in any discussions, so I'll be sending some emails and things -- add a comment below if you are interested)

Baltimore's Internet Economy as I See It

There are a lot of creative people in Baltimore working with Internet technology. At events like SocialDevCampEast, Beehive, Refresh, Bmore on Rails, Twin Tech, Outlet, or Ignite, you'll meet a ton of them. Many technical people in and around Baltimore have a national following, and I've run into them at far-flung events like Techcrunch50 and Lone Star Ruby Conference. We have several successful entrepreneurs in our midst who have built great Internet businesses. A recent accounting of greater Baltimore's IT industry gives us top rankings for many tech indicators. Baltimore's economy definitely has the human capital to succeed in the Internet industry.

Yet few of these talented people are starting or working for product companies. I rarely meet someone who's involved in making something that he or she owns. Baltimore's Internet economy, as far as I can tell, mostly comprises consulting work, services, and government contracting. Those sectors are very strong, and bring a lot of wealth to our region, but product companies have much more potential to improve the long-term prospects of our economy. Because they involve greater risk, product companies create a lot of wealth for investors and early employees, who then go on to invest in the next round of startups. Service businesses have less growth potential since they are ultimately constrained by the hourly labor of their employees. When they don't work, income doesn't come in.

Why should it be this way? How do we encourage more product-based technology companies to form here? Starting a risky venture requires a leap of faith and a maverick move against the grain of what society expects you to do, so how can society foster these choices? In an email, Dave Troy gave me a great metaphor:

"...you can't make a wild mushroom grow. The only thing you can do is be sure the conditions are right. That means there needs to be enough biomass in the underlying organism, there has to be sufficient food, moisture, and the temperature has to be right. The mushroom has to want to grow on its own."

I don't presume to be any kind of a "startup mushroom farmer", as I am still working on my first startup. But I do think we have the potential makings of a startup ecosystem in place:

• Exemplars of success: Advertising.com, BillMeLater, Image Cafe, and other companies were started here, and there's a strong software game industry in Hunt Valley.
• Integrated economy: Baltimore and DC are closely connected, being less than an hour away by train or car. We are part an Amtrak corridor connecting us to Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.
• Low cost of living: you can buy a lot of house in Baltimore in a nice neighborhood (including one of the best-planned great places in America) and lead the kind of urban, connected lifestyle much prized by creative people.
• Tolerance and diversity: Although our neighborhoods are largely segregated, it's still the kind of town where noncomformists can feel at home. We've got John Waters, the High Zero festival, Theater Project, Creative Alliance, and the Visionary Arts Museum, just to name a few examples.
  
• Community spirit: In my experience, people in Baltimore really want you to succeed at whatever you're starting or trying. If you want to make a movie or start a business or become an activist, few in this community will tell you that you can't; most will say "that's cool, how can I help?" I experienced this vividly when I helped found the Baltimore Improv Group and Ignite Baltimore. People in this city could not have been more supportive.
• Culture and recreation: The greater Baltimore area encompasses many amenities that entrepreneurial people enjoy. Museums, symphonies, parks, book stores, art house movie theaters, coffee shops, major league sports franchises, etc.
• Excellent university: There are many good schools in Baltimore, but Johns Hopkins in particular has a global reputation, and is a fertile recruiting ground for local technology companies.
• Talent pool: there are over 100,000 IT workers in Maryland according to the Economic Alliance of Greater Baltimore [link requires registration]. The Washington-Baltimore region is first in the US in the number of residents holding Bachelor's and graduate degrees.
  

With a little more investment of energy, time, and resources, I believe we could capitalize on these assets by priming the conditions for startup growth. Here are some ideas for what else we could do:

• More visible angel investment: If I have the skills and ambition to start a technology company, how do I meet someone who has the capital and appetite for risk to invest in one, or tell me my idea needs more thinking through? As Dave Troy puts it:

"One of the valuable functions of an angel community is that it creates a mechanism for telling silly entrepreneurs to go pound sand; or to come back with a better idea or team. We don't have a very functional mechanism for handling any of that here right now. What we have is some risk-averse investors telling potentially good entrepreneurs to pound sand, and we have a lot of silly entrepreneurs pursuing ideas that they probably shouldn't. So, towards the notion of 'supporting' local startups, in my opinion the best way to 'support' them is not to encourage them or patronize them, necessarily, but rather to find ways for them to fail more quickly.

"...We need faster failures and quicker morphing of bad teams into good ones, and the pursuit of good ideas instead of bad ones...we need to provide real, objective guidance mechanisms to help entrepreneurs navigate the money and power networks they will need to master in order to succeed..."

Awesomely enough, Dave recently announced the formation of Baltimore Angels, and at last count 14 angels have signed on.

• Develop a bootstrap network: Baltimore does not lack for ambition or ideas. I know of at least nine companies in various stages of growth (600block, Localist, Ipiqi, MPTrax, Ubernote, SpotCrime, AwayFind, DiscoverED, Sleep.FM -- these are software companies, because that's the field I follow). We should build up a bootstrap network to support and mentor such entrepreneurs and connect them to potential investors.
• Reach out to students: Jared Goralnick pointed out to me that technical people graduating from college today assume they have only one choice - to get a high-paying, stable job (i.e., at a big consulting or contracting firm). It's an admittedly attractive choice - who would turn down the chance to make $80,000 or more right out of college? But students need to know there are other options that could prove more lucrative: starting their own company or joining a startup, options which may payoff financially but will no doubt payoff in terms of the business and technical education they offer. Recent college graduates can take bigger risks as they have less to lose and more to gain, but few students get that message. Jared is organizing an event scheduled for 4/11, watch his blog for more details.
  
• Encourage self-organization: No formal entity could have started SocialDevCampEast, Coworking, Refresh, Outlet, or Ignite, but entities like GBTC, the University of Baltimore, and many local businesses have shown tremendous support for them. These groups are all run at low-cost with little or no budget, and they still need help. Our business and government leaders could do wonders by helping with facility rental, marketing, or publicity, or by attending the events, speaking at them, and mixing with the technical community.
• Improved communications: I'd love for someone to start a blog chronicling the local startup scene and self-organizing tech events.
• GBTC Round Table: I hear really good things about the GBTC's round table groups. If there was a group that focused on startup technology companies, I bet people would flock to it, as there aren't many opportunities for local Internet entrepreneurs to mingle exclusively with their peers. It would also demonstrate GBTC's commitment to helping product companies.
  

I've made some generalizations here, and what I've written is pretty specific to my experiences, but it's from the heart. My own startup, OtherInbox, is based in Austin, Texas, because that's where the principal founder is located, but also because it's a really ideal place to start a technology company. It's got all of the support mechanisms I mentioned above, and has had a few rounds of successful startups, so now the startup community is self-sustaining. Technical people in Austin can't help but encounter many examples of success, and there are a lot of investors willing to mentor them and invest in their dreams. Truly, Austin is ripe for wild mushroom growth -- yet Austin is more culturally and economically isolated than Baltimore. If they can do it, why can't we?

I'm a entrepeneur and technologist, a hacker and improvisor, and I want to spend my life starting and running technology companies. I'm also a transplanted son of Baltimore, with many friends and connections and roots here, and I really love this city. I want to make my dreams come true here, and I'm committed to doing whatever I can to make this the kind of place where every entrepeneur has that chance. So let's get going!

Thanks to Dave Troy, Stephen Muirhead, Bill Mill, Prescott Gaylord, and Jared Goralnick, who read drafts of this post and gave me great feedback.