The idea for this post came to me after reading the very well written blog post about “The state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin” by Brett Hurt a successful entrepreneur and an Austinite as well. In this blog post Brett goes into the details of the type of startups that are more common in Austin, first-stage startups as he called them. However, what I really enjoyed about his post is when he says that everything that is happening in Austin will lead to more experiments and because of it we’ll end up seeing more second-stage and third-stage startups. Go ahead and read Brett’s blog post to see how he defines first, second and third stage startups.
The keyword above is “experiments”, I love it. You see the word experiments gives us the freedom to be brave, to be persistent on crazy ideas and it invites everyone to do things that we wouldn’t try otherwise. It is an experiment after all. Experimentation it is the spirit and essence of entrepreneurialism in my opinion. Let’s go an experiment something today, and tomorrow and next week. One side-effect AND benefit from all of these experimentation is finding innovation along the way, and how’s that you might ask? Well, if you continuously try new things chances are that even if you don’t get the desired results you will at least learn from the experimentation and open your mind to new ideas and the like. It is not about success or failure, it is about experimenting and failure and success are just the result of such experimentation.
I agree with Brett, Austin is becoming this place where experiments are more common than before, entrepreneurs and investors seem to be taking more risks and the startup community is growing every day. Austin and other cities are an important part of the whole US startup and entrepreneurial ecosystem, whether Austin or any other city is better or worse than Silicon Valley is irrelevant, every place, every city and every community can learn from each other. What’s important is to do the best we can, push forward and don’t stop and look back to see where we are or how we compete against Silicon Valley, that is just silly and a waste of time.
Go ahead, go experiment, take some risk, do something and who knows you might end up building something awesome… or better yet, something that will make people who use your product or service awesome.
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Very nice article, Ricardo. The “experiment” – also I do believe that the Valley has their own. Austin is more in highly specialized niche markets which require much less capital while the Valley does huge broad experiments burning sometimes 9-figures. What makes Austin so interesting is that a 6-figure, or even a 5-figure, investment takes you a long way – talking about lean. This is the reason why first time entrepreneurs and a growing crowd of investors prefer Austin – and perhaps the reason why Kim Jong-un recognizes Austin among the most important US cities.
Reblogged this on OnTechies.
[…] a lot when you are trying to gain exposure and some attention for your startup or experiment as I like to call them. This is nothing new, and yet many startup founders find blogging useless and not worth their time […]