by Adam Rentschler

As the culture of entrepreneurship continues its shift from reliance on paid consultants to volunteer mentors, we collectively cheer about the money we’re saving. But, this shift trades one problem for another. Mentors’ time is perhaps more precious than money. Yet, our startup communities are hopelessly inefficient in turning mentors’ expertise into good startup-company outcomes. 

If your community doesn’t adapt, you are in danger of burning through your mentors’ goodwill, and your startups will increasingly be left to fend for themselves.

Why? The learning model in which we are stuck is based on one-to-one exchange of intuitive impressions that experts share with startups. This has two implications:

(1) Mystery. Many experts in startup communities insist the difference between a fundable strategy and a one that cannot attract funding is like the difference between art and porn. “I know it when I see it,” they’ll tell you. (Smut, like a good strategy, is difficult to define in the abstract.)

(2) Access. This type of learning relies on high caliber experts who are gifted in applying their intuition to the unique strategic challenges of a given startup. Mentors’ volunteer time is a scarce and carefully guarded resource. This makes sense; we  are making novice entrepreneurs much faster than we are making new, kick-ass mentors. 

Mystery creates efficiency problems. Access constraints are a symptom is a growing supply and demand imbalance in our communities. The intuition our communities rely on as the wellspring of entrepreneurial learning doesn’t scale. Until we address this issue, our communities cannot scale either. 

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by Tommy Perkins

At this point, you’ve probably seen this Pando Daily post that was heavily circulated this week, titled “We Know Accelerators Are Headed For a Shakeout – But Do They?” Aside from the eyebrow-raising walk-back at Y Combinator, which by its own admission was bloated, much of the post is anecdotal. Yes, the Series-A crunch appears real, but how much of that is the product of reduced capital requirements and the rise of crowdfunding and angel events? As Pando Daily founder Sarah Lacy noted Monday, reporting on seed funding data ranges from bad to non-existent and has for ages. As a former financial reporter (and colleague of Sarah’s), I heartily vouch for her on this.

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by Todd Reimer

This is a response to Brad Feld’s recently published book Startup Communities, which is summarized in a 3.5-minute video here.

Feld’s “Boulder Thesis” is highly aligned with the research on fostering effective communities of practice. However, based on that literature, Valid Eval (VE) believes there are opportunities to help startup communities take advantage of an under-utilized resource—the tacit expertise of their community’s “entrepreneurial stack.” VE was founded as a way to begin capturing the wisdom of the crowd for the mutual benefit of the startup community. VE began this process by providing novice entrepreneurs (newcomers) with reliable feedback from more experienced community members (veterans)—taking advantage of historically tested learning models rooted in mentoring and apprenticeship. 

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