I recently had the opportunity to speak at the Big Omaha conference in Nebraska a few weeks ago. While I intended to incite a bit of conversation, I had no idea that I’d start such a riot.
I really loved Omaha, the city was vibrant and I met a number of smart, energetic entrepreneurs. I wasn’t thrilled with my talk performance, despite lots of preparation I ended up getting some major stage fright. So I ended up losing most of my logical argument and what had been awesome in my bathroom mirror only a few minutes earlier, didn’t end up being as great as I’d planned. I’ll do better next time.
The topic was on entrepreneurism, the most important things I’ve learned while starting my company, discovered through experience and passed on by other founders. I’d been told that the conference would have a lot of people who were about to start their own thing, were looking to take things to the next level or wanted some inspiration, so I wanted to talk about a few things that helped me in the company building process, things like:
- using competition as driver to step up your game
- how to get over the fear of failure
- the value of being a good person
- making sure to spend your time on things that you want to define you in ten years
The real kicker though was my point that if you want to build the best possible company, you should move to SF, NY, Chicago, Boston or Boulder. (queue angry Omaha mob)
While I expected some push back, I didn’t expect such an explosion. My goal was to kick off what I thought was an important conversation around how to build your business as quickly and as effectively as possible if you live in a smaller tech community. Unfortunately, forgetting my speech means I didn’t make a great case. Therefore, what followed was several hundred tweets about how wrong I am, that I hate Omaha or just twitpics like this:
After the talk I had a lot of brilliant conversations with people on Twitter and in-person. I thought it important to explain my point further, so we can discuss . I’d love to hear your thoughts, please leave comments!
In my opinion, if you’re an individual who’s serious about building something great; the best business in the universe for whatever problem you’re trying to solve; you’ll give yourself, your company, your co-workers, your investors everything you have at your disposal to make them successful.
This means going to the place with the most intellectual capital. Building a network of people who are succeeding at what you want to do, who have the experience in the things you don’t, who can answer problems you can waste months trying to solve. It means building trust with partners who will quickly do deals with you because you know you both have a shared work ethic and great product.
It means spending every non-working moment at events and conferences learning about every aspect of your business (lean startup theory, customer driven development, marketing, analytics, design, customer acquisition, sales, etc). While you can build a great business anywhere, these things are more readily found in big cities and make the business building easier.
If you wouldn’t drop everything to do these things, you’re playing a different game than most of the rest of the people in tech.
One of the major pieces of feedback I received was that I was speaking against what BigOmaha is about - community building. In reality, building a business as fast and as well as you can and building a community are two only slightly related things. The first is the goal of an individual, the latter of the community and both are great.
A community should never hold an individual back, and if it can’t foster the individual it’ll never be truly competitive. So, the focus should be on improving those conditions not holding individuals. Improving a community is a totally separate discussion than mine, however it seems like people are really interested in this and it might make a great headline topic for next year’s conference.
Perhaps the next BigOmaha should have panels that talk about how the region can attract more investment, how to incentivize regional youth to be entrepreneurs, how to participate more fully with other communities and how to attract more talent to the region.
I hope that BigOmaha is about building conversation about how to succeed in this industry we all love, being open, helping each other get there and creating some awesome technology. I hope it’s about building better businesses, moving the industry forward and empowering the next generation of entrepreneurs— not purely about geography.
Omaha is absolutely on its way to becoming a major tech hub in 5-10 years, and BigOmaha is on its way to becoming a premiere conference. My ideas for next year’s event:
- make the conference more actionable. define a challenge we all should be thinking about and addressing (speakers, audience members, internet audience, etc.) Something like: the tech scene in the Midwest; how can we foster talent, investment and knowledge
- highlight more local companies
- hold a competition for best local startup, have a sponsor donate an awesome prize
- get more audience participation! It’d be great to have smaller break-off sessions for targeted discussions and sessions (how to get funded, how to brand your company, how to build and motivate a rockstar team, etc)
Midwest, I love you. If any of you come to SF, email me at melody@styleseat.com and I promise:
- to buy you a drink
- to help you any way I can: (people, good conversation)
- to be impressed if you mention you got to the end of this crazy long blog post
