It’s been a little over a year since we held the first DC Tech Meetup, and a little over a year and a half since we launched ProudlyMadeInDC, which can be considered a catalyst for the Meetup. One can confidently say that everything has been up and to the right with all aspects of the greater DC startup ecosystem; more startups, thriving startups, investments, acquisitions, M+A, etc. For actual community resources, we’ve seen a lot of that grow. New events and organizers are coming about, and new people are attending them all the time, with demos getting better and better. It’s remarkable how I can walk into a DC Tech Meetup (which, thanks primarily to the hard work of fellow organizer Peter Corbett, is now one of the biggest meetups in the country), or a Lean Startup meetup and the first reaction that pops into my mind is how many unfamiliar faces there are.
More recently, I’ve pulled back a bit as my primary focus is putting all my passion and energy into making Contactually “blow up” to quote Paul Singh. We still operate ProudlyMade, which continues to grow despite having never spent anything in marketing, and generally really sucking at PR. I still assist with DCTM, and help run each show. I have no regrets about pulling back, as I believe the best community organizers are those who are deeply entrenched in the startup battle. It’s also great to see new resources pop up and provide a lot of auxiliary support for those in the greater community.
There has been a lot of attention among the entrepreneurial blogosphere towards fostering strong startup communities, as more and more “hubs” pop up, galvanized by the knowledge that a startup can exist and thrive outside of the Valley Mecca. As I think about my involvement and passion for growing a strong community, and what would provide the biggest returns for the region in the little amount of time I’m able to provide, that leads to what I believe the primary goals are for a community, and what DC needs.
What qualifies a strong community?
More startups going through the full life cycle – inception, prototype, funding, pr, growth, liquidity, recidivism.
A swirling pool of talent, jumping into and among nascent and growing companies.
A strong support base of resources, professional services, investment cash.
An active sense of community and camaraderie among founders and employees. Whatever will end up with the first-time entrepreneur with the glint of an idea in his mind to connect with the battle-hardened serial entrepreneur/investor and get enough of an ass-kicking to get him on the right track (Glen, Aaron, I love you guys).
What should the priorities be for the community as a whole, especially any self-proclaimed “leaders”?
Kill the wantrepreneur. Whatever it takes to get the guy with an idea off the sidelines and into the game. Vet their idea, help them find their team, give them the crawl-walk-run(thanks for letting me steal your phrase, John Casey) steps they need to take, with a “I’ve been there, let me help you” attitude.
Build better companies. Help those already on the path, and their companies, kick ass. Throw resources, mentors, investors, press at them. And ask for nothing in return, other than hoping they pay it forward.
Keep swirling and feeding the talent engine. Connect those hiring with those looking. Get people out of their government/corporate cubicles and into startups, sometimes even before they gradute. Encourage them to take a risk. At the same time, build confidence that if a startup fails, that’s not game over for the employees and a sign that they should run back to their golden handcuffs. If you know that you can easily attain an open position in any number of thriving startups, you have enough of a safety net to take a bigger risk with your own.
But what can do more harm than good?
Event overload. Already if you look at Ross’ excellent and long running DCTechEvents, every night is loaded with events geared towards entrepreneurs. While networking is great, and the content is always a value-add, the best thing one can do is work on your startup. I’ve found the the best events inspire me to the point that I end up leaving early, hungry to get back to work. When people ask me why I don’t go to many events at night anymore, I normally respond by saying that the best thing I can do for the DC community is ensure Contactually is a success.
Incite dependence on resources. Again, there’s a trend that going to an event and talking to one of the organizers will be your solution. I can maybe point you in the right direction, give you some advice based on my limited experience, and if I can think of a possible introduction, make it. But I’m not going to help you find your cofounder. I’m not the one to judge your idea. I’m not the one who will spend my day helping you, solely because you happen to be in DC. I and many others have recently become overburdened with requests like this. More than once I’ve been confronted by someone at an event, furious that I can’t find them a ruby instructor, or that unicorn-like technical cofounder.
One year ago today, we launched ProudlyMadeInDC. I sent out this message to our mailing list
In the wee hours of the morning, on December 2nd, 2010, the two of us
started throwing together a simple WordPress site, after a dinner discussion
with other entrepreneurs about improving the scene in DC. We posted a list
of startups that we knew about (a total of 40!), and shared it with a few
close friends. On December 13th, 2010 – we opened it up to the world. And by
“open it up” – we actually mean making a couple tweets/FB posts. We expected
maybe a couple hundreds hits to the site, and eventually it would just trail
off and disappear.
But you, the community, latched on to it. You took what we built, and ran
with it, turning ProudlyMade into something we could never have imagined.
More importantly, we’ve seen the community grow. While we could focus on the
birth and growth of so many follow-on efforts (DC Tech Meetup, DC Tech
Summer), as well as dozens of other resources coming online in the DC
area… That doesn’t matter. What matters is that every day, more and more
people are seeing that realizing their dreams is possible in the DC area.
They’re escaping their cubicle prisons, working nights and weekends,
validating their ideas, raising funding, and building companies. We’re
creating jobs and making the world a better place. Sites like
ProudlyMadeInDC, events like the DC Tech Meetup, and thousands of other
resources, meetups, and groups… we’re just here to support that. Just a
few years back, would anyone have dreamed that DC would be a place where
hundreds of startups would bloom? We certainly didn’t. Yet here we are. DC
is on the map. And you are making it happen.
So here we are – roughly a year after launching, still going strong. We’ve
established ProudlyMadeInDC as a home for entrepreneurs helping
entrepreneurs. We work 24/7 on our ownstartups (it’s currently 1:30
in the morning as we write this), and try and put whatever remaining time we
have into helping you. Going forward, we’re going to be adding more
resources, both internally and on our site, with the aim of helping you. So
thanks.
The past sixth months we’ve seen an explosion in the DC community. Events where we normally may have expected a few dozen of the same faces to show up have now grown into the hundreds. There seems to be this constant flow of new people, new companies, and general enthusiasm around creating new ventures in the region. We’re hoping that this becomes self sustaining, and all signs point to that being the case.
With such a large community of new individuals, new challenges arise. We keep an ear open to every bit of feedback, and there is one constant piece of advice. The people sitting in the audience want to know each other, above all else.
Michael and I, and numerous others, have talked at length about this, and I’ve condensed this into a few hypotheses.
A community relies on 1:1 connections – I can honestly state that, over the past four years of networking events, dinners, drinks, and coffee – I’ve been able to both give and receive the most amount of value by sitting down – in person – with one other person. Getting to know them, learning what they are up to, and figuring out actionable next steps to help each other out. I’ve made clients, friends, and business partners this route.
Large events don’t provide the right atmosphere to facilitate real connections – When I walk into a large networking event, I maybe walk out with one or two people I’d actually be interested in talking with. Now, my tendency is to gravitate towards the people I already know, and just chat with them. I’ve heard how daunting it is, as someone who doesn’t know that many people, to walk into a room of 700 people, and not know who to talk to, or how to.
Existing social platforms aren’t built for discovering other people – The initial use case of Facebook (I was in college at the time) was exploring and connecting who was in your classes, and who your friends were friends with. Over time, privacy and new features have all but destroyed the ability to connect with people you wouldn’t know otherwise. Even the groups feature isn’t conducive to connections amongst its member. Twitter’s utility as a discovery decreases with each new member being added… more noise.
Social context isn’t necessarily the solution – Just because you’re in the same group on Quora, checked in to the same venue on Foursquare, or “like” the same social objects – doesn’t provide enough data to ensure that some kind of meaningful connection will happen.
A platform purely focused on people discovery can serve many purposes. I’ve seen the value of connecting with others, and facilitating further connections between others. An online solution to facilitating offline connections has value.
That being said…. keep your eyes open. We’re working on something.
It’s been a little under five months since we launched the first version of ProudlyMadeInDC, a website that has helped shed light on the growing startup community in DC. It’s received more media attention and traffic than I expected when it was built. Since then, we’ve launched two additional initiatives – the DC Tech Meetup (800 attendees expected for next week) and DC Tech Summer (over 400 interns applied in one week). ProudlyMade remains our flagship destination, as well as the biggest time commitment.
In terms of hard costs, PMiDC is relatively cheap. It is however a huge time commitment. We have companies to review and add all the time. All day long, entrepreneurs, VCs, and established companies are reaching out to us asking how to get involved, to vet their ideas, and what they can do to help the community. It is an incredibly exciting thing to do, but when you’re building a startup while already running a successful business, and in general trying to find time to enjoy life a bit, the opportunity cost is high.
So why do it?
Really simple:
Main Reason: If I can do everything I can to make DC a great place to build and grow a startup, then that increases the chance that anything I create here will succeed. I could move somewhere else to do that, and that’s never out of the question, but I’m here now.
Secondary Reason: These are my friends, coworkers, collaborators. I’m lucky to personally know so many awesome founders in the region. As anyone who’s been in an entrepreneurial community for a while, the peer support is amazing. This is one of the best ways I can think of supporting the community.
Secondary Reason: I started out in the community knowing no-one, and am always out there to discuss ideas, work through problems, and figure out the best way to help each other. I want to know everyone in the community, to work with them, discuss ideas, maybe get funding. Having a central role gives me that visibility into the community.
I’m Not Doing it for Money: Sure, I want my startup to succeed and be profitable. But I’m not here to make any money directly off the community. A lot of people, after an article is published or a big meetup, will reach out to me inquiring to me about my services. I’m not accepting new clients at this time, no matter how much you ask. That being said, as our initiatives grow and become more of a time commitment, that may change in order to better balance our time.
What’s Next:
We just had a great meeting yesterday regarding the next steps in the community, and have a product in the works to support it. Just wait and see. People Discovery + Social White Pages FTW.
When Mike IMed me a few months ago to ask if I would join him and Kunmi for StartupXLR8R, I resisted at first. I am already focusing so much time on STRUCTO, and already distracting myself with side projects like WhoMails.Me and ProudlyMadeinDC (the latter of which Mike is a co-founder), that another project would be too much to handle. But we approached it with a different spin. While we all had our own startups, and all the other teams applying were for the most part well established startups, we were going to go from zero to launch. In two days (16 hours).
We had tossed around a number ideas, but ended up choosing a smaller idea that we knew we could launch an initial version of by 4 PM Sunday afternoon, when it was time to pitch our product for “investors” (not that we had any interest in raising capital for this). We settled on an idea I had, a daily e-mail customized for you.
So Saturday morning, we headed off into our breakout room (thanks Microsoft for an absolutely gorgeous space), and just started cranking out code. Kunmi worked on the frontend display, Mike on the email and configuration backend, and myself on all the data sources. It was an exciting weekend, with sixteen straight hours of heads down, don’t-talk-to-us coding.
By 3:59 PM (we were pushing code as we were walking into the conference room), HeyAstro was born. In the few days since we’ve launched, we’ve had over 150 people sign up, an immense amount of amazing feedback, and a laundry list of new things we want to do with the product.
Sign up for HeyAstro, and let us know what you think!
Final Stack:
Ruby on Rails (#FTW)
Heroku for Hosting
Delayed Job for Queue Management
SendGrid for email delivery and analytics
Gems, Gems, Gems. There is no way we could have built this in any other language than Ruby, as so much of the backend relied on particular gems. Koala for Facebook, HttParty, Instagram, OAuth etc…
In February of this year I presented at the DCPHP meetup. Based on my experience deploying large client applications built in PHP using AWS and Rightscale, I gave a detailed walkthrough of how to set it up. Fuzzy video below:
As mentioned previously, I’m co-founder of ProudlyMadeinDC, a central site showcasing DC’s startups, showing to the world, and to ourselves, that DC is an up-and-coming startup hub. We started it as a small side project, but it’s grown to become real movement, helping to power the rise of DC startups. I presented at Ignite DC 6 (slides below, full video coming soon), so what I have below is, for the most part, my talk.
I’m here to talk about the efforts to rebuild a startup community in the dc area and how just one step by anyone can help make a difference. Because an awkward guy like me might appear to be the most unfit for the job.
I went to school in the region, and they did an awesome job of ensuring that we all were funneled into cubicles at a beltway bandit. It was only then I started learning about the whole concept of a start-up outside of the corporate bubble.
But I didn’t know anyone who involved in the start-up world. So I read voraciously. Every book, blog, and newsgroup I could. But still, I lacked the personal contact and war stories of a peer community to help me venture out on my own.
Three years ago, I stumbled across a wiki for barcamp DC. Here was a completely volunteer organized event, that help me meet so many entrepeneurs. Many of these people I am still in contact with today, and consider them my mentors, peers, and friends.
But it seemed that every founder walked around with a chip on their shoulder because they weren’t in the valley. And because of that their chances of survival were slim. VCs weren’t investing, media wouldn’t cover them, and there wasn’t much of a peer community.
Fastforward to today. Our community has grown. What’s great about most of these events is they aren’t organized for any major financial or PR gain. They’re organized by one or two people to get a bunch of like minded folks together.
While a small group of people actively try to improve the community, far too many find solace in complaints via Twitter and Facebook about the inability to start a company in our nation’s capital.
If you’ve spent any time in DC you’ve run into these people. While I’m not telling you to join an artists’ commune any time soon, their manifesto has always resonated with me. If you see a problem, stop complaining about it and do something to solve it. Isn’t that what every entrepreneur aims to do?
When Brad Feld, a VC who helped build Boulder as a startup hub, came to DC, he had no idea that Living Social is a local company. Lesson #1: No one was really talking about DC’s startups. So we knew that marketing DC is one thing that we could improve upon.
There are a number of events and resources in DC available for entrepreneurs. But figuring out where to begin is a daunting task. Lesson #2: Provide some kid of beachhead to guide newcomers to the right resources.
It was finally time to stop talking. With just one Red Bull fueled night, I was surprised with the outcome. 2 months ago, today, actually, I emailed my co-founder of what became Proudly Mady in DC with the first version of our directory.
The lean startup methodology teaches you to launch as quickly as possible. We had lots of big ideas for what we wanted to do, and debated the what-ifs – but we quickly put an end to that, opting instead to just jump off, and figure out the rest as we plummet to our demise.
Launch day is always a rush. About a week after the first version of the site, we started publicizing. And by “publicizing” I actually mean posting on Facebook and emailing about a dozen people.
What we learned was that if there’s a community backing you, your idea grows legs, really quickly. Thousands of visits and hundreds of tweets later, our directory of over 100 startups had made its mark. We can now sit andwatch visitors come to our site, and check out the startups on the list.
When we built the site, we set up a single email address where anyone could reach out. Since the launch day, emails have been pouring in from new startups, experienced entrepreneurs, and newcomers who just want to get involved. We do our best to guide them on the right path.
You won’t get it right. You may have much more grandiose plans. And you may have a lot of critics, as we did. But we made that first step, took a few hours of our time, and made something that has provided a 10-fold return to the community.
what’s next? What can you do? We’re at a critical time in making DC into a startup hub. We need to work better together, across different groups. We need to build that herd, support that new startup, because if we can improve the community as a whole, we can make it a better place to bring our own dreams into reality.
The next phase is the DC Tech Meetup, a place where anyone who’s involved with startup or wants to be, or just wants to support startups, can work together. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a lean startup enthusiast, VC, hacker, lawyer, founder, whatever. We need you and everyone you know.
It sounds like your standard cliche advice to go out and just do something. But to make a community happen, it’s going to take all of us making one small step. The next time you think that something is hard in DC, stop complaining, and figure out a way to make it better.
For us, it started with just two people. We can now happily say that we have formed a supportive community around us and our idea. Find one or two people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and and decide together what your first step is. There’s no way to build a community alone. Thank you.
—
Really, it’s an amazing time to be involved in the startup community. There’s electricity in the air that wasn’t here six months ago. The conversation is no longer about whether or not a startup can survive in DC, it’s changed for the positive. People are leaving their silos, and figuring out how they can work together. It’s great to see.
ProudlyMadeinDC is still booming. We’re getting tons of email every week, from new entrepreneurs looking to get involved, startups asking to be listed, and people/organizations who just want to help. It’s amazing to have our fingers on the pulse of entrepreneurship here, and meet so many amazing people.
I’m the kid who made mixtapes for his friends in high school. I got a small taste of it senior year, when I had my full setup in my basement, and hosted many sweaty fraternity parties (while destroying half a dozen speaker systems). But I never really understood what to do, and could never find a way of learning how (while most DJs I spoke to were self taught, it’s kind of hard to justify investing in equipment I had no idea how to use).
After finding out about the Beat Refinery program off of Thrillist, I signed up for their inaugural class. Taught by DJ Trayze, the beginners class was a perfect introduction into the basic skills and theory behind mixing. It was a lab-style class, where we each had our own station with the full setup a normal DJ uses, including Scratch Live, the industry standard.
After finishing up the first course, I went out and invested in a full rig, knowing that I’d actually have a clue how to use it. I just completed the intermediate course, where we learned some of the more advanced tricks, using more features available in Scratch Live, and getting a lot more hands-on time with the equipment, and great guidance and oversight from experienced DJs. If you’re in the DC area (classes are in Bethesda) – definitely check it out.
As busy as I am with skeevisArts and Structo, it’s nice to have something fun to take a break with.
Thanks to Nick for catching me doing what I do best… checking e-mail.
A big thanks to the organizers and other sponsors of BarcampDC3. It was a great experience for everyone, and it’s hard to believe that this is the the third one, organized by essentially the same group of people.
Startup Metrics for Pirates – Jared dug in depth one of the most important concepts of the “Startup Metrics for Pirates” methodology organized by Dave McClure – converting and retaining users. One especially helpful tool to come up was Google Insights for Search, that I will immediately start using.
HTML/CSS Tips + Tricks – Russell led the most useful session on HTML/CSS tips + tricks – little bits and pieces of advice to really perfect your technique. First thing Monday AM, I was already using some of his lessons, posted online here.
Android Development – THE GREATEST TALK EVER GIVEN BY ANYONE EVER. Gyuri and I led a developer-focused session on beginning Android development. Gyuri gave a basic step by step tutorial on building an Android application, while I dug into the code for MeetroDC, an application for checking DC Metro times (Bonus Round: I open sourced the code)
Twilio Development – Two developers from the DNC gave an overview of how they used Twilio to rapidly spin out telephony-powered applications during election time. This evolved into an open discussion on possible future applications that can be built, given how easy it is now with these APIs available to developers.
Freelancing – Josh and I finished up the day by leading a session on freelancing, both moonlighting and full time. We had a great dialogue amongst experienced freelancers, newbies, and those just interested in learning more. The conversation started out dominated by legalese and fear of being “caught” – but we then focused on some of the true important topics – billing, project management, and communications. I’m thankful for everyone who came out, and especially to those who attended just to put in their 0.02. We could tell by the questions being asked and the wide eyes that this was inspirational and helpful for all involved (it certainly was for me).
As the first BarcampDC was my first foray into any kind of professional community outside my then-employer, it’s a great experience to come back each year, see how the DC community has grown, and see how I’ve progressed in my own journey. If you had told me two years ago, that I would be completely out of the government contracting world, running my own thriving business, working on multiple products, and a regular contributor to these events… I would have laughed and kept walking.
I'm a hacker/founder, I'm working on Contactually, an email interface to CRMs. I'm also a freelance developer, working as skeevisArts while working on Structo, a cloud service for web developers.
When 
