Entrepreneur as Information Gatherer
This article is a part of the book “How to Build Thriving Start-up Ecosystems: Five Information Patterns for Success.”
Humanity has long been a forager of information, for more information can lead to more food. And food — a mix of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins — supplies the body with calories that are vital for its every function, from physical activity to maintaining internal processes like breathing and digestion (Westerterp). Millenia ago the information that was transferred between people was information on what game was plentiful nearby, or which mushrooms were edible versus poisonous.
As farming techniques advanced and more people could move away from subsistence farming, specialization of labor began. Now individuals might become glass blowers, leather workers, weavers, or smiths (Smith). This specialization of work demanded a way to transfer value between specializations, as people still needed to ultimately transfer their work for food. These tokens of symbolic value became known as currency (Mankiw).
As products became more specialized than any one person could create and sell alone, organizational structures were created so people could work on specific components of a product or service in a way that they could transfer their labor into currency (Parker). This structure of internal organized work to obtain and store value within a larger economic structure became known as a company (Smith).
Even though today’s companies seem far removed from hunting and gathering, the same pressures on a more abstract level guide them that guided our ancestors: fundamentally, companies need to take in more stored value (money) from customers than they expend on their operations. Every company is a unique structure of four operational facets: marketing to find potential customers, a revenue model to take value from the customer, value production that provides a product or service, and retention that enables them to repeat another cycle of production. Marketing, Revenue Generation, Product Generation, Retention: this is the metabolic cycle of a company.
A start-up is a search for a new combination of these processes that together generates consistent inflows of money. More accurate information in this search increases the chances of finding a successful combination before the company (metaphorically) starves.
Entrepreneur as Forager
Animals adopt various different strategies in their search for food based on their unique combinations of traits (Stephens). Some animals alter their search behaviors with the surrounding world to meet their energy needs, known as utilizing external behavioral patterns (Pyke). Many large cats and frogs adopted an ambush strategy where they remain motionless and wait for prey to come within striking distance (Schoener). This helps them to conserve energy while they wait.
Other animals developed internal mechanisms to grapple with indeterminate food access known as internal behavioral patterns (Pyke). Bears build up fat reserves during times of abundance in the late summer to grapple with times of scarcity in the winter. Camels similarly store fat in their humps that can be metabolized into water when food and water resources are scarce (Schmidt-Nielsen).
Whether it is to change their behavior to the external world or evolve energy storage within their internal structures, these animals are all fundamentally doing the same thing: finding ways to take in more energy than they expend (Schmidt-Nielsen).
Internal and external behavioral patterns also exist in the entrepreneurial world. External behaviors of marketing utilize different information sources, from billboards, to newspapers, to social media to pull in potential customers’ attention.
Founders also constantly search for ever more efficient internal behavioral structures to expend less energy on the design and development of their products. This might include the utilization of AI to help their developers code faster, or a software platform that converts design sketches to code for easier hand-offs. A key role of a founder is to search for an efficient combination of internal structures and external behavioral patterns that pull in more energy than the company utilizes to enable their operations for another cycle.
While start-ups and animals share similar metabolic patterns, they diverge in an important way: the evolution of companies are not bound by the time scales of physical evolution. Founders can change their companies’ structures in weeks, even days to adapt to changing conditions within the organization or the wider market. A small tadpole can become a whale.
Productivity in the Context of Entrepreneurial Ecosystems
An important role for Community Information Designers is to create productive environments that not just promote the generation of start-ups, but that help founders search efficiently for a combination of internal and external patterns that take in more money than they expend.
Productive ecosystems in the natural world like rainforests can host a wide range of life due to their ample rainfall and warm temperatures, while coral reefs offer protection and nutrient-rich waters (Whitmore). In entrepreneurship ecosystems, the breeding ground of successful companies are not crafted through dirt and water. Rather, they are spaces that have three core facets: the resources for founders to run initial tests, the ability to gain rapid feedback, and the ability to adapt their internal structures and external behaviors efficiently based on this feedback.
This conception of entrepreneurship creates a deeper understanding of the role of the Community Information Designer (CID). What a CID might be doing is running workshops, hosting networking events and alumni panels, etc. But the underlying reason why is to develop an ecosystem where founders can achieve this goal of creation, feedback, and adaptation. Good CIDs create an environment where more companies can evolve faster.
Just as start-ups are ever evolving, so too is the work of CIDs to build thriving start-up ecosystems, as the physical landscape of opportunity as well as the technological infrastructure founders need to use it ever shifting, and CIDs need to evolve their infrastructure in turn.
