Interaction Type: Home
A home is a safe space, a place to return to over and over again in life. Home is a space that serves many functions at once: a place to gather family, a place to build friendships, a place to work and relax on your own.
After entrepreneurs have shaped their ideas and built teams at a university, community college, or other type of community, there is always the point where this support ends. It is about six to eight months before this time that there is generally a large drop-off in entrepreneurial activity as students look for work. Few people can afford to continue with their ideas after school. There are also information hurdles. Some students get into accelerators, and leave for the coasts. This increases brain-drain, and makes it so community managers lose a lot of the work put in to developing an entrepreneurial community.
For the many thousands of students that do not get into high profile accelerators, they suddenly find themselves with no community. No program, no counselors, no mentors. It is no wonder that at this point, people end up getting a job.
To stop this drop-off, community managers should work with whoever leads economic development in your town or city, to create an Entrepreneur House. The goal of the house is to provide a way for previous students to continue to have a community and framework as they develop their start-ups. This guide is to provide community managers ideas on how to start and program this house. As always, you should fit this model to the needs of your location and your entrepreneurs.
This model is a new way to think of economic development. Instead of giving millions in tax breaks to large existing corporations, economic development managers can use this alternate approach to develop smaller industries in their towns and cities for a fraction of the cost. It will likely take many cohorts to create a home run, but even if the start-ups from people who belong to these houses fail, the city has stopped some brain drain, and created long-term networks between entrepreneurs in their communities. It is hard to immediately quantify the value of these connections.
Below is an outline of some of the basic components of the creation of an Entrepreneur’s House for a community:
Location
- Should be located near a down-town and close to public transit.
- Better if located near a university, cafes, or other industries.
Layout
- The house needs to have both sleeping quarters and communal space for relaxation and eating.
- The house works best when connected or close to a cafe, co-working space, or events space that can work in conjunction with the Entrepreneur’s House.
Duration
- People should be able to stay in the house in cycles of six months and for a maximum of two years. At each six month interval, the community manager should sit down with them and make sure they are still making strides to build their companies.
Programming
- Every Tuesday the members of the community come together for dinner. At this dinner they should first check in with each other on whether they have completed their tasks from last week and then create goals for the following week. Secondly, at this time they should also have some kind of programming. This might include a lawyer who comes in to talk about how to form an LLC, a marketing firm that offers tips on social media, or a venture capitalist on how to raise money. This might also be Skyping with another group in a different state that is also having dinner.
- Every Thursday night the house should have an open house. This open house does not need to have formal programming, but the entrepreneurs that live at the house should be there. This open house everyone in the community should know about — -this is a time when new college students can come to ask questions. Returning entrepreneurs can pick back up on the pulse of the community.
Size
- The size of these communities will likely scale with the size of the city or town, and the money that they have to put towards building their entrepreneurial community.
Obligations
- The community agrees to support half the cost of housing and initial capital for the start-up. The entrepreneur in turn agrees to give the community 5% of their start-up per year that they are in the house. For tech start-ups, this equity would return to the community after a public offering or acquisition. For traditional businesses, like bakeries, marketing firms, clothing stores, they would pay back the community more like a loan. The community if they have the funds can also open up the house to more non-traditional start-ups, like a film, an art installation, a writer. While it might not be immediately apparent how a community would get their money back on these investments, having a film noticeably shot in a location can bring press, a writer might help the other companies to develop new thoughts and directions, and an art installation can create more cultural “stickiness” that decreases brain drain.
- The entrepreneur promises in return that while in the house, they will work at least twenty hours a week on their start-up.
Continuation
One enormous problem in the current entrepreneurial community is fragmentation and a lack of a central hub. There might be meet-ups for people who are software developers, classes on start-up marketing, college incubators, and large coastal accelerators. None of these various groups talk to each other, or vitally, share data about emerging entrepreneurs amongst each other. This makes it extremely hard for individuals to focus on building their companies when they have to continually search for opportunities and constantly lose networks as their start-up grows and their needs change. The home is a place of stability.
