Local Technology Councils Have Tough Work

• Everybody's so spread out - The internet means that people and businesses can work from anywhere, and we like that. In, say, San Francisco it's nothing to walk 5 minutes to a Starbucks and chat with another entrepreneur for lunch and then be back at work by 1. Out in the hinterland you spend 30 minutes to an hour driving just to get to one event, then you sit through the event, then you spend some time networking, then you spend another 30 minutes to an hour to get back. This makes a huge difference, as you're not just spending your lunch hour doing something, you're killing 2 or 3 hours. The distances involved make everything a bigger, more formal deal than they should be.
• Visibility is low - In a high population density area, everybody can easily see what everybody else is doing. Here, you have many pockets of excellence that most people never hear about. Here's an example: my son works for a startup in the area giving online tests to kids in K-12 in public school systems. It looks like it's becoming very successful. But when I mentioned it to Donovan, he wasn't sure that they were on his radar yet. I'll take a guess and say I bet there's 30-50 technology companies in this area that are flying somewhat under the radar. This is a self-perpetuating problem. When you don't expect there to be a supporting culture, there isn't one.
• Technology still hasn't solved the problems of growing a live community - We talked some about FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networking sites, but we both agreed that social media just isn't ready for prime time when it comes to building and supporting a real, live community with dozens of different levels of interest. If you run a company with 3 guys in a basement and you screw up, you're more likely to tell people about it and learn from the experience. But if you're running a company with a few hundred folks, suddenly it becomes more difficult to be as open as you were back in the day. That type of trust requires face-to-face interaction over a period of weeks or months. You're not getting that quality on LinkedIn, sorry.
• Small business owners are, well, busy - Cory tells me that he tries to make really sure that his communication is to the point and brief, and that activities are targeted as much as possible. I really enjoyed talking to Donovan yesterday but frankly I'm not sure if I were running small startup if it would be worth my time to meet with him. Cory is thinking and acting at the regional level for hundreds of players. Startups have immediate, day-to-day problems like making sales. These problems are about a zillion times more important than talking strategy or watching Eric Schmidt visit the area. (Eric graduated high school in this area and came to visit last year)
• Small businesses grow in almost any area - The good news is that the internet and technology is allowing all sorts of businesses to start anywhere they want. The bad news is that the internet and technology is allowing all sorts of businesses to start anywhere they want. Businesses are sprouting up in all kinds of fields: medical, biotech, web-apps, service -- you name it. This makes providing services a bit more difficult, because you're trying to be everything to everybody. The 80-person well-funded biotech company is going to have needs that the 3-person web-app company doesn't have. People are going to come into the region and into the entrepreneurial scene with all sorts of preconceived ideas and notions. It's very difficult to make generalizations or to have a baseline to work from.
• There's no centralized place for talent - Because one region can cover many newspapers, telephone area codes, and cities, it's really hard for there to be one place for employers and employees to go to find skilled talent. Donovan and others got a Craiglist listing for the area, which helped a lot, and a lot of firms service the area, but that's not the same as having a community where people are actively trading around information.
• Capabilities are invisible - If businesses are hard to find, and hooking up employers and employees tough, understanding capabilities is even worse. For instance, Cory uses the example of a high-tech firm in Blacksburg that competed in the DARPA self-drive challenge. Did I know about them? Not really, but I knew of the challenge. Did I understand all of the other stuff they brought to the table, he asked, going down a list of services this company offered. I had no idea. I've got an advanced robotics company right down the road from me and they might as well be on the moon. The true value in having such a diverse base of businesses, if it can be harnessed, is in a group understanding of what everybody can do. That's the type of thing that could catapult the region into a higher zone. But it's very tough to pull off.

Donovan's a sharp guy, and he seems on his game. But I can't help but get the feeling that the types of problems our local technology council is working through are shared by technology councils -- communities -- everywhere. These are human-intensive issues that technology has really not solved in an integrated fashion (or at all)

Who knows? Perhaps we'll be the first!