1 post tagged “open coffee”

I've been attending quite a few entrepreneur group meetings recently, and I think I've found a pattern that correlates with their life-cycles. 

Hypothesis

All tech entrepreneur groups devolve over time to where they are only attended by predatory service providers, at which point a new group will have been formed to avoid said service providers.

Methods

Simply attend meetings from each forum at least once and talk to as many people as I can, and Google to find out when they were formed.  I considered counting business cards, but that would favor the service providers; many entrepreneurs don't have business cards yet.

Results

WTIA(WSA): (est. 1984) This, the first group to really become popular in the area, is all but overrun by service providers.  I've been to a few of their networking events, and of the 50+ people I've talked to I met two other entrepreneurs.  Pretty much everyone else there had a service they were looking to sell.

MIT Enterprise Forum: (Seattle chapter est. 1984) The meeting I attended here was a different format, being a sit-down presentation with relatively little networking opportunity, but of the few people I did meet, there was a rough parity of entrepreneurs and service providers.  I wouldn't consider this a

NWEN: (est. 1985) Due to my wife's work schedule I haven't been able to attend one of these, so I'll rely on my co-founder Colin's experience: "...out of the people that I talked to, I'd say that about 25% were service providers, and the rest were entrepreneurs or NWEN old timers."

SeattleTechStartups: (est. 2006) These meetings are almost exclusively attended by (SHOCK!) actual entrepreneurs!  While there was at least one service provider there, it was a company that exclusively works with startups and tries to use that experience to give advice rather than actively seek clients.

Open Coffee: (est. 2007)  I didn't talk to a single service provider at this meeting, although I'm told there may have been one there.

Conclusion

While I don't think I have enough data points to validate my hypothesis, the trend looks rather compelling.  I was surprised that the first three were founded in such a small time-frame and that only recently have the newcomers been formed.  My guess is there are others groups I haven't attended (such as Ignite), don't know about, or were founded in the 90s but were short-lived.  Suggested future research directions would be attending additional meetings, especially in groups not listed above, and interview long-time attendees from these forums to find out their past compositions.