

Surrounding Yourself With Other Startups Won't Accelerate Your Company's Growth - haishachen
http://technori.com/2013/05/4445-surrounding-yourself-with-other-startups-will-not-accelerate-your-companys-growth/

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richardjordan
If the premise is that surrounding yourself with other startups is not
sufficient in itself to accelerate your company's growth, then it's trivially
true and of little value.

If the premise is that there is no value to be added from startups seeking
high growth from surrounding yourself with other startups, then I have to
disagree.

Sure, you won't get high growth if you spend all your time hanging with
brogrammers and drinking at industry social events. But learning from smart
people is something that happens almost by osmosis if you mix with a good
selection of other startups.

Being around when one startup falters and the founders and team are looking to
join something interesting means your network for recruiting grows, and some
of the best team mates I've had have been when one startup died and folks
joined up for another. That's accelerating growth.

Seeing what mistakes others are making prevents you from making and short cuts
the path to making the right choices. That's accelerating growth.

If you've got a crappy product and an idea that isn't going to work, and you
spend yourself hanging out with others similar to you in that, well, you're
not going to do anyone any good. Particularly not when, as I've seen, it
becomes a complaint fest about the industry not an analysis of what you could
be doing better. Like anyone who's ever worked at a big company will tell you,
if you hang outside the building with the smokers bitching about the company,
don't be surprised if you aren't the ones doing well at that company.

So YMMV, but absolutely mix with other startups. Pick well who your friends,
mentors and models are. It's unlikely that it's going to hinder your growth,
unless your attitude was such that you probably weren't going to get that
growth in the first place.

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pxlpshr
Wholly disagree, proximity of like-minded individuals is the essence of the
bay area and why it's so unique.

"Our startup, Kip Solutions, is a social media consulting firm for social
causes."

With all due respect, if you were pitching your social media consulting
services to startups, it's very likely you were put on the same list as
recruiters.

~~~
mindcrime
Sure, spending time around other like-minded individuals is a Good Thing, and
the author of TFA acknowledges that. I think his point was that you shouldn't
spend _all_ of you time networking with other startup people. And that's a
sentiment that I wholeheartedly agree with.

Unless you are selling to startups as your market, you have to get out of the
startup echo chamber at some point, and get out in the trenches where your
customers live, and talk to them. If you're selling to manufacturers, instead
of going to the nth "startup happy hour" even of the week, how about go the
"National Manufacturers Association" trade show or whatever?

On a related note, we should look at our social media activity and ask who our
audience is... the HN crowd, and other startups, or customers? Personally,
this is something I've just forced myself to start looking at differently in
the past 2 weeks or so. I've cut back on tweeting tweets about startups and VC
and Silicon Valley gossip, and started tweeting stuff that's, ya know, of
interest to the people I want to _sell_ to. It's a seemingly subtle change,
but in just two weeks we already have dozens of new followers who represent
our potential customer base. That's "permission marketing" at work, and it's
something I wish I'd realized a lot sooner.

Anyway, I think the OP is onto something. No, don't take _anything_ as an
absolute... and go to the "startup happy hour" from time to time, sure. But
don't forget to take time to go talk to customers (or potential partners,
suppliers, resellers, etc. Whoever you _need_ to connect with in order to
advance your business).

