A long time ago, in a classroom far, far away a teacher told me you should always begin a talk with a bold statement. So here’s mine for tonight: We are standing in the next great startup ecosystem.
That’s not just my hope. My job is to visit tech communities worldwide.
At every mixer and every co-working space I come away with the same feeling: Sacramento has something truly unique on the global stage. Silicon Valley and Silicon Alley have the funds. Seattle has the big tech backings while Sweden and the Nordic countries are state sponsoring game development shops. But we have something here that can feed into all of those ecosystems.
Quick example: I began working on my start up, the SacRev over a year ago, here in Sacramento. But I’m what we call a “non-technical founder”. I’m more likely to break a RSS feed than embed it. I needed help which meant I had to ask for it. And the response when I did was overwhelming.
This community bends over backwards for each other. Projects elsewhere are guarded and not discussed freely. Coffee meetings are preceded by NDA’s going back and forth.
What we have is a community willing to go above and beyond to help each other out, to fix problems and build bridges. And we’re doing it in a town with a low cost of living, where new projects can begin tomorrow with very little overhead or capital.
It’s easy to get lost in terms in the tech industry. We throw incubate around a lot, but at it’s core it means a safe place for an individual or a group to grow.
In Sacramento, we’ve created a true Incubation Island, a place where ideas flow freely and openly with little fear of reprisal or backstabbing. We have a place where anyone with an idea can come and build it out. If they go somewhere else, great because their roots will always be here. Those ideas may head to Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, Seattle or the Nordics.
We know this. But it isn’t known outside of our little community.
Sacramento is in the grips of a cultural revolution. Many of the industries that didn’t exist or were never mentioned six years ago are now leading the charge in how we’re perceived both across the nation and the globe. Music, soccer, food, nightlife. And there is no reason tech shouldn’t be a part of that equation.
We have the city’s biggest risk takers in this industry. We solve problems every day with our products and our companies. It’s what we do. Think about what would happen if we came together on this problem.
So here’s the challenge I have for you. Come up with something you can be doing and ask others what their idea is. And then tomorrow, we do what we do best; act on them.
The more we work together on ideas the more our tech community moves forward together. We see that every day. But if our tech community can combine efforts on how to make tech a staple of Sacramento, we can move the entire city forward together.
