Recently, I posted that I was stepping down as CEO of Palisade Systems and taking some time off. Some friends predicted that I would last in an idling state for at most a week before I identified my next venture, but (as it turns out), I lasted six weeks.
I am strongly passionate about many topics, but first and foremost are my daughters. I want them to have the right education and opportunities and be able to achieve their full potential. This seems to permeate everything I do, and my next ventures are no exception.
My girls are builders. If they aren't creating virtual worlds on Little Big Planet, they are editing their own webshow in iMovie, or making paper 'phones' with innovative features that Apple should contract them for. They are cursed with the same disease as their parents: the need to create things that will change the world they will grow up and live in.
Meanwhile, I am active in the entrepreneurial community locally. I watch new entrepreneurs struggle with the central Iowa ecosystem and try to get the things they want to create defined, built, and frequently, funded. This resonates deeply to me in knowing that my daughters would have the same problem were they ten or fifteen years older today.
The last two years in particular have had an explosion of events, people and resources emerge, however IMHO we are still missing some key components. Too many of these local innovators struggle over the same areas: how to build their initial value proposition, if they need funding, mentoring, legal advice (and the cost of same), how and when to staff, idea validation, and so on. These are common themes among every startup I speak with. They don't just need space, they need help.
To that end, we're going to build a 'Startup City'. An incubator. A place where the new companies have the resources they need to get the best possible start. Fundamentally, an incubator is people, resources, space, and other startups to learn 'over the wall' from. No more reinventing the wheel. No more wandering from office to office locally gathering pieces of a puzzle.
I've been fortunate enough to run into considerable support for the idea, and last night had the first of many meetups with interested (and skeptical) parties that had even more ideas on how to improve the incubator. I've built a temporary home for it on the web at Startup City Des Moines, and am speaking with a number of local developers on finding a physical space to host the resources that have already stepped forward to kick it off. In the meanwhile, we'll keep the conversation and momentum going with 1:1s and meetups with key groups of people. #SCDSM
A key to the success of any incubator is critical mass. The startups need to learn from one another as they go, and take the best pieces from other's experience. Isaac Newton once wrote to his friend Robert Hooke "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." In my personal experience in building products and services since I was 19, it's the messy process of bouncing ideas around with people of diverse experience that makes innovation spark.
The first of many of the initial startups in SCDSM is my second new effort, Athena. As I mentioned above, I believe that we have an opportunity to apply lessons and learnings from key parts of business and entertainment to the current educational paradigm. The idea of using gaming in education is by no means new, and there are some very notable efforts in recent years. The model to which I have always compared these was the concept of an interactive story adventure, like an educational massively multi-player online game (MMOG), as was well described in two key works of science fiction: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, and Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. That's what Athena is, an educational MMOG.
Athena is one piece of output from informal conversations that began earlier this year with a cross-functional group of startups, educators, and other interested parties to discuss how the current eductional model could be enhanced by leveraging tools and mechanisms from these types of games. How do we get the students as engaged in their learning as they are in their play?
Over the last six weeks, I've had the opportunity to speak with educators, students, parents and other stakeholder groups to help define what a game like this would look like, what it would need to do in order to fit current educational reporting requirements, and how it could be educational yet fun.
As with Startup City Des Moines, it's going to happen, and it's a matter of lining up the right people and resources to make the vision reality. Right now, it's sprouting, but it's getting lots of water and sunlight from interested parties around the world.
If you have interest in either effort, I'd encourage you to open a browser tab and read all about each of them on their respective pages, StartupCityDSM and PlayAthena.
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