One of my own personal missions over the past couple years has been to contribute to the D.C. web-startup ecosystem as much as I could and help foster a more thriving environment for entrepreneurs. Over the past couple years a lot has changed and a lot continues to change. Over the coming weeks Social Times will be working on some interesting projects which I hope will continue to contribute to the local technology and entrepreneurial environment.
It’s only one component though as it truly takes a community to build the ecosystem. I’m hearing about more and more events and slowly we are beginning to see signs of an emerging hotbed of technology and entrepreneurship. I also believe that we are slowly witnessing the meshing of what was previously distinct sub-communities. There are still serious challenges facing the local environment though.
Entrepreneurship & Technology Education
In the D.C. metro area there are a number of leading universities but when it comes to entrepreneurship and technology, none of them have the national exposure of universities like MIT & Stanford. That’s not to say that the local universities aren’t capable. The University of Maryland for example has the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship dedicated to creating a healthy environment for startups and has a great group of venture advisors as well.
The biggest problem is that many of the people filtering through the local universities are not gaining much experience as it applies to technology. In an article yesterday, Howard Anderson highlighted some of the primary factors that help germinate successful tech startups: “sophisticated money; first-rate technology universities; and a few template successes (a Google or a Facebook, and so on) to”.
D.C. has plenty of sophisticated money, at least one template success: AOL, but no leading technology universities. So this is something that local universities need to focus on.
Conclusion
I would list off a number of other factors but I honestly believe that we have everything else in place. The local media is becoming more active in what has become a highly active community, a local startup incubator has succeeded in getting their first company a Series A (I’m assuming more will come in the near future) and the local events are getting bigger and bigger.
While D.C. is filled with extremely intelligent individuals, many of them are coming here with jobs already filled. Many of them aren’t young enough to take ridiculous risks and learn from a series of failures. Not that you can’t launch a startup at any point in your life, it just becomes harder when your responsibilities increase.
What do you think the next steps should be to build a thriving ecosystem? How can we get the universities building more technical programs?
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It is just 5 years old, but has already launched several entrepreneurs, one of whom is a founder of LivingSocial.com, Tim O'Shaughnessy. Another is Will Wnekowicz, who cofounded Debatepedia.com and is now President and Founder of Altum Design Studios.
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