Brad Feld is working on 4 books this summer, he has structured his new blog based on those themes. I think he is spot on in identifying the themes that are relevant to the startup ecosystem around the world. The themes are:

  1. Startup Communities
  2. Startup Life
  3. Startup Boards
  4. Startup Metrics

I am looking forward to getting to read all those book. I think there is a revolution starting to happen around the world, some places more so than others. I think the global socio-economic shifts are starting to influence how communities structure themselves and find purpose. There is a struggle starting to happen, Brad Burnham wrote about the Freedom to Innovate, a paragraph in that succinctly describes what I mean by the socio-economic shifts:

For the last 130 years the economy has been dominated by firms structured as bureaucratic hierarchies. That model worked well to mass produce products for mass consumption, but the inefficiency of communicating customer needs up through the hierarchy and management decisions back down, and the natural tendency of any organization to protect its current organization structure makes it difficult if not impossible for bureaucratic hierarchies to innovate as quickly as the emerging network-based model of decentralized innovation.

The above shift is happening whether one likes it or not, Brad Feld‘s work on defining a structured approach to build communities, companies and markets is in my perspective a good roadmap or guide to counter this shift. I think Iceland is a great experiment in this change, there was no other country that was harder hit than Iceland due to the 2008 Financial Collapse. It would be interesting to see how Iceland is responding to the shift, we have started on an interesting path with Startup Iceland, Startup Reykjavik and a Number of Startups being formed in Iceland and Infrastructure being aligned to help startups. I think it is a good start and only time will tell if this experiment is going to give the right results but so far I like the path.

Related articles