Social Strategist - Online Strategy & Innovation: BarCamp Boston 4 Presentation Preparation

BarCamp Boston 4 Presentation Preparation · 04/24/2009

This Saturday and Sunday, BarCampBoston4 is happening at MIT! It’s a fantastic geek unconference, with close to 400 attendees networking, eating, and participating in sessions on everything from Rapid Application Development to Entrepreneurs Anonymous to Battlestar Galactica: The Aftermath. The main thing I’m thinking about is… what am I going to present on?

Some ideas I’ve been thinking about…

Boston public startup space – getting one started.
The Entrepreneur’s Lifecycle – learning, doing, outreach, and mentoring.
Kicking ass at competitive research for web services.

Starting a Boston Startup Space

Right now, the Boston startup community is an invisible network with no persistent points of connection or knowledge-sharing. Students, newcomers to the area, and corporate refugees have a particularly hard time discovering and feeling connected to the local community, resulting in a talent drain from Boston as individuals move to San Francisco, New York, and elsewhere.

Events like BarCampBoston & Web Innovators Group are great at drawing them out some of the time, but these events are ships making port only occasionally, and often passing in the night. A persistent, publicly-available space for the Boston startup community would act as a magnet for entrepreneurs & talented individuals. It would allow them to network, collaborate, gain inspiration, and feel more connected to the community.

The session would be about my vision for such a space, the challenges in creating one (some questions I still don’t have answers to), and some action items for any who want to be involved, or can pass along the items to others who may want to be involved.

The Entrepreneur’s Lifecycle

Recently, I’ve had the opportunity to advise a couple of entrepreneurs younger than myself. One an intern from CareerNumbers, the other a connection from a high school friend, now in college. I was amazed at how much advice I actually had to give; that is, how much I’ve learned since moving to Boston almost three years ago, attempting my first startup, and now working on my second. It got me thinking about where I became aware of entrepreneurship, from my mother as a small business owner, and what I’ve done to make others aware of it.

I’m not sure what the goals of this as a session would be, though. My main thought right now is it would be interesting to hear the stories of others from different stages of this lifecycle.

Kicking Ass at Competitive Research for Web Services

This relates to the article I wrote on Evaluating Your Competitors’ Products. First you have to know who your competitors are. And just as important as understanding how their product works and how their customers like it, is understanding where their customers are coming from (and where they’re not). Essentially, this session is me compressing a bunch of marketing expertise, bundling it with a dozen or so useful tools, and uploading it into everyone’s brains at T3 connection speeds.

Leave a comment if you’re particularly interested in any of the above, I might not present until Sunday. I’ll post slides after the presentation, but hope to see you at BarCampBoston4!

What do you think?

Jay, some of us in NH are talking about starting up a co-working / startup space in Manchester, NH to give a home to startup and high tech community in southern NH. There is another effort starting up called PortForward in Portsmouth. I agree more fostering and community support in the earliest stages is needed both to cultivate, and to keep startups and entrepreneurs in the area.

— James Hall · 04/24/2009 08:34 PM · #
Thanks for the comment, James! I’ve noticed a lot of Manchesterians coming over to Boston (plenty coming to BCB4, in fact). It’d be cool if a startup space were started there; strong nearby tech communities make other tech communities in the area stronger, I think.

— Jay Neely · 04/24/2009 09:09 PM · #

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