Welcome to our series taking a Deep Dive into Venture Asheville. You can find all the posts in this series linked here:
How Venture Asheville Built a $150M Startup Ecosystem; A 7-Part Series
This post focuses on the importance of events, Engaging an Event Driven Ecosystem to build capacity within founders.
Everyone loves to take credit for a thriving entrepreneurial or startup ecosystem. But it’s never an individual, an organization, or fund that solely is responsible. It’s not even a founder or a startup. Rather, it’s the amalgamation of all community stakeholders deeply interconnecting, forging real relationships, building the density talked about in the first post of this series, Setting the Scene for a Small City Startup Hub, that makes a powerful ecosystem. To drive that density forward, to build the interconnectedness between stakeholders, you need events.
Events can range from pitch events, startup weekends, happy hours, show-and-tells, info-sessions, no agenda meet ups, lectures, AMA’s with investors, conferences, demo days, award shows, game nights – whatever. The content is secondary to getting the right people in the room together. Focus on attendees first, programs and agendas later.
People and organizations need mechanisms for connection and collision. The American Underground in Durham, a powerhouse in the nation of ecosystems, was built on a simple hypothesis “get a bunch of smart people in an event-rich environment and see what happens.” Startup entrepreneurs know what they need, just not always how to get it. Bring these horses to water, they’ll drink happily.
We’ve done lots and lots of events. Just scroll through our Facebook page for descriptions of previous events. In the next section we’ll list most of the events we’ve done with a brief description.
Some are education focused, like our Corporate Entrepreneurship Series which brings the startup mindset to our corporate stakeholders in the ecosystem. Others, like the Entrepreneur Resilience Summit, are a one-day conference tailored to helping entrepreneurs build this important competency in themselves, their teams, and their ventures. Whatever it is, you need a reason for doing it.
Some of Our Events
- Demo Day
- A showcase of Elevate startups, following a classic pitch model
- Companies typically fundraise off this very public and buzzy kick-off event
- Show-And-Tell
- Another showcase, but in this one, pitching is not allowed. Instead, you show off whatever cool thing you’ve built and how you did it.
- This event generates insipiration, shares best practices, introduces entrepreneurs to the community, and it gives people a welcome way to present that isn’t as scary (for most) as a high-pressure pitch
- The Venture 15 and Venture Asheville Honors
- AKA “the startup party of the year”.
- At this event, which won us the Gold Ranking in Innovation by the International Economic Development Council, startups subit year-end financial documents and our CPA sponsors crunch the numbers to produce a CAGR. We then rank startups by CAGR and announce the 15 fastest grwoin startups in the ecosystem.
- We also award Honors to the entrepreneur of the year, mentor of the year, investro fo the year, etc…
- It’s our biggest event, if you are ever in Asheville in December, you should attend. The whole ecosystem is under one roof for the night. Between the awards, the speeches, the commraderie and shenanginas we pull – it is not to be missed.
- Corporate Entrepreneurship Speaker Series
- Corporate employees need a dose of startup innovation and mindset. Furthermore, the more collaboration we can facilitate between statups and corproates, the better. Here’s a blog all about that.
- Entrepreneur Resilience Summit
- Technically, we’ve committed to a one-day special topic summit featuring keynotes and panels on a relevant and timely need of our founders. Resilience has just been the most in-demand topic lately.
- It’s a full day of talks and resources to help founders build skills they need to lead and be successful.
- Investomercials
- In an effort to increase the visibility and awareness of founders in CPG fundraising, we started these live-stream broadcasts.
- Founders come on camera and give a classic Shark Tank-stly intro pitch. But instead of getting beat up by investors, we pivot to infomercials, showing off how great the products and companies are.
- With this much video content, you can cut/recut/repurpose in tons of ways.
- Startup Road Trip
- Sometimes, you’ve got more startups fundraising than investors or cash available in your community. I know of colleagues that work hard to bring investors to their town to meet their local startups. We’ve found the opposite to be more effective, bring your startups to the investors.
- We pack a van of 6-8 fundraising founders and run a whistle-stop tour around the region holding pitch events at great venues.
- Ths first year we tried this, we spent $2,000 of our budget. Connections made on that road trip resulted in over $1,400,000 in funding within 6 months.
- Talent Jam
- We actually license this event from the Talent Jam company. It’s a job fair and pitch event. Startups pitch what jobs they have open, people pitch what they are good at.
- Strong connections happen fast at these events.
- Asheville Entrepreneurship Week
- Celebrate all kinds of entrepreneurs all week long. Find reasons to partner with organizatiosn you usually wouldn’t. Hosting a week of events across the whole ecosystem create so many benefits: getting all the stakeholders connecting, building buzz, raising visibility, broadening your circle, giving more avenues for people to get into the ecosystem.
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Events evolve, they lead and follow ecosystem needs. Just keep them fun and give your stakeholders the vehicle to connect, they’ll take care of the rest. If not, run a “How to Network” Event, it’ll surely fill up.
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The next section looks to the future. What’s next for the Asheville Ecosystem after hitting this major milestone? Read on for Part 7: Looking Beyond the $150M Impact
Find all the posts in this series here:
How Venture Asheville Built a $150M Startup Ecosystem; A 7-Part Series
