Et Tu, Gainesville?

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Comment by David Nessl on May 20, 2010 at 3:52pm

What I got from the NYT article is that, in comparison to Boulder, Gainesville lacks a couple of the building blocks of a *culture* of entrepreneurism. We have laudably put in place the infrastructure (GAIN, Progress Park, GTEC, etc), and we've gotten Gainesville and Alachua County governments to stop being hostile to startups, and UF has gotten over its "must score big like Gatorade" mentality about patent licensing. But in comparison to Boulder, we have no large company presences (IBM, etc) which tend to generate entrepreneurs who want to escape the corporate world. We can't fix that easily, but all is not lost. Like Boulder, UF's faculty does not yet have entrepreneurism "in their DNA". We can fix that. We need to embark on a program to get UF faculty to just assume that they will create one or more startups in the course of their career at UF. That change in culture is that last piece of the puzzle to make Gainesville an entrepreneurial hotbed.

Comment by Dan Rua on May 14, 2010 at 1:12pm

to touch on just a piece of your post, I think there is room for innovation on the topic of "tolerating failure". Are there creative ways to accelerate a community's tolerance of failure that are revolutionary instead of evolutionary? What would it mean if there were "better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all" awards (badges of honor for entrepreneurial effort) or "safety-net" funding for entrepreneurs that successfully raised $X or employed Y people in a startup.

On that latter point, how might entrepreneurs near and far change their behavior if Gainesville:
1) set aside some portion of the local taxes created by new startup jobs created by an entrepreneur (e.g. there must be some formula to calculate what a new job/salary generates in local taxes)
2) hold that pool as "entrepreneur unemployment" paid to qualifying local entrepreneurs here after a failure (e.g. they must stay local to get the payback and they don't need to move immediately to keep food on the table for themselves/family)

Would that cause entrepreneurs to start more companies, create more jobs, stick around after failures, move to Gainesville from other cities? It would surely put Gainesville on the radar of the nation's entrepreneurs...if you're going to create jobs via startup, create them here!