Can too much of an ecosystem be a bad thing? Or to be less gnomic about it, over the last decade Rochester’s developed an enormously elaborated network of resources and groups supporting entrepreneurship and a startup culture, which you’d think is phenomenal — but is so much, in this case, too much?
I asked myself this question after attending the last RocGrowth meeting on March 15th, which I was incredibly impressed by — really interesting presentations, really involved audience, a meetup that could as easily have been San Diego or Boston or anywhere else. I’ve lived in Rochester for 11 years now and I know people are sometimes negative about the opportunities, but it was hard to walk away from this meeting feeling that naysayer attitude can possibly be correct.
But could the opposite actually be true, that there’s too much going on here now, too many events encouraging a startup culture, entrepreneurship, rebirth of the city and the region? That might seem counterintuitive, but the more events there are, the more people have to pick through these events to separate the wheat from the chaff. Unless, of course, you assume it’s all invaluable stuff, which I’d argue on first principles can’t be the case, although of course I’d love to be proved wrong on that point.
I don’t have a strident answer to this question, my feeling is this signal-to-noise problem is generally a good one to have, as long as people are honest about it, and as long as there’s continual striving to improve the signal and diminish the noise.
I think it’s a sign of our community’s maturity that we can assert ever more discerning tastes on the part of what we should certainly call the “customers” for these events, this training, these opportunities. If a set of events isn’t useful, that fact needs to get out as fast as possible so that the event series can evolve or die. The alternative is a little bit of signal and a lot of noise that entrepreneurs of all shapes and sizes will fritter away their time on. I’ve no doubt that there was a time when all events were good by virtue of there being more of them; but the situation’s now (happily!) considerably evolved.
Call this the “Willful Reimposition of Disbelief Movement” if you like, or, more euphoniously, the “Movement of Artful Disbelievers,” “MAD.” A movement where we as a community recognize we’re now far enough along to have short attention for lesser events, and are willing to be direct enough to say so, although certainly with thought (artfulness) backing up the criticisms. After all, any startup — any enterprise whatsoever? — has to be willing to change, we might as well propagate the concept to startup types and also to startup/entrepreneurship community events.
I’ll close by adding that although I consider myself a fully MAD participant, I’m not writing this with any particular group a target for my MADness. I simply think it’s imperative we demand the most we can both from ourselves and from our communal resources.
Get MAD. The ecosystem will thank you for it.