Iowa, the Silicon Prairie, investors, communities, hustlers, and you.
I often get snide remarks from my closest friends about my Iowa heritage. They range from the lighthearted joke (“when I see Iowa mentioned, I think of you!”) to the serious (“stop wasting all your time and effort in Iowa, no investor will invest in an Iowa startup”) to the downright bizarre (“Iowa. I don’t get it.”)
I was born and thrust into an interesting time, place, and community. It seems like The Internet is all-to-ready to throw around the word “community” without investigating the true nature of what we’re referring to, so, first, let me stipulate that a “community” isn’t online. I’ve dissected my thoughts on “social” in this post and they’re synonymous with my thoughts on “community,” so I won’t bore you with repeating the same ideas, but I will simply clarify that any interaction that we refer to as being a true “community effort” involves real, live, breathing, thinking, and feeling people just going out in the world and doing shit.
It’s also really easy to get caught in the notion that our social group is inherently better than the others. My friends, after all, are absolutely the most amazing people in the world.
Perhaps it’s only because of my youth and inherent naïvety, but there’s a certain special magic attached to the “Silicon Prairie” community that I haven’t been able to find anywhere else.
This is an incredibly small, but incredibly dedicated community. These are the kind of people who decide they want to hold a startup exhibition, send a few emails, and get hundreds of people to attend a mere 3 weeks later.
These are the kind of people who rally together to win their city its own badge on Foursquare.
These are the kind of people that decide (in jest) that someone like Mike Draper (owner of Raygun, a local tee-shirt shop and the “greatest store in the universe”) should be a write-in candidate for mayor of Des Moines with less than 6 hours left in the polls, instantly create a huge social media presence (#MikeDraperforMayor), end up snagging almost 8% of the vote in his name, and (later) rent out a room in their house on Airbnb for someone like me to coincidentally book. (Okay, it was an incumbent victory with zero official running mates. Still.)
These are the kind of people who react to an idiotic article in The Atlantic with a hugely popular and entertaining YouTube video that attracted the attention of CNN, MSNBC and other major media outlets.
These are the kind of people who rally over a young entrepreneur building some “really freaky” money-transferring service, eventually helping him secure $1 million in local Series A, and, very recently, $5 million in Series B from Union Square Ventures. These are the kind of people who — despite that status — will allow a poor idiot like me to crash on their couch for a few nights and openly welcome me into their crowded office to demo my current Frankensteinian creation.
These are the kind of people who don’t care and ignore the rest of the world because they know better. These are the kind of people who build incubators, coworking spaces, and all kinds of crazy shit just because they — and their friends — need it.
They know that raising $41 million for some crazy photo-sharing startup isn’t possible here because a crazy photo-sharing startup doesn’t need $41 million in the first place. Yes, it’s often taken as an obvious disadvantage, but I do wonder if one of our greatest strengths is lack of access to crazy amounts of capital. We’re limited in our resources, so we learn to use the heck out of what we can and create the resources we absolutely need.
And that’s why I think we’re at an advantage for what we don’t have. We’re a small, dedicated, incredibly nimble group of people who just want to shut up, build it, and keep moving forward.
That’s the real magic of our community — only the best hustlers and entrepreneurs skillfully utilizing their resources to create insane awesomeness. And that’s why — when the time is right — investors do invest in Iowa and even view “staying in Iowa as a strength, not a weakness.”
Hey, we’ve got a good thing going.
