The entrepreneurial journey is fraught with challenges and unknowns for new founders, requiring individual energy and resilience to navigate your way through it, leaning heavily on those who have done it before to provide support, education, and guidance.

Whilst this collective and collaborative value creation is key to most successes, the value captured throughout this journey is not entirely equitable, being mostly distributed to founders and funders, rarely recognising value-added by the community.

Why? Because, most startup communities unwittingly encourage a zero-sum game.

In a zero-sum game, for someone to win others have to lose.  Power and network access end up being centralised, and value accrues to a few rather than the many, even though the many created value throughout that journey.

Financial capital is valued highest in this zero-sum game, leaving social, network, and knowledge- capital, which are just as critical to success, as ultimate second-class citizens.

This second-class capital, valued mostly as goodwill (via people volunteering their time to organise and run events, mentor others, share their knowledge, making high value introductions, being an ‘informal’ advisor, etc) makes up the fabric of a connected and vibrant startup community, but more often than not, is pulled on freely, time and again, with little mutual value exchange and with little recognition when companies are successful.

Sadly, in many startup communities, entrepreneurship can be an exclusive club.  If you’re in you’re in.  If you’re not, or someone deems what you’re doing isn’t worthy enough or doesn’t have enough ‘sizzle’, you’re often left on the outside trying your best to find a way in.

How many times have we seen founders running up against gatekeepers, blockers, and bad behaviour in the community, whether that’s exclusive access to programmes or resources; or having unfavourable terms or unnecessary fees forced on them by investors because they have all the power; or even struggling to access those networks in the first place because someone else wants to control who you can and can’t know regardless of whether you have relevant business with that other party.

We believe this isn’t the way to create the companies of the future, at the cost of others.

Instead, we believe the next startup communities will be built on foundations of shared trust, openness, and a spirit of service and empathy for the journey; with shared and open community assets that anyone can access to get the knowledge, networks, and know-how they need to be successful; and where all value created is captured, and shared as ‘community upside’ across all of those who helped others get there.