Give First Week: Why Startup Communities Are a Founder's Cheat Code

Building a company is often described as a solo sport, even when you have a team. Chris Heivly, Techstars' former SVP of Innovation and co-founder of MapQuest, and Katie Smith, who leads Techstars' Startup Community team, spent their Give First Week session making the case that it doesn't have to be.

Their framework traces back to Brad Feld's Boulder Thesis, four principles for a thriving startup community: entrepreneurs need to be part of the leadership, the community needs a long-term view (Heivly's addition: "it restarts every day"), activities need to be continual rather than one-off, and the whole thing needs to be inclusive of anyone who wants to engage.

For founders specifically, Heivly's pitch is practical. A strong community is a shortcut, speed to the right mentors, the right knowledge, the right investors, that you can't replicate working alone. It's also a check on your own judgment: when you're the only one in the room making decisions, there's no one there to push back on you. Having four or five people you can call with a half-formed idea does the job a co-founder or team sometimes can't.

One myth Smith and Heivly were quick to knock down: community has to be local. "My network is not Raleigh Durham anymore," Heivly said. "My network is the world." Post-COVID, geography isn't the constraint it used to be, and Techstars alone has run startup weekends in nearly every country on Earth.

Keeping a community alive long-term takes deliberate structure. Heivly's own Raleigh Durham Startup Week, now five years running and free to attend, works because leadership rotates: pairs take on organizing roles for two or three years, then hand off to the next group. Assume turnover from day one, he said, and build for it rather than being surprised by it.

The two also connected community to fundraising directly. Heivly separates connections from what he calls meaningful connections, the ones where you've actually done something for someone, made an introduction, reviewed a deck. Founders preparing to raise should be talking to people who've fundraised in the last six to twelve months, not just investors, since the tactics and investor preferences shift constantly. And the relationship-building can't be switched on right before you need it. Heivly's advice: treat it like dating. Show investors progress over several quarters before you ever ask for money, and eventually they call you.

The through-line of the whole session was give first in practice. Heivly has held free, open office hours for almost 13 years. Smith pointed to something as simple as a founder throwing a pizza party for technical co-founders, solving their own problem while creating a hub other people can keep drawing on. As Heivly put it, quoting Steve Jobs: "You cannot engineer meeting the next person who's going to change your life." A community can't do that for you either, but it creates the conditions where it happens anyway.