There is no Startup Generation yet in ticino
Even if this post may sound provocative, it come from the heart of an entrepreneur, that although the possibilities availables like courses, incubators, and so on, just keep feeling lonely. You can see this post as some sort of mantra or manifesto for the startupgeneration group we created in Ticino, Switzerland.
Here, everything seems to be top-down, and everybody seems to accommodate to this. Nobody seems happy, but nobody stand out and shout about it. Everybody wait for institutions to give them help, infrastructure, mentoring, money, and everybody is getting what they are asking for, more or less, but there is a subtle problem in this top-down way of dealing, the wrong culture get created and promoted, because entrepreneurs should be the ones who do, who try, who follow their visions, they should be the ones who build and fight for what they believe, they should be the ones who create value not the ones who consume value, they should be the ones seeking to share, to learn from others, and finally they should be the ones who leads, not who follows.
We should all invest in creating and nurturing a culture of sharing, more then anything else. Startups without this have really few chances of succeeding, and we will end up all losing. But if this need for sharing and nurturing such a culture doesn’t come from the ones who run & create startups first, it will be impossible.
We created this group exactly out of this need, the need to share our thoughts, our learning, our experience, our failures & mistakes, our insights, the need to validate our ideas by exposing them to others. But during this years we have fought against a pretty strong NDA kind of attitude. Sharing doesn’t mean revealing strategical informations, but if you are scared of talking about your idea because someone else could stole it, then ask your self if it’s an idea worth following, ideas can be stolen but their executions belongs only to you. We have seen incubators builded around closed doors cubicles, where no lightning talk, demo days, camps or any kind of cultural event exist. We have seen shirt&ties. We have seen tons of awards and contest where very few understand that awards are made for the ones who give them not for the ones who get them. Before caring for getting funding, let’s care about creating and nurturing our startup generation culture, there is no money that can do this, it’s only about us.
Startups aim big, they wanna change the word and disrupt it, but if we cannot even change our little local mentality, culture and town, how can we imagine to change something bigger. If you care, act.
