About the author: Kyle Tautenhan is a University of Nebraska Omaha student, an intern at the Greater Omaha Chamber and co-owner of Nutrition Now Nebraska.
Gosh, we love startups don’t we? It gives people from any city a warm, fuzzy feeling when they can say they have a good startup community. There is a push all across the Silicon Prairie to create policies and infuse money into fostering more startups. But, is this the correct way to go about it? Do we really need to produce more startups or should we actually be creating policies and giving money to scale startups that already exist? Should we focus our resources to all the accelerators that have popped up recently in the Silicon Prairie or should we put more of our resources into programs such as Pipeline that help already-established startups? It is the classic quality vs. quantity debate.
Daniel Isenberg, a writer for the Harvard Business Review, posed the question, “Would you allocate more of society’s resources to giving birth to more babies or to raising children well?” I think the obvious answer is to raise the children we already have. This idea can be applied with startups. It would be great if Omaha could produce hundreds of quality startups. But, we do not have the right mix of resources or the right amount of resources to do so. What we do have, however, is enough resources in the community to build a few stellar startups that could become pillars of our community. Let us say, for example, that MindMixer and SkyVu start scaling faster than they already are. They graduate from the startup world into the corporate world with a couple hundred employees each. We will call them grownup MindMixer and grownup SkyVu. How would this benefit Omaha?
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The most important thing this would do is address a major problem within Omaha’s startup community: lack of programming talent. Any startup in Omaha can put up a job posting asking for a computer programmer and will have an awfully hard time getting one. On the flip side, if startups ask for a marketing position they will be inundated with applications. Furthermore, our entrepreneurs in Omaha have wonderful skills, particularly in business, but can’t find a programmer to partner with for the technology side of a startup.
Grownup MindMixer and SkyVu would be able to help this through their ability to not only attract talent to Omaha, but to also create it. A grownup version of anything has more resources to do the things they want to do. The same goes for a grownup MindMixer and SkyVu. They would be able to attract talent from the traditional tech hubs and abroad by offering better salaries and better compensation than a two- or three-person startup could ever dream to. They can also compete better locally for talent with the Union Pacifics and ConAgras of the world.
This is good stuff. But, that just seems to help MindMixer and SkyVu doesn’t it? Yes, in the immediate term, absolutely. Longer term, however, these programmers may get restless or find that they don’t fit with the cultures at MindMixer and SkyVu. What are they supposed to do? Well, and this is the cool part, they can go work for one of the smaller startups in Omaha or they can start their own startup. Of course, they could go to Union Pacific or elsewhere but it has been proven in the Silicon Valley, Seattle and Austin that technology companies tend to spawn a lot of offshoot startups from former employees. I believe this would hold true in Omaha. And, if it would, viola! Omaha is creating more startups and better startups organically with former employees who have learned how successful startups operate.
Let’s switch to the creation of talent. The thought would be that grownup MindMixer and SkyVu would be able to influence the universities in the state to produce the programming talent that is needed by themselves and startups. In 2011, UNL, UNO and Creighton produced 203 students graduating with degrees in computer science and information science. The Bureau of Labor Statistics predicts the Omaha metro alone will need to average 551 degrees per year in computer science and information science through 2020 to meet demand. Omaha needs a voice loud enough and strong enough to get the schools to change these graduation outcomes. Small startups cannot accomplish this. Grownup MindMixer and SkyVu could.
Whether the Omaha community wants to focus on creating more startups or scaling the ones it already has, both sides have the same goal of creating a stronger startup community. With this post, I hope to give pause to the thinking that the best way to create a strong startup community is to develop policies and give money to creating a larger quantity of startups. The culture of stability in Omaha lends itself towards helping startups that are already established and far more likely to succeed.
Credits: Photo from LinkedIn.
