In the last 5 years, the world has made great strides in recognizing, celebrating and encouraging entrepreneurship, but there are major questions left unanswered. Why, if we believe the data around the correlation between entrepreneurship and job creation, does so much that drives entrepreneurial success get left to chance? Why, when we all say we want our startup ecosystems to be “better”, do we still focus our definition of better on access to capital when, even in a developed economy like the United States, less than 0.02% of all companies ever take venture capital funding? Why, with the power of today’s technology, have we not made more progress in solving our world’s challenges -- how we educate our children, provide healthcare, access efficient sources of energy and deliver so many other government services? And why, in today’s hyper-global and hyper-connected economy, does geography still matter so much as to why some startups succeed and some startups fail? This presentation dissects these challenges and presents a new vision for a truly hyper-local and hyper-global worldwide startup ecosystem.

1. Together:
Startup Communities Changing the World
(Global Entrepreneurship Congress, 2015)

2. Confidential and Trade Secret
1776 is a global incubator and seed fund focused on startups tackling major world challenges in areas like
education, health, energy, transportation, and smart cities.

3. Confidential and Trade Secret
We are headquartered in Washington, DC but our community, members and focus are global.
1776 at a Glance
1776 is a global incubator and seed fund focused on startups tackling major world challenges in areas
education, health, energy, transportation, and smart cities. Our incubator program is headquartered
but we’re a global hub.

4. We believe many of the most promising ideas for solving major world challenges lie with entrepreneurs who
live outside of Silicon Valley. To realize this untapped potential, entrepreneurs around the world need both a
robust local community of support and global access to the resources and connections that can power their
growth.
Confidential and Trade Secret

5. Our platform has multiple elements that to create an entirely new model for identifying and scaling
tomorrow’s most promising companies from wherever they emerge on the planet.

6. In the last five years, the world has made great strides in recognizing, celebrating and encouraging
entrepreneurship, but there are major questions left unanswered:
• Why, if we believe the data around the correlation between
entrepreneurship and job creation, does so much that drives
entrepreneurial success get left to chance?
• Why, when we all say we want our startup ecosystems to be “better”, do
we still focus our definition of better on access to capital when, even in a
developed economy like the United States, less than 0.02% of all
companies ever take venture capital funding?
• Why, with the power of today’s technology, have we not made more
progress in solving our world’s challenges -- how we educate our children,
provide healthcare, access efficient sources of energy and deliver so many
other government services?
• Why, in today’s hyper-global and hyper-connected economy, does
geography still matter so much as to why some startups succeed and
some startups fail?

7. Thesis #1 – How do we help one startup?

8. There are many key people in every community who are beginning to recognize the importance of
entrepreneurship. Today, that role is largely celebratory. Chance is often the driver of whether these actors
know, engage with and actively help a particular startup in their community.
• Entrepreneurs, especially successful ones
• Mayors, governors, elected officials
• Economic development agencies and staff
• Universities, schools and other training programs
• Co-working spaces, incubators, accelerators
• Angels, angel groups, venture firms and other investors
• Corporate executives
• Community organizers
• General public, friends, family

9. EXERCISE: Let’s Brainstorm
Meet Sarah…She has an idea. How can the community help her?
• Growing up, Sarah had a pen pal who lived on
the other side of the world. They would
continually write letters back and forth and
share what their lives were like in their home
countries. It was a great way to see the world!
• Now, Sarah is a teacher and a mother of two.
She can give her children the same experience,
but it’s harder for Sarah to figure how to make
this work for her students.
• A friend of Sarah’s from teacher’s college lives
in another country, so the two started pairing
their classes to discuss current events and do
basic language lessons.
• Their students love it, and other classrooms are
asking to get involved.

10. With the community’s help, Sarah has decided to jump in and start her company. Now she’s faced with the
task of doing discovery to find out if others think there is merit to her idea. How can the community help?
• Sarah decided to launch her company and she
named it LetterLearn.
• As she’s started talking to her friends who are
teachers, she’s hearing they are really excited
about the concept.
• She thinks she is on to something, and now she
needs to figure out what sort of product
LetterLearn needs to be, and more importantly,
how she might build a successful company out
of the idea.
• She knows a lot of teachers, but they are all
family and friends, so it’s hard to know whether
the idea really one that could scale, or if they
are just telling her they love the idea because
they are friends.

11. Sarah has uncovered a lot of opportunity– both for features the product could have in it and options for
potentially building a company. Now she has to validate them and, more importantly, start making
decisions. How can the community help her?
• Sarah was able to talk to and interview
hundreds of teachers, school administrators
and technology experts.
• They loved her ideas and gave her a ton of
input on what the product might be able to do,
the features that would valuable and thoughts
on how she might scale.
• She’s swimming in ideas and not sure how to
choose the right path forward.
• What to build and not build? Which business
model makes sense?
• And, she’s feeling like she’s in over her head.
Building a company is a lot different from
teaching!

12. Sarah has made decisions about the product features and business model for LetterLearn. She’s gotten
some beta customers, who are giving her great feedback. Now it’s time to put everything in to motion to
start scaling. How can the community help her?
• Sarah has made her decisions on what to build
and the ideas for scaling that she thinks will be
most effective for growing her company.
• Now the challenge is actually putting it into
motion.
• Until now, Sarah has worked full-time as a
teacher and worked on LetterLearn in her spare
time. And she’s convinced a lot of people to do
work for her for free, but that goodwill is
running out. Time to start paying herself and a
team but the bank account is nearly empty.
• And, she knows from all of the work she’s done
so far, that she needs to start executing on the
sales and marketing strategy before a
competitor emerges.

13. How do we help one startup?
• The community must play an active, not passive role in helping startups
get connected to the resources they need to scale or solve their challenges
• The things a community can do to help a startup vary by stage. There are
many interim milestones startups need to achieve on their path from idea to
scale. What an entrepreneur needs help with will vary dramatically from
idea, to customer discovery, to validation to growth.
• There are clear signals that an entrepreneur is succeeding or struggling at
each stage.
• We cannot successfully, systematically help the startups in our
communities if we don’t know who they are, understand the stages of
startup growth and the signals each present, and take an active role in
helping remove barriers at each of these stages.

14. Confidential and Trade Secret
Startups have common needs as they seek to transform their ideas into successful, high-growth businesses:
training, advice from mentors and peers, access to customers and channels, access to capital, and media
attention. But the type of help they need varies by their stage (concept, customer discovery, growth)
Curriculum Mentors and Peers Market Access Capital Media Attention
Need
Concept GrowthCustomer Development
Progress

15. Confidential and Trade Secret
Startups in the concept stage primarily need education about how to build a startup and about their
industry. They need to quickly become oriented around “the right way” to build their type of startup.
Curriculum Mentors and Peers Market Access Capital Media Attention
Need
Concept
Progress
1776 has built an exhaustive curriculum
that melds Lean Startup concepts with
deep domain expertise and functional
training to create a highly effective, just-
in-time, self-directed model of learning.

16. Confidential and Trade Secret
Startups in the customer development stage require access to mentors, industry experts, and potential
customers. They need to test their ideas with experts in their industries and with target customers.
Curriculum Mentors and Peers Market Access Capital Media Attention
Need
Customer Development
Progress
The 1776 mentors &
partners network ensures
our members have access
to experts and potential
customers and channel
partners, each of whom
can help them test and
refine their ideas.

17. Confidential and Trade Secret
Startups moving from customer development into growth stage need access to markets and capital in order
to drive scale. This can be co-marketing opportunities, channel access, media engagement strategies,
assistance raising capital and more.
Curriculum Mentors and Peers Market Access Capital Media Attention
Need
Growth
Progress
1776 plays an active role in
co-engineering success
with our members. Our
programs and partnerships
ensure that our members
have dramatically faster
access to market, capital
and media attention.

18. Thesis #2 – How do we systematize
helping startups in our community so we
can help many?

19. What does a community look like at scale? What can communities do to systematically help all their
startups?
• Support must become systematized. We must shift from relying on
unplanned collisions to creating collisions. Subtle but important.
• Who are our startups?
• How do we know who is starting to succeed versus fail? (leading versus
lagging indicators, at each stage of startup)?
• What can we do to shore up those who are failing (or transition them so
failure becomes part of the process, not a dead-end)?
• What can we do to accelerate those that are showing positive
momentum? How to systematize it so we are neither relying on good luck
or “choosing favorites?”

20. We need two layers of Ecosystem Building to truly realize the opportunity for job growth in our
communities.
• V1.0 -- Ecosystem building has been focused on creating the conditions
– Convening
– Building Density
– Creating opportunities to connect
– Ensuring support services exist
– Make more capital available
– Getting mentors to participate
– Etc., etc.,
• V2.0 – “Better” has to be about achieving outcomes
– More starts
– More successfully scaled companies
– Creating companies that have an impact – financially and/or socially

21. We’ve been studying this and executing on this for the last five years, through Startup America and 1776.
1776 at a Glance
1776 is a global incubator and seed fund focused on startups tackling major world challenges in areas
education, health, energy, transportation, and smart cities. Our incubator program is headquartered
but we’re a global hub.

22. Thesis #3 – How do we drive global scale for
the world’s most promising startups?

23. We’ve purposely built a global hub. We’ve built the Startup Federation, our affiliate network of top tier
incubators with whom we share membership and mentors. The Federation allows us to identify the most
promising startups in education, health, energy, transportation, & cities around the world.
Confidential and Trade Secret

24. We’re expanding the Startup Federation to hundreds of ecosystems across the planet so that it includes a
top-tier hub partner in every major startup market in the world by the end of 2016. The entire purpose of
the federation is to create action-oriented collaboration between cities.
Confidential and Trade Secret
Amman
Paris
Detroit
Indianapolis
Brussels
Seattle
Raleigh-Durham
Vancouver
Mexico City
Santiago
Denver
Sydney
Melbourne
Singapore
Hong Kong
Bangalore
Richmond
Charlottesville
New Orleans
Dozens of others

25. Through the Challenge Cup competition we are actively looking for highly scalable companies in every corner
of the globe. Finalists and winners get mentoring, coaching, connections to potential partners and
customers, media exposure and access to capital.

26. We’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the great unanswered questions, both at Startup America and at
1776. We believe that, together, startup communities can indeed change the world.
• High growth entrepreneurship should not be left to chance. We must play an
active, not passive, role in identifying the companies that are gaining momentum
and surround them with an active layer of support.
• The single thing startups need most is connections – to customers, partners, and
smart mentors – people who can help them advance their thinking and hone in on
the products and business models that will most likely result in scale. With the
right connections, startups will build capital-ready businesses.
• Startups can and should be innovating in areas typically the domain of
government. New thinking will not come from wtihin the governmental system
and we have the opportunity to drive disruption in our lives as citizens in the
same way our lives as consumers have been changed.
• The only way we can truly realize all of the opportunity at hand is to create both a
hyper-local and hyper-global startup community that is based on action-oriented
collaboration across cities

27. Donna Harris
@dharrisindc
@1776