Startup Weekend, the Seattle-based nonprofit that runs an international network of hackathon events, is shutting down its effort to create a sister organization called the Startup Foundation. That project, first reported by Xconomy back in June, aimed to create a more permanent presence in individual cities that could help stimulate the entrepreneurial community.

When I talked with Startup Weekend CEO Marc Nager and technical chief Franck Nouyrigat in the summer, they envisioned the Startup Foundation as a central office in each city that could tie together the often-fragmented entrepreneurial networks and seek sponsors and supporters for community-building projects, acting like a kind of chamber of commerce for startups.

The pilot project kicked off in July in eight cities: Seattle, Boston, Detroit, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, New York, Des Moines, IA, and Sao Paulo, Brazil.

But the Startup Foundation couldn’t find enough support to remain self-sustaining, and didn’t last through the end of 2011. I first caught wind of the project’s shuttering via this post at Silicon Prairie News, a Midwest tech news company that hosted the Des Moines, IA version of the Startup Foundation.

That doesn’t mean the ideas behind the Startup Foundation are petering out, however. As Silicon Prairie’s Geoff Wood wrote, and Nager confirms in an interview with me, some parts of the Startup Foundation mission are being folded back into the overall Startup Weekend organization.

The nonprofit has been tinkering with different ways to spread its brand beyond more than just a weekend, including a project known as Startup Weekend Next and some pre-Startup Weekend training events, some of which are tied to Google’s recent corporate sponsorship.

“It served as basically a great little R&D vehicle for us,” Nager says. “We’re going to continue all of that stuff. It was just becoming a little harder for us to figure out how to continue it outside of Startup Weekend—and did it need to be?”

I wondered what became of the people Startup Weekend had tapped to run the Startup Foundation cities, since at the time of the rollout Nager said the participants were so jazzed up by the idea that they were willing to quit their jobs and tackle the foundation full-time.

That includes Seattle’s Jennifer Cabala, listed as the Startup Foundation co-founder, who had been working as the marketing chief for Startup Weekend in Seattle before the foundation effort got under way—a post that is now filled by Joey Pomerenke.

Nager says that, with the exception of Boston and Des Moines, all of the former foundation people are still affiliated with Startup Weekend in some capacity in their cities. Cabala declined to comment on her next steps when reached via email.

“It was definitely posed as a pilot program. Everybody was kind of on the same page from the beginning,” he says. “It was nothing too shocking.”

In the future, Nager says, Startup Weekend plans to grow in a slower fashion by bringing people on as employees of the larger nonprofit once there’s clearly enough capacity and financial support to make the gig a self-sustaining position.

“We will essentially bring you onto our core team—you can have benefits, you have everything else, as long as we’re making more than one dollar and one cent to support everything we’re doing in your city,” he says.

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Two Massachusetts companies, Fenugreen and Dynamo Micropower, took home the grand prizes this week at Startup Open, a competition put on by the Kauffman Foundation that recognizes startups with high-growth potential.

Cambridge, MA-based Fenugreen develops all-natural food packaging material called FreshPaper that’s designed to give produce two to four times the shelf life it sees now. Founders Kavita Shukla and Swaroop Samant will participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Congress this spring in Liverpool. Shukla, who has two patents and four more pending for the Fenugreen technology, discovered the active ingredients from a home remedy she was given for stomach ailments while growing up.

The second winner, Dynamo Micropower, works out of Boston’s Greentown Labs cleantech co-working space and develops micro-turbines for more efficient power generation. Dynamo founder Jason Ethier will receive a year of mentorship from Redbox founders Michael DeLazzer and Biju Kulathaka as his Startup Open prize.

The Startup Open’s pool of 50 contestants includes a few other Boston-area startups, such as Zoom, a member-driven car-sharing company targeting India, and Genii, a developer of language learning game technology. Select startups from that pool will have the chance to attend Start-Up Chile, a program that offers companies $40,000 in equity-free funding to launch their business in Chile.

The Startup Open awards announcement kicked off Kauffman’s Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW), designed to spur and celebrate innovation across 123 countries with more than 3,500 events put on by universities, non-profits, corporations, startups, and government agencies.

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For the third quarter of 2011, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation leavened its otherwise morose quarterly survey of economics bloggers (PDF) with something new: a haiku contest. The 63 academics, entrepreneurs, investors, and journalists who participated in the survey, including myself, were asked to describe the state of the economy in the form of a haiku, the classical Japanese poetry form consisting of three lines in five, seven, and five syllables. More than 500 public readers voted on the compositions, which were published last week by The Economist.

I didn’t win, perhaps because my poem didn’t hew to the required number of syllables—but more likely because I just was trying too hard to be clever:

Employment down, output up 
Doing more with less 
Until everything is done by no one

The most popular poem was penned by Art Diamond, a professor of economics at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Like all of the best haiku, it was both poignant and true—I voted for it myself:

jobs and Jobs are gone 
need more Jobs to get more jobs 
innovate to grow

The rest of the haiku are below, for the amusement of poetry and economics fans. And the survey itself? Well, reflecting the tone of the poems, the collective outlook of the participating bloggers was at its most pessimistic since Kauffman Foundation senior scholar Tim Kane began doing these surveys back in the first quarter of 2010. A crushing 95 percent of the respondents said they think the economy is either mixed, facing recession, or in recession. Across the board, respondents rated business conditions for entrepreneurs, venture and angel investors, bank lending to businesses and individuals as either fair, bad, or very bad. The most frequent adjective picked to describe the economy, as in past surveys, was “uncertain” (click on the word cloud below for other frequently used descriptions).

On the positive side, respondents seemed to feel that the economy has nowhere to go but up. Some 71 percent said that global output is bound to either “increase” or “increase strongly” over the next three years. But only 50 percent thought that employment would increase over the next three years, while 63 percent foresee an increase in the top marginal tax rate, 61 percent predict interest rate increases and a jump in inflation, and 48 percent expect federal budget deficits even higher than those today. The report called that last finding “a depressing surprise.”

Asked what government policies they endorsed to restart economic growth, the bloggers rallied behind three solutions—reducing regulatory burdens on new firms, enacting free-trade agreements with countries like South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, and forcing Congress to account for future liabilities such as entitlement payments in annual budget assessments. On other proposals, such as Medicare reform, capping tax deductions, and balanced-budget amendment, the respondents were more divided.

Survey participants included luminaries such as UCSD economist Jim Hamilton, UC Berkeley scholar Brad Delong, Craiglist founder Craig Newmark, author and columnist Robert X. Cringely, and Kauffman Foundation senior fellow (and Xconomist) Paul Kedrosky. ”As independent thinkers who are immersed in discourse through the innovation of blogging, these economics writers have a unique voice and perspective, and potentially profound influence,” the foundation says.

Here’s the full collection of poems, reprinted by permission. They range from the uplifting to the downcast to the downright cynical. If these inspire you, feel free to leave your own economics haiku in the comments.

Tax the Rich and Now
Borrow to Invest in Stuff 
Bring Back the New Deal
– Daniel Gross

Boost U.S. Demand 
Need More Money and Tax Cuts 
Hands off the long run
-Karl Smith

… Next Page »

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When complete human genomes can be sequenced for $1,000 or less, how will this change society? Will all newborns in wealthy countries get sequenced automatically as part of their permanent medical record? Will society start discriminating against people based on their genetic makeup, like the “Gattaca” nightmare scenario?

Bioethicists have been discussing these questions for a long time, but my personal sense is that it’s a debate society at large hasn’t really tuned into yet, but will be forced onto the agenda in the next couple years if scientists really are enabled to sequence 1 million human genomes. That’s why I’m really looking forward to a fascinating closing keynote chat about these issues at our next event in San Francisco—”Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome.”

This chat will come at the end of a half-day forum that will feature some of the emerging startups in genomic computing; strategies from Fortune 500 companies seeking to help scientists manage the DNA data deluge; and a conversation on how physicians are beginning to use the fast/cheap tools of genomics for personalized medicine.

All of the fascinating things we’re bound to hear could become moot if something careless happens and society decides to apply the brakes for ethical reasons. So that’s why I’m excited to have a trio of big thinkers together to talk about these issues at the end of the day, right before the networking hour. Here’s who you can expect to hear from:

—Thomas Goetz, executive editor, Wired, and the author of “The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the New Era of Personalized Medicine.” Goetz is accustomed to taking the big picture view of what’s going on in technology and medicine, and raising the key questions. He’ll be the moderator.

Sue Siegel

—Sue Siegel, general partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures. Siegel, a former president of Affymetrix, has been thinking about the societal implications of her investments in life sciences for a long time, and sees this story unfolding through her work on the boards of many emerging companies, including PacBio, Crescendo Bioscience, Navigenics, On-Q-ity, and Raindance Technologies.

—John Wilbanks, senior fellow, Kauffman Foundation for Entrepreneurship. Wilbanks has long pursued an interest in open science. His latest work for the Kauffman Foundation is in developing a standardized genomic informed consent system for patients. He is also a director of Sage Bionetworks, a nonprofit led by a former Merck executive who’s seeking to spark an open source movement for biology.

I’ll be the emcee of this gathering, keeping the trains running on time, making sure we have plenty of time for networking between sessions, and for your questions. There’s still time to get tickets, which you can get here at the registration page. See you there on Monday.

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[Updated: 11:18 am PT] One of the most fastest-moving, highest-impact innovation stories in history is happening in genomics. Lucky for those of us who follow the business on the West Coast, this epic story is playing out right where we live, right now.

Everyone in the Valley knows about Moore’s Law, and how computing power and speed doubles every 18 to 24 months, but fewer realize that the rate of progress in whole-genome sequencing is outpacing the rate of progress in the semiconductor business. That’s why I’m psyched to have pulled together many of the leaders in this field for a half-day conference, “Computing in the Age of the $1,000 Genome.” The conference is now less than a week away, on Monday October 24. It will be hosted by the folks at QB3, in Genentech Hall at UCSF’s Mission Bay campus.

This event will feature a cast of speakers from Complete Genomics, PacBio, 23andMe, Microsoft, EMC/Isilon, PerkinElmer, Stanford University, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and a handful of hot Silicon Valley genomic computing players like DNAnexus, Ingenuity Systems, and NextBio.

We’re putting these speakers together with terrific guest moderators from Fortune, Wired, and leading life sciences companies for a series of interactive chats. There will be no PowerPoints, and plenty of time for networking. Promise.

So, here’s how the afternoon will flow:

1:00 pm: Registration and networking.

2:00 pm: Welcoming remarks, QB3.

2:05 pm: Opening keynote chat: How new DNA sequencing technologies are creating computing’s next big challenge.

Luke Timmerman, Xconomy national biotech editor (moderator)

Hugh Martin, CEO, PacBio

Cliff Reid, CEO, Complete Genomics

2:40 pm: The challenges big computing companies are wrestling with in genomics.

Tim Hunkapiller, consultant, Life Technologies (moderator)

Paul Rutherford, chief technology officer, EMC/Isilon

Jim Karkanias, senior director, Microsoft Health Solutions

Alex Dickinson, senior vice president, Illumina [Added speaker: 11:18 am PT]

3:10 pm: Networking break.

3:45 pm: Strategies from the new wave of genomics computing startups.

Rob Arnold, general manager, Geospiza unit, PerkinElmer (moderator)

Andreas Sundquist, co-founder and CEO, DNAnexus

Doug Bassett, chief scientific officer, Ingenuity Systems

Ilya Kupershmidt, co-founder and VP of products, NextBio

4:15 pm: How will doctors use all these genomes for personalized medicine?

David Ewing Duncan, author, “Experimental Man” (moderator)

Atul Butte, associate professor, Stanford; co-founder, NuMedii

Ashley Dombkowski, chief business officer, 23andMe

4:45 pm: Closing keynote chat. The big medical and societal implications of the $1000 genome.

Thomas Goetz, executive editor, Wired (moderator)

Sue Siegel, general partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures

John Wilbanks, senior fellow, Kauffman Foundation; director, Sage Bionetworks

5:30-6:30 pm: Networking Reception.

As with all Xconomy events, we make special discount tickets available for people in startup companies, and for students (which applies to undergrads, graduate students and postdocs at any of the institutions around the Bay Area like UCSF, Stanford, and UC Berkeley). There is still time to get tickets for this opportunity to learn about the state of the art in genomics, and meet the personalities who are driving progress. I’m looking forward to seeing lots of readers there on Monday, and posing a few questions to these folks myself.

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It was a little over a year ago that Xconomy broke the news that a movement was underway to bring an Entrepreneur Walk of Fame to Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA, modeled after its Hollywood namesake.

The idea makes a lot of sense: If we celebrate movie stars and athletes, why not the top innovators and business leaders of all time? The goal is to inspire young people to make a big impact on the world. As for a location for the Walk of Fame, why not historic Kendall Square, which arguably sits in the densest cluster of technology and life sciences organizations and companies in the world?

Lo and behold, it’s really happening. Today the Entrepreneur Walk of Fame will be unveiled at a 1 pm ceremony in the newly paved plaza in front of the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square. To get to this point took the collaborative efforts of a lot of people from MIT, the City of Cambridge, the Kauffman Foundation, and several community and private organizations.

Here is the inaugural class of seven inductees (and who will present the awards at the ceremony, which is almost as interesting):

—Thomas Edison (1847-1931), founder of General Electric. Probably America’s most famous inventor, he is credited with pioneering the phonograph, the motion picture camera, and the commercial light bulb. But it’s his contributions to industry that got him in here. (Presented by David Edison Sloane, Edison’s great-grandson.)

—Bill Hewlett (1913-2001), co-founder and CEO of Hewlett-Packard. He was a Stanford and MIT grad. (Presented by Howard Anderson of MIT Sloan School of Management, formerly of Yankee Group and Battery Ventures, and an Xconomist.)

—David Packard (1912-1996), co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Hewlett-Packard. A Stanford grad and General Electric veteran who supplied the garage that housed the early HP. Rumor has it they called it “HP,” rather than “PH,” based on a coin flip. (Also presented by Howard Anderson.)

—Bob Swanson (1947-1999), co-founder, CEO, and chairman of Genentech. He was an MIT undergrad and MIT Sloan grad, as well as a founding board member of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. (Presented by Tyler Jacks of MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.)

—Bill Gates (1955- ), co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of Microsoft; co-founder of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. He is probably Harvard’s most famous dropout, and one of the world’s richest men. (Presented by Dan Bricklin, co-creator of VisiCalc, the PC spreadsheet.)

—Steve Jobs (1955- ), co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of Apple. On his resume: the Apple II, Mac, Pixar, iPod, iTunes, iPhone, iPad…need we say more? (Presented by Dan Lyons, better known as Fake Steve Jobs.)

—Mitch Kapor (1950- ), founder of Lotus Development, creator of Lotus 1-2-3, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Kapor is the one inductee who will be present at today’s ceremony and will speak for himself. Rumor has it there will also be lots of ex-Lotus employees on hand wearing vintage Lotus 1-2-3 shirts.

“This is a hall of fame” for entrepreneurs, says Bill Aulet of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, who spearheaded the overall effort. “The event itself is kind of like The Breakfast Club. These people are coming together who fought at different times.” (He was talking about Gates, Jobs, and Kapor in particular.)

Each inductee gets a granite star on a 4-foot by 1.5-foot tile that has the entrepreneur’s name, title, and one of his inspirational quotes inscribed. (See photo, left, of the Steve Jobs tile, next to an MIT beaver mascot.) The tiles sit in the plaza next to the Kendall T stop, close to the sidewalk, on either side of the new grassy knoll. As of yesterday morning, about a dozen workmen were sweating to put the finishing touches on the construction in the plaza.

Of course, with any list like this, it’s easy to nitpick or ask why someone is or isn’t on the list. The whole selection process was probably subject to all the usual politics that plague any … Next Page »

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A couple of years ago, three guys crammed together in a Seattle condo were trying to turn a 54-hour crash-innovation meetup called Startup Weekend into something much bigger. Today, their humble little nonprofit is a global phenomenon, attracting some 36,000 people to events in about 200 cities around the world.

Stocked with top mentors, touting some buzzworthy success stories, and backed by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Startup Weekend now has nine full-time staffers and just expanded into bigger offices in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.

The organization has also partnered with the Obama administration’s Startup America initiative, and plans to make a lasting dent in local entrepreneurship by branching out into the Startup Foundation, a sort of chamber of commerce that will connect innovators and early stage companies with resources in their communities.

It’s all built around a single event: A relatively low-cost, low-stakes entrepreneurship contest that puts people in largely ad hoc teams to come up with a working kernel of a business idea, plowing straight through from Friday to Sunday.

So what’s fueled such explosive growth? It turns out that Startup Weekend probably hits the same triggers in the brain that make competitive pursuits like multiplayer video games so satisfying. Without really setting out to, Startup Weekend has cooked up an event that keys on the experiences that make humans feel good, and keep coming back for more.

The effects are pretty plain if you talk to some of the enthusiastic veterans of Startup Weekend events. With so many thousands of participants, there are surely some people who came away disappointed. But the people who like Startup Weekend don’t merely have fun. They get addicted.

“If you love startups at the very earliest stage, honestly it’s like—a nicer way to say this is, it’s like catnip. But the other way to say it is, it’s like crack! It’s like crack for startup junkies” says Greg Gottesman, a managing director at Madrona Venture Group. “It’s really intense, and it’s amazing what you can do in a weekend.”

Psychologists Scott Rigby and Richard Ryan are among the leading people studying the psychology behind what makes video games so attractive to such a wide audience, a topic that’s drawing lots of interest as social and casual games have become big business.

Rigby and Ryan, co-founders of the consulting firm Immersyve, have pointed to three key components shared by games that keep people engaged and satisfied: Players have the autonomy to explore the world on their own, can improve their skills, and get a sense of relationship to other people involved.

The researchers call this “a blueprint for meaningful fun,” since hitting those three marks delivers more than just entertainment—it touches something deeper inside of us. And Startup Weekend has all three of those things down to a science of its own.

Go Your Own Way
When designer and illustrator Kyle Kesterson attended a Startup Weekend in Seattle last year, he was in high demand. While the events are typically loaded up with plenty of techies and entrepreneurs, they can be somewhat less stocked with creative types, who are outside the typical profile of a tech startup founder.

That meant that when confirmed Startup Weekend junkie Donald DeSantis finally dragged his friend Kesterson along—a whole day into the event—he essentially had his choice of several teams who were hungry for an artist and designer to help tackle a problem.

Kesterson settled on a seemingly unlikely partner: Kevin Leneway, a former Microsoftie who was basically alone at that point, working on a wild idea for a social game that would let users … Next Page »

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Has the air gone out of the American economy? That’s the troubling suggestion of a new study showing how, even before the current downturn, fewer new firms were being formed and those that did open for business were hiring fewer workers.

Titled “Starting Smaller, Staying Smaller: America’s Slow Leak in Job Creation,” the report looks at the entire gamut of new companies and not just high-tech startups.

But Dane Stangler, research director for the Kauffman Foundation of Kansas City, MO, which produced the study, says technology firms exemplify these hiring practices because they are most familiar with the productivity tools that let employers get more work done with lower headcounts.

“Clearly technology is at play because you need fewer people to run a company nowadays,” Stangler says. “And one of the most prominent places you see that is in the tech sector.”

The new findings have nationwide significance because previous studies by the Kauffman Foundation, which specializes in research about the entrepreneurial sector, have shown that job creation in the United States is essentially driven by new companies.

“Historically, startups are the key to long-term employment growth, and they have been hiring fewer people over the last several years,” study co-author Robert Litan said in a statement today.

During the 1990s, for instance, the average new business establishment opened its doors with about 7.5 employees—compared to about 4.9 jobs per startup today, the report said.

Moreover, the number of new businesses that hire employees has contracted by more than 27 percent since 2006, according to the study. So not only are there fewer employees per new company, but there are fewer new companies making any hires at all.

The net result is a persistently high unemployment rate, despite the fact that the recession technically ended two years ago. “We won’t fix our core unemployment problem in the United States until young businesses get back on track,” Litan said.

One potentially hopeful finding in the otherwise discouraging study was the fact that larger numbers of Americans were going into business as freelancers or contractors. Stangler says some of these one-person shops could become employers in the future.

“Call them necessity entrepreneurs if you will, but some of those people—how many we can’t predict—could drive future job growth,” he says.

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[Editor's note: Cross-posted from The Economist, 6/16/11]

As the G8 last month pledged $10 billion to aid the Arab Spring to support the building of economic and political institutions, the May 24th NASDAQ debut of Russia’s $10 billion Yandex was but one of many green shoots of an equally significant Entrepreneurial Spring blossoming out from Chile to China, and Israel to India. Led by two brilliant entrepreneurs who knew how to take native search engine technology and implant it in the emerging Russian marketplace, for over a decade, Yandex, a Moscow-based Internet venture, had been growing inside of its language-walled garden. Finally, after a planned 2008 IPO was foiled by the economic crisis, this ambitious venture burst onto a global stage with the largest NASDAQ Internet offering in recent history.

Like its Middle East counterpart, the Entrepreneurial Spring is a grass roots movement, and, although fertilized by innovations originating in the United States, it is fundamentally global and only loosely connected to America. China’s RenRen, Estonia’s Skype, Japan’s Rakuten, and Bangladesh’s GrameenPhone represent ripe fruits of the last decade’s entrepreneurial investments in environments outside the U.S.

Also similar to its Middle East counterpart, the global Entrepreneurial Spring can lead to the democratization of opportunity and increased control by citizens over their own economic fates. However, just as the Arab Spring is a first fraught step on a long, even treacherous, path, so is the Entrepreneurial Spring neither a panacea nor a fait accompli. Left unaided, exposed to the vicissitudes of climate and availability of resources, the fragile shoots can easily be stunted or trampled. To take root, they will require enlightened leadership and the patient cultivation of a rich environment of institutions and norms in order to become part of a self-sustaining ecosystem.

To sustain and spread these new ventures, like political democracy, leaders everywhere—not only publicly elected leaders, but a broad base of leaders of public and private, formal and informal, institutions—need to democratize the entrepreneurial choice without over-controlling it. That will require deliberately fostering an entrepreneurship ecosystem that (a) is conducive to increasingly broad numbers of citizens making the choice to take their economic futures into their own hands, and, (b) after that choice is made, facilitates the broad, merit-based access to the resources—capital, human, cultural, institutional, educational, and legislative—required in order to be successful. The helping hand and the invisible hand must clasp each other.

Fortunately, there are also green shoots of such enlightened leadership. Startup America, StartUp Britain, Startup Africa, and Start-Up Chile are but a few outward manifestations of the new national priority that leaders are assigning to entrepreneurship. Kauffman Foundation-initiated Global Entrepreneurship Week, launched less than three years ago, already conducts 100,000 discrete activities in more than 100 countries. In four years, Startup Weekend has spread to more than 100 cities in 30 countries with 30,000 participants. These two private initiatives, impressive by themselves, show that leadership of the Entrepreneurial Spring can and must go beyond government.

The bubbling up of the Entrepreneurial Spring shouldn’t be confused with the capital market bubble of social media valuations. Up-and-coming next generation stars from Lebanon (SABIS; management of K-12 schools in 15 countries), to Slovenia (Studio Moderna; multi-channel retailing in 20 countries), to Brazil (Tecsis; wind-turbine blades for the US and Europe) to Iceland (Actavis; generic pharmaceuticals in 40 world markets) show that entrepreneurship spreads far beyond the latest Internet technology. These rapidly growing, high potential ventures––and thousands like them––may still be under the public radar, but they are already having huge impact in their respective fields; no less importantly, they are making their economies more competitive, their citizens more prosperous, and they are creating jobs for many and inspiring further entrepreneurship in others.

For those countries not yet blooming with new ventures, get ready. As the successes become more visible and prove that value-creating entrepreneurship can and does happen anywhere and everywhere, the cultivation of a conducive ecosystem will not be a “nice-to-have” opportunity but a “must-have” necessity. Citizens everywhere will expect and demand the equal access to the possibility of prosperity that entrepreneurship can provide.

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Startup Weekend, the create-a-company cram session that has spread worldwide in just a few years, is branching out in a big way. The Seattle-based nonprofit tells Xconomy it is creating a sister organization called the Startup Foundation, aimed at establishing a permanent hub for local entrepreneurial communities around the globe. The new project has backing from the Kauffman Foundation, and full-time staffers in seven cities who officially start work next month.

Startup Weekend CEO Marc Nager says the Startup Foundation is a natural outgrowth of the Startup Weekend phenomenon, which gives entrepreneurs 54 hours to organize themselves into teams and develop proto-companies that are ready to pitch investors for possible seed money. The nonprofit organization, headquartered in Seattle, has taken its events to nearly 200 cities in 65 countries since 2009, and is on pace to hold 200 Startup Weekends this year alone.

Nager and Startup Weekend CTO Franck Nouyrigat say that all those entrepreneurial bootcamps have shown that, while there are motivated entrepreneurs everywhere, there’s often not enough community infrastructure to keep momentum going after the weekend is over. Instead, the scene tends to be somewhat fragmented—held together by several key players, but not always fully united. “The startup community in general doesn’t really have that much of a voice,” Nager says.

The Startup Foundation hopes to grow that voice by building each city’s organization from the bottom up. The Foundation “fellow” in each city will start by conducting a high-level study of the entrepreneurial community: Identifying the institutional and individual players, surveying influential community members, and compiling a list of the area’s strengths and weaknesses.

That leads to a big summit, in which members of the entrepreneurial community vote to elect an advisory board of leading people to help guide the Foundation’s work. They also come up with recommendations for what the Foundation should pursue—improving outreach with government, building stronger ties to university students, training developers, reaching out to the media, and so on. The local staffer is then charged with raising money in their area to fund those activities, and making them happen.

The first wave of Foundation cities, starting work July 1, will be Seattle, Boston, Los Angeles, New York, Detroit, Des Moines, IA, and Sao Paulo, Brazil. In Seattle, the effort will be led by Jennifer Cabala, the former Seattle 2.0 CEO who is currently Startup Weekend’s chief marketing officer.

“The greatest validation is, we started having these conversations two moths ago with all the seven people, and they all said ‘Great idea,’” Nager says. “And we came back two months later and offered … Next Page »

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Cloud computing was my big theme last week, but we also covered stories about renewable energy, and we brought back a report from the future (the way the Churchill Club sees it, anyway).

—I profiled Heroku, the Y Combinator-backed Ruby on Rails platform that was acquired by Salesforce.com last December for $212 million. Co-founder Adam Wiggins shared previously undisclosed details about the company’s crucial “pivot” prior to the acquisition, from training ground for Ruby on Rails programers to true application hosting company. Coincidentally, Heroku today announced a major upgrade of its cloud-based services.

—Speaking of cloud computing, I took a look at Emergence Capital, the San Mateo venture firm known for being one of the earliest and most active investors in Software-as-a-Service-based startups, including Salesforce.com (which brought it an 80x return when it went public in 2004).

—I attended the annual Churchill Club “Top 10 Tech Trends” dinner in Santa Clara, and came back with a post-game report summarizing this year’s featured trends and the reactions from the audience and from panelists Aneesh Chopra, Paul Saffo, Steve Jurvetson, and Ajay Royan. One of the highest ranked trends: the emergence of trusted social networks to supplement Facebook.

—In my Friday column, I wrote about the economic impact of “ephemeralization,” including the tendency of software and hardware makers to distill the functions of many old devices into just a few new ones such as smartphones and tablet computers. Ephemeralization (and its cousin, efficiency) are probably net destroyers of jobs, I acknowledged, but I listed a few reasons why there may be room for optimism about the long-term employment picture.

—Ford Motor Company listed the San Francisco Bay Area as one of the 25 regions in the country best prepared for an influx of electric vehicles, when it comes to the availability of charging stations and other infrastructure, my colleague Bruce reported.

—South San Francisco-based Solazyme (NASDAQ: SZYM), which is developing technology to turn plant sugars into hydrocarbon fuel, saw its stock price shoot up after its initial public offering last Thursday night, as Luke reported. Solazyme shares rose more than 16 percent on Friday and are up another 8 percent in trading today.

—We compiled details about four summer competitions open to startups, including the Kauffman Foundation’s Startup Open, Morgenthaler Ventures’ Health IT Startup Showcase, Evernote’s developer competition, and Kaggle’s dark matter competition.

—Google bought Sparkbuy, a Seattle-based electronics shopping startup that had just launched last November, as my colleague Curt reported. At first it looked like a classic case of Google “acqhiring” a team of talented engineers, but Google later commented that it intends to foster the Sparkbuy  business within Google.

—In other acquisitions news, Jive Software bought OffiSync, BuyWithMe brought Groop Swoop, and Twitter confirmed that it had purchased Tweetdeck.

—In funding news, Everloop raised $3.3 million, GainSpan raised $10.2 million, VuClip raised $8 million, Revel Systems raised $3.7 million, BlueStacks raised $7.6 million, Zozi raised $7 million, CrowdStar raised $23 million, RelayRides raised $673,000, MobileIron raised $20 million, Intel Capital unveiled a series of four tech-startup investments totaling $24.5 million, Google invested $55 million in wind power company Terra-Gen, and Innovalight won a $3.4 million grant from the Department of Energy.

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You weren’t actually thinking about taking Memorial Day Weekend off, were you? If you’re an entrepreneur and you want some (relatively) easy money or fame, it’s time to get moving on your entry for one of the many startup-oriented competitions underway this summer. Here are just four that have hit my inbox this week.

—Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, CA, is organizing its second annual “Health IT Startup Showcase.” It’s a search for 10 outstanding startups seeking seed or Series A funding for technology ideas that could improve the quality or cost-effectiveness of healthcare delivery. The finalists will be paired with investors and other startup founders to help them prepare for presentations to an audience of VCs, angels, and entrepreneurs at Morgenthaler’s DC to VC Summit in Mountain View, CA, on September 22. Two categories of startups are eligible: those under two years old with less than $500,000 in funding, and those under three years old with less than $1.5 million in funding. Applications are due August 9; the details are available in this PDF at Morgenthaler’s website.

—Mountain View, CA-based Evernote, maker of a cross-platform system for storing digital notes of all kinds, has organized its first-ever Developer Competition. Aimed to spur the creation of more apps for the “Evernote Trunk” (the company’s third-party app ecosystem), the competition carries $100,000 in prizes, including a $50,000 grand prize, six $5,000 finalist prizes, a $10,000 student prize, and a $10,000 “wildcard prize.” The winners will be showcased at the company’s Evernote Trunk Conference on August 18. The submission deadline is July 15; Evernote published all the details in a May 23 blog post.

—The Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO, announced the Startup Open this week. The competition is designed to identify the 50 most promising startups around the world. Any company that has had a “startup moment” since November 22, 2010 is eligible—meaning “any action related to launching a new business, such as incorporating a company; officially opening the doors for business; completing a first sale; or securing outside funding,” according to the foundation. Applications are due September 15. The 50 finalists will be announced on October 15, and those companies will compete for prizes during the foundations’ Global Entrepreneurship Week event in mid-November. Last year’s grand prize winner, Resolute Marine Energy founder Olivier Cebiero, received a trip to Richard Branson’s private island.

—This one’s far out—literally. Kaggle, a Melbourne, Australia-based Web startup that crowdsources scientific data analysis through online competitions, has announced a competition for new computer algorithms that could help to measure the distribution of dark matter in the universe by gauging the apparent ellipticity of images of distant galaxies. The competition is being sponsored by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Royal Astronomical Society, and the winner will be invited to present his or her solution at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The entry deadline is August 18. (Working with the Heritage Provider Network, Kaggle is also running a longer-term “Heritage Health Prize Competition” aimed at eliciting an algorithm that can predict, based solely on insurance claims data, which patients will be admitted to hospitals. You’ve got until April 3, 2013 to enter that one.)

—This one isn’t an organized competition, but it’s great for mobile game startups: San Francisco-based TinyCo, which makes games such as Tiny Zoo and Tiny Chef and is backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, said this week that it has set up a $5 million “TinyFund” to help developers get iOS and Android games to market. TinyCo said it will provide selected teams with up to $500,000 in funding, along with marketing, development, and business support.

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Forbes recently ranked the best cities for minority entrepreneurs and perhaps not surprisingly, Detroit finished near the bottom of the list.

Despite Detroit’s large African American population, the magazine ranked the Motor City 47th out of 52 metropolitan areas. You can probably blame the usual suspects: lack of venture capital, the loss of population, downsizing of the auto industry, etc. Atlanta, Baltimore, Nashville, Houston, and Miami made the top five.

Here’s what did catch my eye. All of Xconomy’s cities— Seattle (27th), San Francisco (35th), New York (39th), Boston (45th), San Diego (48th)—fared poorly.

What gives? These cities boast dynamic high-tech economies (which is why Xconomy’s there in the first place) and vibrant immigrant communities, who, according to a Kauffman Foundation study, are more likely to start a company.

In the Forbes piece, Jonathan Bowles, president of the New York-based Center for an Urban Future, theorizes that expensive business rents and unaffordable real estate discourage minorities from launching companies in those areas.

Detroit does not have that problem. The city has plenty of cheap land and help for would-be minority entrepreneurs. Kauffman’s Urban Entrepreneur Partnership, for example, is trying to help minority-owned auto suppliers expand into high-tech industries like medical devices and clean energy. BizDom U, a joint project by Kauffman and the New Economy Initiative, mentors and trains minority entrepreneurs and helps find funding for their ideas.

The region, though, is trending in the right direction. From 2002 to 2007, the number of black-owned businesses in the Detroit-Warren-Livonia area jumped 71 percent, far outpacing the national average, according to a recent report by the U.S. Census Bureau. Tax receipts in the area increased 16.9 percent to $3.7 billion.

Most of the businesses focused on repair, maintenance, personal and laundry services, healthcare and social assistance, and administrative support, waste management, and remediation services.

So it seems Detroit’s minority community, at least African Americans, is starting to embrace entrepreneurship. What remains to be seen is whether the region can produce minority-owned high tech startups that attract venture capital and produce high-paying jobs similar to those on the coasts.

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It’s hard to believe that the biggest recession in U.S. history officially ended almost two years ago. For many regions the road to recovery has been rocky at best. Washington State is no exception. According to the Bureau of Labor and Statistics, our state’s unemployment has hovered around nine percent for the past six months. Still, while many markets like financial services and construction have been hit particularly hard by the recession, the life sciences industry not only weathered the storm quite well, it has grown.

In fact, the life science industry in the Pacific Northwest is a hotbed for innovation and has been an important part of our overall economic recovery. Between 2007 and 2009, the number of life sciences jobs grew nearly 5 percent to 26,300, while jobs in Washington’s other private sectors decreased by 4 percent.

We attribute much of this success to the scrappy, entrepreneurial spirit that has become a hallmark of our state. Washington ranked second in the country in the “2010 State New Economy Index,” published by the Kauffman Foundation. The high scores were reflective of our strength in software and aviation but also an acknowledgement of the innovative environment that has developed here in many sectors, including life sciences.

And despite the reality of today’s economy that has made private investment in research and development even harder to come by, Seattle is among some of the country’s leading life science hubs, including the Bay Area, Boston and San Diego, that are bringing in VC funding. Last year while other sectors struggled, life science companies across the nation raised record levels of capital, according to the Burrill & Company report on Venture Capital Funding. Investment also came in the form of acquisitions. Five of the area’s life sciences companies were acquired last year, most notably, ZymoGenetics, acquired by Bristol-Myers Squibb for $885 million. Encouragingly, in January, Bristol-Myers Squibb announced it would keep ZymoGenetics open in Seattle, retaining more than 200 jobs.

Across Washington State, 72 cities host life science and research companies, which create more than 25,000 jobs directly linked to life sciences and 55,000 indirect jobs. A typical life science job pays twice the average salary in Washington State. In addition to job growth in the life sciences, there are many hopeful signs that our life science industry is flourishing.

• Just this month, Seattle Genetics raised $178 million in a stock offering.

• In 2010, three of the FDA’s twenty-one approved drugs were discovered and developed by Seattle biotechnology companies, including Amgen’s Xgeva through Amgen’s acquisition of Immunex, Gilead’s Cayston through their acquisition of Corus, and of course Dendreon’s Provenge.

• The National Cancer Institute awarded $11.5 million to Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center to lead a breast cancer research consortium.

• And last September, the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association (WBBA) signed an historic agreement with the Beijing Pharmaceutical Profession Association to encourage investment, partnering and research collaboration between Washington State and China.

On March 2, the WBBA and Burrill & Company will co-host Life Science Innovation Northwest 2011 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle. The event brings together members of the life sciences community from 15 states and eight countries including Australia, Canada, China, Denmark, Germany, India, Japan and the United Kingdom to address some of the critical issues facing the industry. The goal is to stimulate ideas and excitement about the Northwest’s innovative life sciences corridor. We’ll tackle the issue of early stage funding, providing ideas for fueling innovation through public, angel and VC sources. We’ll also discuss ways to encourage global investment in the region.

We have an exciting and challenging opportunity before us. We are fast becoming one of the world’s leading innovation hubs for life sciences. We are uniquely positioned for this role because of our world renowned expertise in research (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, University of Washington Center for Commercialization, and Oregon Health & Science University), global health (Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Seattle Biomed, Institute for Systems Biology, and PATH) and agriculture (Washington State University) as well as our proximity to growing markets like Asia. We have a vibrant community of private sector companies and are working with our state and local governments to encourage a climate that enables entrepreneurial people and companies to convert innovative ideas into marketable new products, services and jobs.

[Editor's Note: This post was authored with input from Steve Burrill of Burrill & Co.]

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In startup and technology news last week, it was nearly all incubators and accelerators, all the time.

—Angel investing whirlwind Dave McClure, the founder of 500Startups, took the lid off his new startup accelerator program, based in downtown Mountain View, CA. Twelve companies have already joined the program, which provides startups with mentorship, product design assistance, and investments of $25,000 to $100,000 in return for a 5 percent equity stake.

—I profiled Astia, a San Francisco-based network of startup accelerators focused on women-led companies. Astia CEO Sharon Vosmek shared some of the secrets behind her operation’s remarkable success rate—60 percent of companies win funding or are acquired within a year of joining.

—We published a comprehensive guide to coworking spaces and startup accelerators and incubators around the Bay Area. Coworking is an increasingly popular, relatively inexpensive alternative to renting dedicated office space for many early-stage technology companies.

—Animoto, with headquarters split between San Francisco and New York, rolled out a new, faster, higher-resolution version of its system for creating musical, animated slide shows from users’ photos and videos. The company is taking advantage of Amazon’s new cloud-accessible graphical processing units (GPUs).

—I took a close look at Sidereel, the largest independent guide to online TV offerings. Sidereel founder and CEO Roman Arzhintar told me the company wants to be “the dialtone for TV.”

—Seven Bay Area entrepreneurs will be part of a new Education Ventures Program, an accelerator for education-related startups created by the Kauffman Foundation, as Erin reported.

—San Francisco-based Splunk, which makes software for real-time monitoring of the information flowing around corporate date centers, announced that it has opened a Seattle R&D center headed by former Microsoft engineer Brad Lovering.

—In IPO news, Oakland, CA-based Internet radio service Pandora cued the orchestra for a planned $100 million initial public offering.

—In real estate news, Facebook announced that it has bought the former Sun campus on the Bayshore Freeway in Menlo Park, CA, and intends to occupy it this summer. Known not so affectionately by some former Sun employees as “Sun Quentin,” the facility is far larger than Facebook’s current digs in Palo Alto, but also much farther away from walkable downtown streets.

—Visa acquired PlaySpan, the Santa Clara, CA-based creator of a digital payment system used by makers of mobile and social games, for $190 million in cash.

—In other deals news, Violin Memory raised $35 million, Meraki raised $15 million, Idle Games raised $4.1 million, ConnectAndSell raised $7.5 million, Glassdoor raised $12 million, Tela Innovations raised $4.75 million, Raptr raised $15 million, Shocking Technologies raised $5.2 million, GT Nexus raised $5.8 million, and Google Ventures put an undisclosed amount of capital into Dasient.

—As a lighthearted way to end the week, I rounded up some of my favorite Xtranormal animated shorts about startup life and other geek obsessions.

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What a great week we just had for Northwest regional angel investors. Checkbooks were left untouched but minds were impacted by many insights shared among both highly experienced and new investors. Importantly, the insights shared by angels are just as valuable for entrepreneurs since a highly functional partnership between the two is critical for success. The approach to deal negotiation was that of helping the entrepreneur with his or her wealth accumulation goals.

Why is this important from a policy perspective? According to the Kauffman Foundation study in December of 2009, companies less than five years old created 40 million jobs over the past 30 years while large companies netted zero new jobs.

Investing and entrepreneurship are clearly two sides of the same coin. Investors won’t make sufficient returns to compensate their risk-taking, and entrepreneurs won’t meet their personal goals if a venture is not successful. Angels and entrepreneurs, along with some luck and timing, are both necessary for success. This week drove that notion home over two events covering three days.

Starting last Wednesday at the Northwest Energy Angels event, members from six regional angel groups enrolled to hear Bill Payne, the ultra-experienced angel investor and mentor. He led the Angel Capital Association’s Power of Angel Investing Workshop which focused on the importance of the due diligence process and determining reasonable valuations for investment. Angels need to know how to conduct thorough due diligence that is prioritized on the critical factors yet not overwhelming to entrepreneurs. Research shows that the amount of due diligence effort conducted by angels is highly correlated with returns; the more due diligence is conducted, the better the success rate. However, the key is to focus on the relevant issues that really matter for a particular venture and not get stuck in the weeds of too much detail.

The workshop started with a panel of experienced investors and attorneys including Dan Rosen, Chair of the Alliance of Angels, Geoff Entress, Partner at Voyager Capital, CJ Voss, attorney at Stoel Rives, and Kiki Tidwell, board member of NW Energy Angels. Rosen emphasized the importance of critical analysis of the alternatives a venture’s customers have as substitutes for the venture’s product or service. Entress pointed out that customer calls are critical to validate why they purchase. Understanding customers’ decision-making criteria is just as essential for entrepreneurs as it is for investors. The issue of founders’ share vesting is important for both investors and the other founders to manage precious equity if one of the founders decides to leave shortly after the funding. Retiring some of that founder’s shares is necessary … Next Page »

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I don’t know about you, but I’m incubatored out. With all the news and PR this week about Startup America, MassChallenge, TechStars Network, Y Combinator, and other programs across the nation, startup incubators/accelerators have suddenly gone mainstream. Which, just like when alternative rock became mainstream in the early ‘90s (always a key analogy), makes me think that 90 percent of the incubator trend is hype, and 10 percent is legitimately important.

So, to commemorate the unofficial end of Incubator Week here in the U.S., let me call your attention to a few other recent developments—and then let’s let entrepreneurs get on with the real work of building their companies.

—Last week, the Kauffman Foundation announced the inaugural class of its Education Ventures Program, a four-month training session meant to spur new startups in education. The 17 teams selected (25 people) include a relatively high number of aspiring entrepreneurs from the Boston area (Niko Ralf Cunningham, Jill Frankfort, Kenneth Salim, Igor Khayet, Melissa Pickering) and the San Francisco Bay Area (Matt Garmur, Jason Young, Jingxin (Jerry) Huang, Sandy Khaund, Matt Pasternack, Beth Schmidt, Alexandre Scialom, Daniel Jhin Yoo). The program runs from Feb. 20 through mid-June.

—Highland Capital Partners announced it is bringing back its Summer@Highland accelerator program, now in its fourth year, aimed at entrepreneurs who are students or recent grads. (The program went on hiatus last summer.) The selected teams will each get a $15,000 stipend and office space either in Lexington, MA, or San Francisco (4-6 teams in each location), with no strings attached. The mentorship program will run for 10 weeks-plus starting in June through August. Applications are due April 7.

—TechStars Boston is in the final stages of selecting the startup finalists for its local mentorship program, which begins March 16. Meanwhile, the inaugural session of TechStars New York is in full swing; TechStars co-founder Brad Feld wrote an interesting blog post about doing a “top of mind” drill with those startups this week.

—Speaking of TechStars, Providence, RI-based Betaspring announced it has joined the TechStars Network, an alliance of dozens of startup accelerator programs that will collaborate and share best practices as part of the Startup America initiative. Betaspring also said last month that it is expanding its 2011 summer program to include a new physical technologies track (everything from toys and robots to medical devices and sensors).

—MassChallenge in Boston is gearing up for the second year of its massive startup competition and mentorship program. It is also a key partner in the Startup America initiative. Earlier this week I wrote a debrief piece examining lessons learned from the program’s first year—and looking ahead to the 2011 competition, which kicks off on March 8 (with applications due April 11).

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It’s been an unforgettable seven days for tech entrepreneurs—as if somebody poured startup juice into the nation’s water supply.

First President Obama dedicates a good chunk of his State of the Union address to the virtues of high-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Then Russian investor Yuri Milner and Silicon Valley super-angel Ron Conway pair up to offer $150,000 investments, on very attractive terms, to every startup taking part in the Y Combinator venture incubator program, now and in the future. Then yesterday, the White House unveils its Startup America initiative, including $2 billion in matching capital for early-stage startups, as well as separate mentorship and incubator programs for cleantech startups and veterans. And then TechStars founder David Cohen announces that he’s basically open-sourcing the four-city TechStars operation—including its legal documents and mentorship and investor network—to independent startup accelerators in 12 more cities in the U.S., plus five in other countries.

And that’s only the highlight reel.

It’s like America has gone startup-crazy. To an extent that would have been inconceivable during the post-dot-com haze of 2002-2005 or the economic crisis of 2008-2009, entrepreneurs—obsessive visionaries who take enormous risks, often with other people’s money—are suddenly the new culture heroes, and the organizations that fund them are being showered with new (or redirected) resources.

Maybe it’s impatience with a sluggish economic recovery that isn’t translating into more jobs. Maybe it’s an awareness of the accumulating impact that Google, Facebook, Twitter, mobile gadgets, and other products of the innovation machine are having on culture and communication. Or maybe policymakers are finally listening to the stories we journalists have been telling for years about the power of private funding to spur the entrepreneurship that fuels high-growth companies.

Whatever the case, the last week has witnessed a series of private announcements and public policy changes that magnify the opportunities—and potentially the risks—for budding entrepreneurs. As a society, we have placed a much bigger bet this week on early-stage startups, in both real financial terms and in the more gossamer realm of hopes and expectations. The outcomes are bound to be both energizing and occasionally discouraging.

Amidst all this, it seemed only appropriate to see Jesse Eisenberg, who played the creator of the world’s most valuable startup in The Social Network, hosting last weekend’s edition of Saturday Night Live—with help from the real Mark Zuckerberg. (Whose company, by the way, yesterday announced that as part of the Startup America program, it will host 12 “startup days” in 2011 to give engineering support to early-stage companies.)

The State of the Startup Union

The Obama Administration has directed much of the last week’s media narrative on entrepreneurship, starting with the president’s State of the Union address on January 25. Viewed live by 43 million people, the speech introduced a new tag line—”winning the future”—and made the case that the country’s greatest asset in an increasingly competitive global economy will be its tradition of free-enterprise-driven innovation, supported by taxpayer-funded technology R&D and education. “What America does better than anyone else is spark the creativity and imagination of our people,” Obama said.

The president went on to set specific innovation goals, such as extending 4G wireless coverage to 98 percent of Americans by 2016, building high-speed rail lines that serve … Next Page »

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Yesterday the Kauffman Foundation and the Case Foundation helped to launch a new initiative called the Startup America Partnership. The idea emanated from the White House early in 2010 and has been germinating since that time. As many Xconomy readers are aware, the Kauffman Foundation has seeded programs to support entrepreneurs, entrepreneur education, and research of entrepreneurship for a number of years. The idea of supporting the re-start of our entrepreneurial economy was appealing to my Kauffman colleagues for one simple reason: with all the noise surrounding our economic woes, the voices of the entrepreneur heroes among us don’t seem like they are being heard on Main Street or Wall Street. We hoped that an initiative supported by the White House and separately by the private sector would allow the voices of entrepreneurs across the country to be heard—and that individuals around the nation would realize the importance of new firms to economic recovery and growth.

Yesterday was amazing for a couple of reasons. The majority of the 150 or so people in the executive office building auditorium—entrepreneurs, investors, and others—were not new to me because we work with many of them every day as they toil in support of entrepreneurs in their region or fields. But, I met at least one new friend, Marc Eckos, a designer who built a billion-dollar business and who is now supporting entrepreneurs like himself through an incubation effort for designers called Artists & Instigators—how cool is that?

I am sorry, I don’t have the big scoop I promised Bob. But instead I will share a big “aha” moment. As I listened yesterday to the remarks of my boss, Carl Schramm, and Steve Case, I heard something I didn’t expect because it wasn’t planned. I am guessing neither one of them read the remarks we prepared for them (big surprise for you PR people who try to get your entrepreneur-bosses to stay on message—not). Instead, I bet they were more influenced by the stories of the individuals around them—both young and old(er)—many of whom who didn’t go to Ivy League schools and were not your classic business school type-entrepreneurs.

Steve Case spoke about the history of our country and the great Americans who came before us who were indeed entrepreneurs in the truest sense. Carl spoke about the great democratization of entrepreneurship in our country. Our foundation’s founder, Ewing Kauffman, never went to college, but he created many jobs and great wealth for many people through establishing and growing a pharmaceutical company and later a Foundation. We were reminded yesterday that entrepreneurship is truly color blind and status blind, and comes in the form of designers and IT guys like Brad Feld and the brilliant women supported through Astia—all of whom were with us at the White House yesterday.

So there we were sitting in the executive offices of the White House, where we were reminded of both the history of our country through the lens of the entrepreneur, and the democratizing effect of entrepreneurship in today’s society. Not really what I expected to hear, but in fact it was more than I could have hoped. We will all continue to debate whether entrepreneurs need funding more than good advisors, etc, but ultimately the important point of this initiative is that entrepreneurs are being heard. With the help of entrepreneurial efforts like Xconomy and other publications, readers who can become mentors, entrepreneur teachers, or, EVEN BETTER, customers, we can recover and grow our economy once again.

So, what are you go to do to help Startup America?

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As a Web journalist, I don’t need many tools. Give me a laptop, a smartphone, and an Internet connection, and I’m basically a roving newsroom. But don’t ask me to make anything other than words: in my loft, the closest thing to a power tool is the kitchen blender. To build, say, a robot dog, I’d first have to spend thousands of dollars on design software and metalworking equipment.

Or at least, I would have until this week. Now there’s another option: I could just get a $100-per-month membership at TechShop, a craftsmen’s clubhouse that plans a “soft opening” of its new San Francisco location this weekend. TechShop has almost every conceivable tool at the ready, from design workstations to computer-controlled looms, laser cutters, commercial-grade sewing machines, welding equipment, injection molding machines, an electronics lab, and a full woodworking shop. It’s a DIY enthusiast’s paradise.

Jim Newton

Founded by Jim Newton, a former science advisor for the Discovery Channel cult favorite Mythbusters, TechShop has grand plans to expand Kinko’s-style to dozens of cities around the United States. But the former San Francisco Chronicle distribution warehouse that TechShop is renovating at 926 Howard Street is the company’s first big venture beyond its Menlo Park, CA, birthplace. (There’s a TechShop partner location in Raleigh-Durham, NC, but it’s not company-owned.) As such, the San Francisco opening a major test of the whole TechShop premise, which is that urban areas are bursting with creative people who want to make and sell stuff, but lack the necessary tools, training, and facilities.

“Our mission is to engage, enable, and empower people to build their dreams,” says TechShop’s CEO, Mark Hatch.

Work Tables at TechShopSF

That may sound like marketing-speak, but Hatch is as earnest as they come. He’s a business development ninja who once ran the computer services business at Kinko’s and has studied the ideas of sociologists and new-economy gurus like Richard Florida (The Rise of the Creative Class) and Joseph Pine (Mass Customization, The Experience Economy, Authenticity). He’s convinced that Americans have a deep-rooted urge to make things with their hands, and that with the right tools, a significant minority could turn their basement-shop hobbies into real businesses. Which is why he believes that there’s a place in every major city for a fully tricked-out machine shop that functions on the Gold’s Gym model—that is, charging a flat monthly fee in return for unlimited access to TechShop’s space and equipment.

Those membership terms aren’t just an administrative convenience—they’re the cornerstone of the company’s business model and marketing philosophy. At Kinko’s, says Hatch, “the fascinating story that was about the community that developed between 10:00 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.” This was back in the 1990s, when hordes of desktop-publishing professionals and design students would descend on Kinko’s stores every night because they couldn’t afford a $1,000 copy of Quark or Photoshop or their own laser printers. They’d end up helping one another and, in more than a few cases, going into business together. “The problem was that we charged by the hour, so you were incentivized to leave,” says Hatch. “If you want to create a movement to change the world and really help drive innovation and creativity, you need a ‘third place,’ as Starbucks likes to … Next Page »

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