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Hi David! Your work at Hacker Dojo was really inspirational when we were starting BioCurious. Cool to see you've built so much experience on corporate incubator

by tito 6y ago

Hi David! Your work at Hacker Dojo was really inspirational when we were starting BioCurious. Cool to see you've built so much experience on corporate incubators, I'm curious if lessons from Hacker Dojo played a role? (BioCurious is the world’s first hacker space for biotech, in case anyone is curious. http://BioCurious.org http://BioCurious.org

dweekly 6y ago
Thank you! I'm so glad for what you've built at BioCurious. Awesome work. The Dojo is kind of an anarchist startup incubator / hackerspace / community learning space. Our metrics tend to be more about the number of people we serve, membership counts, and membership experience surveys rather than total market cap generated. (Sadly we don't see any of the upside of our successful graduates like Pinterest or Lambda School.) It does let us see some of what's needed for innovation to happen - and it's surprisingly little. A lot of that is just getting the heck out of the way of very ambitious and curious people and giving them a space to work, connect with each other, have fast and reliable internet, and some basic tooling. Don't forget coffee! The more rigorous and firmly guided the approach about exactly how to innovate, generally the less innovative the outputs are. Just letting curious people tinker and enquire and hear from others who have actually done it themselves is most of the battle. It was Mexican.VC as much as anything that confirmed this as well as adding another key ingredient: believing in people. It is tremendously motivating to have someone credible tell you clearly that they think you can come up with something valuable. The Mexican startup ecosystem had not been taken seriously but once they were they performed incredibly well. At Mexican.VC we returned 11x cash on cash to our LPs and before we are done we may nearly double that. It pays to bet on people and markets that aren't getting enough attention!

by tito 6y ago

dweekly 6y ago

Thank you! I'm so glad for what you've built at BioCurious. Awesome work. The Dojo is kind of an anarchist startup incubator / hackerspace / community learning space. Our metrics tend to be more about the number of people we serve, membership counts, and membership experience surveys rather than total market cap generated. (Sadly we don't see any of the upside of our successful graduates like Pinterest or Lambda School.) It does let us see some of what's needed for innovation to happen - and it's surprisingly little. A lot of that is just getting the heck out of the way of very ambitious and curious people and giving them a space to work, connect with each other, have fast and reliable internet, and some basic tooling. Don't forget coffee! The more rigorous and firmly guided the approach about exactly how to innovate, generally the less innovative the outputs are. Just letting curious people tinker and enquire and hear from others who have actually done it themselves is most of the battle. It was Mexican.VC as much as anything that confirmed this as well as adding another key ingredient: believing in people. It is tremendously motivating to have someone credible tell you clearly that they think you can come up with something valuable. The Mexican startup ecosystem had not been taken seriously but once they were they performed incredibly well. At Mexican.VC we returned 11x cash on cash to our LPs and before we are done we may nearly double that. It pays to bet on people and markets that aren't getting enough attention!