Ben and Jerry’s and the entrepreneurial gap
Jerry Greenfield — co-founder (and the “Jerry”) of Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream, was the lunch keynote at the Los Angeles Venture Association’s annual Investment Capital Conference Wednesday. He spoke about the whole story behind how Ben and Jerry’s started, gave out lots (lots!) of free ice cream, and also talked about social responsibility and business. In telling the story’s of Ben and Jerry’s, Jerry spoke about how both Ben and Jerry knew nothing about ice cream or about business–not a great way to get a loan from the bank to start their business–and how, despite that, they opened up the first Ben and Jerry’s in Vermont and grew to become one of the most celebrated names in ice cream. (Photo to right: Jerry Greenfield on Wednesday at LAVA’s Investment Capital Conference).
Interestingly enough, I find in my wanderings around the technology industry here there’s a huge gap between the typical, first-time (and even second-time) entrepreneurs, and the folks who finance, service, and otherwise enable startup ventures. Even those agencies and nonprofits whose only purpose in life is to enable entrepreneurs to get to the next step find it extremely hard to reach out to entrepreneurs–who, typically, don’t know a lot of people and circulate in different networks than a venture capitalist might, for example.
I have frequently run across entrepreneurs who tell me they don’t know any venture capitalists or how to find them; on the other hand, I will be at a local business event and capital providers will talk about how they’re trying to figure out where the engineers hang out. There’s a gap between the many groups of folks who might find it useful to know one another, but who just don’t hang out with the same crowd.
It’s not all that surprising. Having been on one side of the gap when I was an engineer, often the typical entrepreneur is someone who has a lot of technical ability or a great idea — but really only knows the technical folks they work with. You know other engineers, the folks who sit on either side of your cubicle, and if you’re particularly outgoing you might know some other folks in the industry–but about the last place you’d be is networking and hob nobbing with capital providers at conferences. In fact, the technical folks are often fairly introverted (A large number of the CTOs and vice presidents of engineering I know are) — making it all that harder to connect the dots.
So what to do? There’s lots of potential success stories in folks who — like Jerry Greenfield describes, know nothing about their version of making ice cream or business. In some part, I think fairly democratic events — like Andrew Warner’s efforts at organizing Lunch 2.0 efforts here in Los Angeles — help to mix up the crowd. The Lunch 2.0 crowd tends to attract a lot more of the “rank and file” folks who wouldn’t normally be out evenings networking with folks, plus the location at major companies is a huge incentive for otherwise sheltered employees to mix with the high tech community at large. Also, I think the efforts of technical organizations to bring some of that knowledge to engineers and others is very useful. There’s also an enormous effort by local nonprofits — CONNECT, OCTANe, Entretech, the Los Angeles Business Technology Center, and the Tritech SBDC are among some of the many organizations here — to try to impart some of those knowledge and connections to entrepreneurs.
