To understand the varied perspectives from my first round of interviews, I grouped the different interviewees into categories that define the role they play within the ecosystem. These different categories include: service providers, coworking spaces, startups, incubators and accelerators, investors, community organizations, and universities. Once I grouped them, I realized there's an exchange of "stuff" that allows each group to continue to operate within the ecosystem. This "stuff" included funds, equity, labor, experience, etc. At its simplest, it's the ebb and flow of human interactions. It gives rise to organism-like structures that can be identified from how the people within the startup ecosystem group together. Furthermore, grouping people and the organizations they're a part of into these quasi-defined structures allows for one to analyze the interactions between those groups.
Having finished grouping them together, I realized I could use the map as a tool to further discover where certain resources may be located within the ecosystem. The resource I'm concerned with finding are mentors and the experience they provide. The current version of the map can be found
here. The first version of the map is below:
I now had an interviewing tool to engage the interviewee in a way that uses more than speaking and listening, it uses touching and playing, an interviewing strategy I've coined tangible interviews.
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Table of Contents.
The context and backdrop of this thesis is the Philadelphia information technology startup community. The community is young when compared to the already established communities of Silicon Valley, London, and New York (1). It's also dwarfed in comparison to the already established industries of Philadelphia: pharmaceuticals and health services, bio-tech, real estate, the life sciences, and higher education (2). The challenges facing the community are many, ranging from a lack of designers, to a lack of investment funds, to a need for mentors and advisers, to work spaces that allow for collaboration (3). These are some of the challenges and lack of resources that the community will have to overcome. In order for this community to grow, there needs to be mechanisms in place that retains the information technology startups. In an ideal case, scalable and economically sustainable startups, which are startups that can grow into businesses that hire people and can generate enough revenue to continue growing, create ancillary jobs. This is then followed by the generation of tax revenue and a wealth of business experience, which in turn permeates to the rest of the city via tax revenue, business experience, mentorship, and investment capital.
