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Innovation Isn’t Real Estate: Why Startup Hubs Waste Money

Thursday, 21 August 2025 by
The garage myth keeps fooling policymakers Innovation is not a real estate play, and your innovation district is likely disappointing entrepreneurs. Yet cities, universities, and corporations keep pouring millions into gleaming new “innovation spaces” and “hubs,” mistaking glass walls and free Wi-Fi for entrepreneurship. To some extent, understandably; startup folklore inspires us with stories of
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Bogotá, Colombia; Latin America’s Next Startup Ascent

Friday, 15 August 2025 by
Colombia has always been a country in motion; politically, culturally, and economically. But motion isn’t the same as progress, and progress isn’t guaranteed. For generations, Colombians have adapted to change not because they wanted to, but because they had to. It’s in this crucible of necessity that the country’s entrepreneurial spirit was forged and potential
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10 Comments

Why Startups and Cities Fail Without a Clear Narrative: ACES for Ventures and Ecosystems

Wednesday, 06 August 2025 by
Most of you don’t fail because they lack a great product, brilliant founders, or access to capital. You fail because you haven’t worked out how to tell your story. You fail because your narrative doesn’t build trust, urgency, or credibility; three things that must happen before you ever get to the sale. This isn’t just
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13 Comments

Why Nobody Understands Startup Growth

Wednesday, 30 July 2025 by
Startups don’t grow like businesses. Not in the traditional sense. They don’t scale by adding headcount, expanding inventory, or renting more retail space. They grow by discovering, and then systematically proving, a revenue-generating system that works before it collapses. And yet, here we are, in 2025, with startup advisors, development organizations, investors, and even policymakers
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34 Comments

Why Venture Capital Avoids your Startup Ecosystem

Monday, 14 July 2025 by
Working with cities throughout the world, developing startup ecosystems, every one of them echos the same in their effort to encourage entrepreneurship, “we’re focused on bringing investors to the table.” What they’re doing is typical, ironically, of founders, who hear a problem and the focus on the solution (which by the way founders, is wrong).
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118 Comments

Aerospace Adelaide

Monday, 30 June 2025 by
Adelaide’s not merely dipping a toe into space, it’s building its own launchpad, and during a recent whirlwind tour of the United States, I had a chance to share some thoughts with a few of the startups making the rounds and decided to dig in deeper to some possibilities. Under the radar, this ecosystem has
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24 Comments

Why Cities Should Invest in Startups: The Key to Economic Growth

Wednesday, 25 June 2025 by
Why Startups? Let’s Distinguish Why City Officials Should be Focused on Strategic Investment in Innovation-Driven Ventures (and why most are failing despite trying) It’s one of the most misunderstood yet consequential distinctions in economic development today: the difference between startups and small businesses. Cities talk about “entrepreneurship” like it’s a monolithic idea, but if we’re
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