Why Startups and Cities Fail Without a Clear Narrative: ACES for Ventures and Ecosystems
Wednesday, 06 August 2025
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
- Published in Startup Ecosystems, Startups
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Why Nobody Understands Startup Growth
Wednesday, 30 July 2025
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
- Published in Insights / Research, Startup Ecosystems, Startups
Why Venture Capital Avoids your Startup Ecosystem
Monday, 14 July 2025
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).
- Published in Featured, Startup Ecosystems
Aerospace Adelaide
Monday, 30 June 2025
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
- Published in Aerospace, Regional Development, Startup Ecosystems, Uncategorized
Why Cities Should Invest in Startups: The Key to Economic Growth
Wednesday, 25 June 2025
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
- Published in Economic Development, Startup Ecosystems
How Media Distorts the Truth About Regional Ecosystems – Apparently Austin is on Life Support
Tuesday, 27 May 2025
There’s a reason the phrase “don’t believe everything you read” never dies. Because even when it’s printed in The Wall Street Journal, a brand so synonymous with business credibility that your uncle still calls it “The Paper,” the story can be skewed, shallow, and — let’s not mince words — wrong. In this case, we’re
- Published in Startup Ecosystems, Texas Startups
This Is Why It’s Critical to Our Economy That We Distinguish Startups from New Businesses
Friday, 11 April 2025
This might be among my most harsh criticisms of our economy, and I don’t write it lightly but rather because as time progresses, we can see more and more clearly how misrepresentation of focus, skills, and experience, actually harms entrepreneurs. Not All Failure is Created Equal And more importantly, not all failure is worthy of
- Published in Economic Development, Startup Ecosystems, Startups