Put a Bow on your Startup Ecosystem

If startup ecosystems were a fashion statement, most cities would look like clip on necktie that everyone admires for the good intention of dressing it up. In reality, we’ve overserved accelerators that don’t accelerate, misunderstood venture studios as glorified R&D departments, push university IP commercialization on a market that doesn’t want to license, and host investors who don’t write checks at demo days for 6-week-old startups.

Let’s untangle the mess. Let’s talk bow ties.

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The Left Side of the Bow: Developing Ideas

Picture the bow tie. On the left, we have Labs and R&D in the bottom corner, Corporate Ventures in the top corner, and Venture Studios in the middle.

Labs & R&D are where discovery happens, but not entrepreneurship. Research labs exist to prove what’s possible, not to build a market. They’re funded by grants, corporations, or universities, and their incentives are academic or internal: publish papers, file patents, improve internal capabilities. Expecting labs to birth startups is like expecting NASA engineers to start SpaceX while on the clock. It’s not that they couldn’t, it’s that they’re don’t. But what they do is invent, inspire, and solve problems.

Corporate Venture Arms, on the other hand, are the innovation departments with expense accounts. They scout technology and startups to secure early access or future acquisition opportunities. When they invest, they usually bring distribution, credibility, and immediate traction, because they themselves are the first customer. That said, unless you’re obligating broader support of your ecosystem by these corporate entities, they’re not “ecosystem building,” it’s strategic procurement with equity upside. And that’s fine, so long as no one pretends otherwise and allows [Corporate] for Startups to take advantage of the entrepreneurs by merely showing up and trying to sell their services.

Then there’s the Venture Studio, sitting in the middle of the left side because a Venture Studio is doing both the research and the development while having the resources and expertise available as a corporate entity could be considered. Unlike the far left, the Venture Studio is more entrepreneurial, with the intent of developing and spinning out new ventures. A good studio builds companies from scratch, combining capital, talent, and operations under one roof. They’re the grown-up children of both R&D and entrepreneurship: owner, operator, and investor all in one. The danger? Studios that act too much like labs (chasing experiments no one values) or operating too much like corporations (building only what suits their internal strategy). When they forget that they’re supposed to serve markets, not themselves, they become sterile innovation factories.

I’m painting the left a little critically so let me back off that a bit before clarifying why I’m doing so. These are critical pieces of your ecosystem! Invaluable partners and players. Where we fail the left is that let corporate ventures work in isolation without demanding more active participation in everything, we either ignore labs (as startup engines) or we’re satisfied that commercializing their IP is the only option. As for Venture Studios, they’re under served by public funding, as cities leaned in on the popularity of the word “Accelerator” to the neglect of the model that developing ideas into opportunities with more purpose.

The Right Side of the Bow: Developing Startups

Now move to the right side of the bow. Here we find Incubators, just right of center, Accelerators in the upper right, and Angel Investors in the lower right. This is where we stop theorizing, move beyond developing, and start launching companies and creating jobs.

Incubators are the classrooms and labs for entrepreneurs. They’re about human development, not product development. A good incubator helps founders validate ideas, refine business models, and survive their first few rounds of rejection. Their business model often relies on ecosystem sponsors (hence my Corporate Venture characterization), small equity stakes, or coalition building with government, university, or VC, to underwrite the costs of an incubator. They’re local, educational, and community driven. When done well, incubators are the glue that binds startups to the broader ecosystem; training future accelerator graduates and connecting them to real mentors.

Accelerators are where momentum kicks in and I want you to visualize them in the upper right of our bow because that’s the expectation you should have of them – taking the entrepreneurs who have run through the gauntlet in the middle and accelerating them: up and to the right. Their purpose is not to “help startups” but to amplify those already working. They should take developed startups through partnerships, exposure, and investment. The successful accelerator looks less like a classroom and more like a Formula 1 pit crew: short, intense, and brutally effective. If an accelerator isn’t driving growth, customer acquisition, and funding, it’s not an accelerator, it’s a co-working space with a logo problem.

Finally, Angel Investors, the lifeblood of the right side. Angels fund the chaos before institutions can stomach it. They provide experience to the earliest of ventures because they themselves should have been there and done that. Their capital bridges the gap between ideas and seed rounds so I have it lower on purpose: they’re foundational. Unfortunately, too many “angels” today are just rich professionals playing Shark Tank. They invest like bankers, not founders, demanding forecasts and collateral instead of risk and resilience. When angels misunderstand their role, startups start acting like small businesses, optimizing for revenue instead of learning. When investors won’t behave as Angels should, you need to be pushing them to be LPs in venture capital funds when a team is more capable of good decisions. Without doing this, innovation dies, founders fail, and startups are little more than wasted efforts, because the investment class is misleading.

The Knot That Matters: Entrepreneurs

First let’s acknowledge that a proper bow tie isn’t the black clip-on you got for prom. A bow tie is messy, unique, and not easy to tie until you’ve practiced a few times in the mirror.

The far left and right sides rarely play well together directly but through that knot in the middle, and effective support of the entrepreneurs, both sides thrive. Labs and corporates want IP and control. Angels and accelerators want returns and speed. Somewhere between them, Venture Studios and Incubators could hold it all together; with infrastructure in place to enable the entrepreneurs.

Imagine this alignment: Venture Studios as the private, sector-focused partners; Incubators as the public, open-access programs. Studios develop what they know is valuable, leveraging deep expertise. Incubators amplify that work, teaching entrepreneurs in the same domain and expanding the network around those emerging companies. We find entrepreneurial people in both Venture Studios and Incubators and it’s those people who are most meaningful to both sides: Corporate Ventures and R&D as well as Accelerators and Angels – they put in the work that transitions ideas and opportunities into ventures.

What might that Civic infrastructure be?

What I find in most cities is that they lack even an active Facebook Group for founders. Now, I’m not saying start a Facebook Group, but for crying out loud, when your city proclaims to serve entrepreneurs, but that community can’t even connect, find help, or get advice, with readily available infrastructure, how long do you want to keep fooling everyone? I hear of startup events AFTER they’ve taken place, with ecosystems even lacking the fundamentals of infrastructure that announces and promotes what’s going on. My point being, a Facebook Group is freely available, and with most people using Facebook in some way, you aren’t even using that to help everyone?? Again, not that you actually should, Facebook Groups are rather impotent these days.

I’m talking to you cities, that’s why I called this civic infrastructure – when you leave the community to put this in place on their own, they’ll do it with their own self-interest, spin up dozens of different versions, and merely fracture everyone into silo’s that harm more than help.

• Do you have a CRM of all the mentors in your community? Come on, Hubspot is free.
• Are you providing everyone running incubators or startup programs to use a tested and validated methodology? Founder Institute is in 200-some cities and can be used to put programs on it.
• A centralized platforms for startup–investor relationships, deal flow management, and transparency? Turn on Gust or Visible Connect
• Why isn’t there data infrastructure for mapping, tracking, and benchmarking the local startup ecosystem – give policymakers and investors visibility into what’s real with StartupBlink or Dealroom
• Do you even have a Slack or Discord with everyone on it? Odds are, you don’t because you left that to some local community builder to try, when the reality is that you could allocate some public funding to maintain it better and keep it accessible to everyone.
• Where is your local Eventbrite or Meetup Pro? Not the city or local accelerator using Eventbrite, where is the City Funded Eventbrite that hosts everything related to startups? A shared public calendar infrastructure for all entrepreneurship-related events.
• We should even be bridging government, academia, and entrepreneurs for funding and workforce access so set up OpenGrants

Now, imagine that stack of infrastructure being in place for everyone right under our knot. All entrepreneurs, mentors, and advisors, with ideas and IP funneled in from the left, while developed opportunities emerge to the right to be picked up by Angels and Accelerators. An optimized ecosystem would have Venture Studios and Incubators working hand-in-hand, perhaps even working together (why wouldn’t a Venture Studio space host the same-sector incubator so that the domain expertise of the Venture Studio team is right there for the other founders developing startups??). A studio that runs an incubator doesn’t just gain deal flow, it gains a feedback loop. The incubator brings ideas, talent, and energy; the studio provides focus, capital, and operational know-how. This partnership turns startup development into an ecosystem engine, not a series of one-off events.

Why We Keep Failing to Tie It Right

The failure comes from confusing roles. Governments fund accelerators to create jobs but ignore that accelerators need startups ready to scale as well as startup experienced mentors and advisors who know how. Corporations build labs but don’t let the inventors own their ideas. Angels demand five-year forecasts from founders who still live on ramen. And everyone forgets that innovation ecosystems aren’t supply chains, they’re symbiotic systems – or necks that need a bow tie (though granted, my analogy falls a little short here).

If you’re an accelerator bragging about how many ideas you get from universities, you’re mistaking research for readiness. An Angel Investor showing up for the award show before returning to their law firm isn’t being pushed to be active as needed. That Company Startup program is a PR stunt and if you’re not demanding more from them, you’re letting them pretend to be innovative and supportive at the expense of the entrepreneurs. And if you’re an economic development office funding programs because a consultant told you it’ll “attract innovation,” congratulations: you’ve hired McKinsey to tell you how to breathe.

The bow tie metaphor doesn’t just look handsome, it’s diagnostic. The left side produces knowledge and potential; the right side commercializes and scales it. Studios and incubators tie them together. When any side dominates or misunderstands its role, the knot unravels like a prom date at the after-party: the ecosystem collapses when the party runs too long.