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Now In Print: Startup Ecosystems

Baltimore Is Not Waiting for Permission to Be a Startup City

Monday, 06 April 2026 by
Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message, sent from Washington to Baltimore’s Mount Clare Station in 1844, asked, “What hath God wrought?” Nearly two centuries later, Baltimore is still wroughting. The city gave us the first commercial railroad, the first dental school, the bottle cap, the Linotype machine, rubber surgical gloves, and the national anthem has now
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I Wrote the Book I Needed to Read Twenty Years Ago

Tuesday, 17 March 2026 by
There is a moment, somewhere between finishing a manuscript and holding the printed thing in your hands, when you realize the book was never really about the subject. It was about you. Not in the self-indulgent sense, not a memoir dressed up in economics. But in the sense that everything I have spent the last
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Thailand: The Startup Ecosystem Rising from Centuries of Ingenuity

Friday, 21 November 2025 by
A nation whose cultural DNA has been entrepreneurial for over seven hundred years, Thailand startups didn’t just suddenly wake up and decide to build a startup ecosystem because it saw Singapore building skyscrapers to the heavens; traders, artisans, inventors, and diplomats, long before “ecosystem” was a word policymakers could spell, have held Thailand as a
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How Real Ecosystems Outperform Hype: Startup Ecosystem Infrastructure

Friday, 24 October 2025 by
What if the problem isn’t that cities can’t build startups, what if the problem is they’re building the wrong kind of systems? In the frenzy to claim, “innovation district,” many regions forget the fundamentals: connections, capital-fit, customer access, and context. In a recent panel for Founder Institute, I brought together three ecosystem practitioners, Levi Velez
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How To vs. Experienced With: The Distinction of Startup or New Business

Monday, 06 October 2025 by
The opportunity isn’t that cities, chambers, and investors don’t support entrepreneurship, it’s that they have the chance to support the right kind in the right way. For decades, we’ve been celebrating every new idea in the same sandbox, mixing storefronts with startups, consultants with creators, and then wondering why only a few hold up when
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Bellevue, Washington: The Startup City Defining Its Shadow

Tuesday, 30 September 2025 by
Bellevue isn’t Seattle and that’s precisely the point. Too often, when people talk about the Pacific Northwest, Bellevue gets treated as an extension of Seattle. But Bellevue has its own history, its own culture, and critically, its own startup identity. Understanding this matters not just for Washington but for cities everywhere trying to grow deliberately,
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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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