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Chicago Startups Industrialized Innovation

Thursday, 11 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

This is a city that burned to the ground and responded by inventing the skyscraper. It turned its geography into the nation’s freight yard, its politics into a machine, and its universities into research engines. It engineered futures markets, modern cellular telephony, and now wants to industrialize quantum computing. If you’re trying to understand how

Published in Regional Development

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Better Startup Idea Validation

Wednesday, 10 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Despite countless articles and every startup program explaining how to validate a startup idea, one of the (surprisingly) still frequently most asked questions is how to validate a startup. Reading the tea leaves, that tells me not that people actually don’t know (conventional wisdom is “talk to customers”) but rather, that that advice is less

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Published in Startups

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New Mexico Didn’t ‘Find’ Startups, It Built the Future: From Nukes and UFOs to Quantum Capital

Monday, 08 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

If you still think of New Mexico as a quiet desert between Texas and Arizona, you’re about 80 years behind. This is the state that built the atomic age, test-flew the rockets that defined the Cold War, turned a supposed UFO crash into a tourism engine, and is increasingly the heart of quantum computing. New

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Published in Regional Development

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Why Startup Ecosystems Fail at Scale: The Economic Development Playbook for Capacity Building

Friday, 05 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Cities everywhere are doing a lot for entrepreneurs, often sincerely and impressively, and what I’m finding in city after city is that the greatest opportunity is not in another startup program or even fostering a new investor but building capacity. They are supporting some founders, but not more founders. They are helping some investors, but

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Published in Economic Development

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There Is No “Era of the Bootstrapped Startup,” There’s Math, Memory Loss, and Better Advice

Tuesday, 02 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Every few years, someone declares a new epoch in entrepreneurship. We’ve had the “Era of Lean,” the “Rise of the Micro-VC,” the “Democratization of Innovation,” and (God help us) the phase where every city believed a coworking space with a yellow logo and a couple late career bankers counted as a “startup ecosystem.” With AI

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Published in Startup Ecosystems, Startups, Uncategorized

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Thailand: The Startup Ecosystem Rising from Centuries of Ingenuity

Friday, 21 November 2025 by Paul O'Brien

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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Published in Regional Development

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Startup from the Soul: Grace Is What Matters

Monday, 17 November 2025 by Paul O'Brien

There’s a thought Jeff Buckley once shared, half-interview, half-confession: “Grace is what matters in anything. It keeps you from pulling the trigger too soon. It keeps you from destroying things too foolishly; it sort of keeps you alive and keeps you open for more understanding.” You could hang that on the wall of every entrepreneurs’

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Published in Startups

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