Where are the Builders?

A founder I know recently wrote a LinkedIn post lamenting the lack of technical founders at startup community events in Canada. He noted the following,

“Communities reflect the people who make them up. When I meet people from the startup community in Canada, I rarely meet programmers. There are some — I see you, and I’ll seek you out at a party — but the odds of randomly meeting a coder are low.”

The author went on to suggest that, in contrast to San Francisco and New York, the startup scene in Canada is “very businessy.”

I reflected on his perception while I was writing my end-of-year post, in which I noted that the “Maker Faire” phase of this tech cycle was coming to a close in San Francisco. It certainly felt at times like there were more builders in the Bay Area (especially at this point in the cycle), but is it actually true? Do cities like San Francisco and New York have a higher ratio of technical founders to non-technical founders than other startup ecosystems?

I started going down a rabbit hole of using data to reason about this, but pretty quickly concluded that this was a very deep hole. Between the fact that many “technical” founders these days don’t have obvious signals on their LinkedIn profiles to the propensity of many founders to obfuscate their physical location, it was going to take me far more time, effort and data sources to come up with a plausible theory than I had at my disposal.

(I also tried to cheat by using ChatGPT to source some of the data. But given its confident assertion that “…there could be several hundred technical founders in San Francisco,” I figured that would be a waste of time.)

“Technical Founder at Stealth,

San Francisco Bay Area”

I personally think that it’s reasonable to presume that the Bay Area does, in fact, have a higher percentage of technical founders than most other startup ecosystems. So let’s go with that assumption and take San Francisco / Silicon Valley out of the equation. Moreover, let’s assume for the purpose of this discussion that every other major startup ecosystem has roughly the same ratio of technical to non-technical founders.

If that is the case, then why does it seem harder to find “the builders” in some ecosystems than in others?

I’ve previously written about the fact that the very nature of startup ecosystems is changing. In that post, I noted two significant dynamics that are at play:

1. An effective 5-year gap [due to the pandemic] has left young founders with no memories of, attachment to, or nostalgia for the local institutions that played critical roles in the success of prior generations of startups.

2. The social and societal changes that occurred during and after the pandemic have left a lasting impact on how founders operate and on how they engage with their local ecosystems.

The combination of these two dynamics means that founders of all stripes are gravitating to new and different institutions for “community” than generations prior and, in many cases, those new institutions aren’t physically nearby.

The evolution of media, with the rise of the creator economy and concepts like Kevin Kelly’s "1,000 True Fans”, has brought to the mainstream an understanding that hyper-personalization of almost anything is possible. Whatever interest you may have, there are almost certain to be others online with that exact same interest. Given that we’ve embraced this in so many aspects of our lives, it makes perfect sense that founders are taking advantage of this concept in how they think about community.

• The best founders are no longer content with founder communities where the only thing they have in common is the city they live in.

• The best founders aren’t even content to be part of generalist sub-communities within their geography (e.g. local CTO meetups).

• Instead, the best founders today are actively seeking out other founders who are just like them, regardless of where in the world they might be.

They’re seeking communities of founders who are specifically building B2B infrastructure software targeting mid-market companies in regulated industries. They’re seeking communities of founders who are specifically building PLG-driven open source projects targeting Node.js developers. And so on.

And they’re finding them.

But if that’s the case, why isn’t this happening at the same rate in every ecosystem? Why does it seem harder to find “the builders” in some ecosystems than in others?

I’ve observed two significant factors that seem to have contributed to the “regrowth” of in-person builder communities post-pandemic:

1. Clusters of Founders in the Same / Similar Industry

While many cities have “generalist” startup populations, some have significant clusters of startups in the same industry. I’ve observed that in such ecosystems, builder communities around those industries have formed/rebounded at a higher rate post-pandemic.

For example, Vancouver has a disproportionately large number of developer-centric startups (dev tools, API-related companies, open source platforms, etc.). There are frequent, well-attended events for the large community of technical founders who are building in and around these areas. El Segundo has a significantly outsized cluster of defensetech and dual-use companies. The growing community of “Gundo Bros” is well-known for their meetups and hackathons.

2. Ecosystem Remoteness

Another factor that I’ve observed as contributing to the strength of local builder communities is the “remoteness” of an ecosystem. Cities like Edinburgh, Waterloo and Boulder are all relatively remote, and their in-person builder communities have rebounded at a much higher rate post-pandemic than places like Vancouver, Portland and Manchester, where technical founders have — to a significant degree — reoriented around more frequent travel to larger ecosystems.

(If you’re scratching your head around the fact that I mentioned Vancouver twice, it’s a great example of an ecosystem where there is a thriving builder community around one specific industry — developer tools — but relatively little engagement by technical founders in other areas.)

So what’s my conclusion in all of this?

For starters, there are unquestionably strong technical founders in every single startup ecosystem (if there weren’t, there wouldn’t be a “startup ecosystem”). But in a post-pandemic, hyper-connected and hyper-personalized world, the best technical founders are increasingly choosing whether or not to engage with their local communities based on whether or not there are peers within those communities who share similar characteristics (ambition and industry being at the top of that list).

Startup ecosystems where technical founders aren’t actively participating in the local community don’t necessarily represent a failure of the community (or a perceived failure — e.g. a startup community that is “too businessy”). Rather, they reflect the reality that the builders aren’t seeing value in that community and, correctly, are opting out in favor of finding their community elsewhere.

In such ecosystems, this is an opportunity for community instigators to create something new that is valuable enough for the builders to engage. In some ecosystems, that could mean new, more targeted offerings for local builders. In others, it could be a recognition that the most important thing the community can offer is moral support and social engagements.

As a final note, I can’t help but recall an anecdote my own founders days. In the months after DataHero was acquired, I went to a variety of “startup events” happening around the Bay Area. My goal was to get a sense of what people were working on at that time (by late-2015, I had been heads down in the world of databases and business intelligence for more than 10 years, so I really had no clue what was going on outside of my tiny microcosm of tech).

I brought my then-girlfriend (not in tech) to several of these events. Each evening ended roughly the same: she would tell me about all of the interesting founders she met and the amazing things they were working on. I would inevitably end up tactfully unpacking for her why 9/10 weren’t actually doing what they claimed to be. After three or four of these events, she finally turned to me and asked,

“Why aren’t any of your badass founder friends ever at these events?”

To which I smiled and responded,

“Because they’re too busy actually building things.”