VentureBeat wrote a couple of days ago how Amsterdam aims to attract tech entrepreneurs. The article highlights the infrastructure (events, places, communities) offered by existing startups and individuals, and how it paves the way into making Amsterdam a place known in Europe for innovation, collaboration, and entrepreneurship.
Here’s a quote:
What sets us apart is cooperation, instead of competition. Two developers might be working on the same problem, but it’s not the same app, or they’d merge. They each have their own vision, and punters will be attracted to one or the other based on the strength of that vision. If one developer happens to have better table view performance, they will share that code with their colleague, because table view performance is not our business.
We cooperate, because we are friends. If one of us does something to piss the other off, we don’t call out the lawyers, we call up our friend, and talk it over like people. We don’t just attend conferences, we get together at conferences, go out together, and have a good enough time together to generate blackmail material sufficient to nip litigation in the bud.
What’s interesting here is the emphasis on cooperation and how they leverage it into making better web companies, and quicker.
As a city that’s know for its open source roots, I think the AppSterdam values and work can be also done in Montréal. As someone who’s working himself on MTW and Enterprising.ly, there’s value in having a coop-style group in Montreal, made of single entrepreneurs who see value in uniting so they share marketing, programming, design skills, with the goal that uniting accelerates the group, and also that sharing is fun. You probably know other entrepreneurs who wish they have the same structure of a business (access to legal, accounting, administrative help) and also the group to get even more motivation, peer support, and promotion for their projects.
Of course, not everyone in Montreal share the same values, but that’s not a problem. Entrepreneurship on the web means diversity before anything else, what really matters is finding a friendly environment where you can thrive thanks to peer support.
I know other web entrepreneurs who would be interested in such a structure. Of course, this is only an idea, if you have comments or suggestions, feel free to leave them below.
