3 Ways on How Curated Connections Among Impact Entrepreneurs Accelerate their Learning

3 Ways on How Curated Connections Among Impact Entrepreneurs Accelerate their Learning

The initial response to COVID19 followed the waves of survival, adaptation, and resilience to develop an act of collective courage to build back better. Following these stages, both people and organizations have realized how dependent we are on nature. This awareness showed us the need for regenerative and restorative practices – where new ventures and startups are working for impact.

While running a business to go from 0 to 1 is a huge challenge itself, creating positive environmental and social impact can be even more taxing, especially for the founders themselves. Accelerators and incubation programs offer a highly valuable service for founders when it comes to overcoming the challenges of running a business, scaling it, and managing a team. Based on our vast experience running acceleration programs we have realized the power of peer conversations, that is not often emphasized  enough in the value of such programs. However, the COVID19 pandemic showed us that one further aspect is often missing in these programs – the role of community and the power of collective learning.

That is why when we think of the need for adaptation, changing dynamics, and the power of curated connections, we have reviewed our approach to running an accelerator for impact entrepreneurs and designed a co-learning space independent of the classical co-working space that has long been a core pillar of our Impact Hub community. We know that face-to-face interactions are invaluable, and over the course of a global pandemic and emerging crisis we have witnessed the special role of niche communities that not only enable members to connect but also adapt and thrive. Here are three ways that we have seen how belonging to a community can help founders thrive:

1 – Learn from each other

The traditional education system puts trainers at the center. Learning focuses on content and not on the needs of the learner. Yet humans have evolved learning through connection, hearing stories, and experimenting with peers. Cohort-based programs leverage this, offering peer-to-peer connection as one of their main value propositions. As Y-combinator co-founder Paul Graham has written, founders face similar obstacles at similar times, and there is immense value in the support inherent to a community of peers.

2 – Increase their luck surface area

Luck is both an overrated and underrated concept in the journey of a founder. Having the right team, seizing the right moment, having the right investor, and being in the right market are all subject to some level of chance. However, we can also influence our luck. Luck, in part, depends on how much action we take to follow our passions and how many and which people we communicate with about our passions. In this way, we can fight the arbitrary nature of success. Jason Roberts frames this as Luck Surface Area which is the amount of action you take around your passion combined with the number of people you communicate your passion to.

Being part of a founder community is a great lever to increase your luck surface area as you increase the number of relevant people with whom you exchange about your purpose and your venture. And who knows, one of them might turn out to be your next hire, investor, or potential customer.

3- Support the well-being of founders and their team

Founder depression is a serious topic that does not get the attention it deserves. With the constant pressure on founders to perform better than the competition, accompanied by the toxic narrative of overnight unicorns, founders are especially likely to suffer from depression. Curating a safe space for founders, which enables them to share their current challenges and how they have navigated past challenges and to learn from the experiences of others, can increase founders’ support network and potentially reduce the risk of burn-outs while also serving to empower and inspire.

Find your tribe

The founder’s journey can be  a lonely one, but it doesn’t have to be. Especially when your purpose is to create a positive impact on the world, it can feel even lonelier at times. The role and power of entrepreneurial communities is not only to create resiliency among entrepreneurs and their teams, but also to further support the entrepreneurial ecosystem. That is why we are currently prototyping a co-learning space for impact entrepreneurs, to learn from, with and for each other. Only peers know the situation an impact entrepreneur might struggle with at the moment from first hand experience, and may have important insights to solve it. We want to focus on peer-to-peer exchange in various ways – and keep on learning ourselves along the way! If you are interested to co-shape this offering, join  our next event or reach out to us. 

This event series is part of a joint project with SIA Austria, funded by Wirtschaftsagentur Wien.