Blake Jennelle (The Blog)

Great cities have a soul. They have a set of dominant values and priorities that shape conversations, influence ambitions and attract like-minded people to live and work there.

New York’s soul is, without a doubt, capitalism. It’s flavored by a countercurrent of artistic and creative ambition, but it’s capitalism’s influence that you feel everywhere.

L.A.’s soul is entertainment, with all the vanity, opportunism and dazzling innovation that comes with it. Las Vegas, its neighbor to the east, is built around indulgence, with simple vices made digestible and nonthreatening for everyone from fraternity brothers to their grandparents.

Philly’s soul is harder to capture. I have some thoughts on it but they are still too murky to share.

Last weekend, with all this in mind, I went to Washington DC to get to know the soul of its startup scene. Startups there are immersed in a city of advocacy, where idealists flock to make change and cynics flock to take advantage of things as they are.

So what does this climate of advocacy mean for startups and innovators in Washington DC?

The short answer is, I don’t know. I spent just one short weekend there, which is long enough to notice a few things but not long enough to be confident in any of them.

So why write at all? Three reasons:

1. I hope that my observations will help Philadelphians get to know their neighbor to the south.
2. I hope that these observations – and errors – will spark a conversation in the comments where we can hear from those of you who know DC better than I do.
3. I hope that this conversation between cities eventually leads us to hang out and build cool things together.

If you live in DC or know the scene there – or if you live elsewhere and would like to share observations about your city – I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

So without further ado, here are some highlights from my trip.

Affinity Lab: DC’s take on coworking and startup incubation

I started my trip with a tour of Affinity Lab, “an entrepreneurial dream and action space.” Affinity Lab is a community of freelancers, entrepreneurial companies and non-profits that share an office space in the Adams Morgan neighborhood of DC.

I had a long chat with Philippe Chetrit, one of Affinity Lab’s founders. Philippe explained that he’s building an ecosystem as much as he’s building a community (see Alex Hillman’s explanation of ecosystem vs. community). He said that it’s critical to have a mix of service providers and the entrepreneurial companies who need them. He also thinks that it’s valuable to mix in non-profits and foundations among for-profit businesses, and this certainly created a cool vibe there.

While in Affinity Lab, I had extended chats with two social entrepreneurs who work there, Ian Fisk of the William James Foundation and Andrew Horn of Dreams for Kids. To show the power of cross-pollination like this, in just a few minutes of talking it became clear that there were opportunities for them to collaborate with DreamIt Ventures, Good Company Ventures and Startup Afterschool, three programs I’m involved with here in Philly.

Affinity Lab is opening a second space in DC and is looking to expand into other cities. From what I can tell, their model should translate well. Nothing about it seems specific to DC.

CoolTown Studios: Crowdsourced communities in real estate and beyond

After visiting Affinity Lab, I had an amazing lunch with Neil Takemoto, an Affinity Lab member and the founder of CoolTown Studios. Neil is hard to describe because there’s not yet a word for what he does. This is something I ran into a few times in DC – people not only crossing disciplines but also inventing new ones.

I see Neil as someone who uses crowdsourcing as way to listen to markets. He asks communities what they would like to see in a real estate development, for example, and then uses their answers to design a space that they will like. He also takes advantage of the buy-in created by all that input to ensure occupancy at launch.

In talking, Neil and I discovered a major gap in startup office space that, until its filled, could significantly increase the chances that startups will fail. The answer, we thought, looks something like starutp coworking, although I think that phrase misses something important.

Neil wrote up our ideas on startup coworking immediately after our meeting, and I think it’s a great read.

Matt Stempeck of NetSquared DC and Michael Mossobo of the Goodness 500

Because of the small portions at Tryst, the very cool restaurant/bar/coffee shop where I met Neil, I decided to eat a second lunch during my next meeting with friends Matt Stempeck and Michael Mossobo.

These guys blur the lines between startup entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship in a way that seems more natural in DC. Advocacy often seems to bleed into entrepreneurship.

Matt and Michael both come from the world of progressive politics. Matt just took a new job and has a promising startup idea rolling around in his head that I won’t share here, but that I hope that he develops. He also runs the DC chapter of NetSquared, an organization that focuses on the intersection of innovation and social change, again something that seems very natural to the DC entrepreneur.

Michael started a ranking of the Fortune 500 companies by social responsibility, a list he calls the Goodness 500. He points out that we can’t hold corporations accountable for what we can’t measure, whether as a shareholder or as a consumer. So Michael devised a way to quantify social responsibility in the same way that stock markets quantify a company’s value.

Startup Scramble: 40 college students. 12 social ventures. 1 weekend.

The original inspiration for my trip began with an event called the Startup Scramble.

The thinking behind the Startup Scramble, as I understand it, went something like this: let’s lock a bunch of socially-conscious college students in borrowed office space for the weekend and do everything we can to encourage them to launch social ventures.

For over a year, I have wanted to host a Startup Weekend in Philly. I also saw this event as an opportunity to help promote the startup accelerator DreamIt Ventures, because DC colleges are home to many promising young entrepreneurs. So this seemed like an event that I couldn’t afford to miss.

It did not disappoint. The students, representing most of the major DC colleges, launched 12 social ventures ranging from the iEquate – an initiative local to Memphis, Tennessee that helps young adults find jobs they are actually passionate about (imagine that!) – to the ambitious Global Link, designed to connect NGOs to their active most supporters.

The Startup Scramble was funded by Ashoka and run by Stephen Douglass, an entrepreneur and recovering investment banker who runs Young Impact and was the ultimate emcee. Imagine if the pickup artist, Mystery, were a social entrepreneur and wasn’t creepy, and you have a good picture of Stephen. He’s a proponent of “radical self-acceptance,” a belief I embrace, and with his colorful attitude and outfits, he practices what he preaches. He led the group in a spontaneous dance contest and did everything he could do to get the group comfortable with themselves and each other.

The event was energizing for me, and it was inspiring to see Stephen in action.

Frank Gruber: Blogger, gratefulness entrepreneur, TECH cocktail founder and more

On the last morning of the trip, I had an exciting, inspiring breakfast with Frank Gruber at the shamelessly liberal Busboys and Poets (I fit right in).

Frank is the founder of TECH cocktail, a popular blogger at SomewhatFrank.com, a former AOL product developer and now the co-founder of Shiny Heart Ventures, a startup that builds community-powered products around the joys of life, including the personal gratitude journal thankfulfor.com.

Frank is the consummate entrepreneur and has fit many careers into not so many years. Over breakfast, we exchanged ideas for streamlining TECH cocktail and Philly Startup Leaders, promoting DreamIt Ventures, and simplifying our own over-stretched and email-deluged lives.

Frank struck me as the entrepreneur’s equivalent of a renaissance man, with his hands in a dizzying array of projects and still itching to get involved with more.

What to make of all this

So after all this, I should have some parting thoughts on DC, right? Especially after you just suffered through this endless post.

Really though, I have more questions than conclusions. Let me share those big picture observations that I do have about DC:

• Social impact and entrepreneurship seem to be viewed as complementary.
• The startup, tech and freelancer scenes seem to be well integrated.
• There’s no central community of startup entrepreneurs like Philly Startup Leaders.
• The various scenes revolve more around events than around organized groups.
• Much of the DC scene’s growth seems to come from the grassroots, as it does in Philadelphia.
• Many people seemed to know of Philadelphia by reputation. The reputation of our creative communities is strong.

Keep in mind that these observations were formed from one short trip. They are almost guaranteed to be wrong, the only question is by how much.

What I’m hoping is that those of you who really know DC will share your thoughts below in the comments.

So let’s get to it. What makes the DC startup and tech community tick? And what can we learn here in Philly?