Blake Jennelle (The Blog)

I spent most of last night awake and working frantically on this big announcement by Philly Startup Leaders. We felt we had to act immediately if Philly’s effort to bring gigabit broadband here was going to succeed. We also thought that whether or not Google chooses Philadelphia, this is an opportunity to shine a worldwide light on our grassroots tech and creative communities.

Here’s a summary of the announcement with a link to the full version:

Philly Startup Leaders needs your help to do something big for Philly. Really big.

We’re pledging $5,000 toward a prize for the best gigabit idea submitted on Gigabit Philly. This is all the money we have available as an organization — it’s our savings for the last two and half years. We need you and the city to match it.

The Google gigabit competition is a golden opportunity to prove that we have the best grassroots tech and creative community in the world. Our grassroots communities have already started the campaign with Gigabit Philly, a website that collects your big ideas for how to harness gigabit connectivity to change the world.

Yet we will fail in this campaign unless we do something dramatic. We have to show Google what’s special about Philly. And we haven’t done that so far.

So Philly Startup Leaders is taking a gamble on Gigabit Philly, and we need your help. Our $5,000 pledge is just the beginning. We need our donation to spark a wave of pledges large and small that will draw worldwide attention to Philly. This prize will help us generate hundreds if not thousands of big ideas on Gigabit Philly from all over the world.

Make a pledge now and send the full announcement to everyone you know. We need help from every one of you!

Here’s the link to share: http://phillystartupleaders.org/news/philly-startup-leaders-goes-all-in-for-gigabit-philly/

We literally went from idea to launch in about 12 hours. At 9pm last night, a group of us were sitting at the Philly Startup Leaders fishbowl event with an idea, and by 9am this morning our announcement was live.

Read more…

Right now, I’m fighting a solo battle with the Angel Venture Fair (AVF) over their lame decision to use Eventbrite instead of TicketLeap. Until now, this disagreement has lived on the on the AVF’s Facebook page.

I’m really irritated.

The Angel Venture Fair is put on by the Private Investors Forum, which in turn has members who invested in TicketLeap (Robin Hood and the MAG Fund participated in a recent round). The AVF is dissing a local company for reasons that don’t make any sense to me. This is after a recent discussion among Philly Startup Leaders (PSL) members over what many entrepreneurs (and Jason Calacanis) think is ridiculous pricing — $1,000 to present at the fair and $250 just to apply.

It’s also amusing that the AVF says that they aren’t really looking for PSL stage companies. In a phone call with Valerie Gaydos, who runs the AVF, she said that they are looking for companies with around $500k in revenue.

This is amusing for two reasons:
1. PSL has a bunch of companies with $500k+ revenue
2. How lame is our angel community to be that far upstream?

I’ve literally had angels in Boston and DC laugh at me when I told them what kind of deals our “angels” look at. And this is on top of what the real Philly angels are saying, who don’t need the AVF to source deals and think this whole affair is downright silly.

I’m tired of sitting this one out. I hope some of you are too.

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? Read more…