Pay it back to the Sunrise crew today
Take a moment to thank someone who works for Blackbird Ventures or Startmate today because if you were at Sunrise, I think you’ll agree they’ve all been the nicest, most patient, helpful and professional venue and event production team you’ve ever been served by.
Which is amazing because that’s nobody’s day job in either team, and also because it’s not like you can just stop a tech venture fund or an accelerator program while you pull this off.
They’re both organisations in which everybody’s got to work their arse off all of the time, and yet, for a couple of weeks, they add another job to that already very demanding job and manage to do both. I don’t know when they get to sleep.
They perform this new job (that they didn’t aspire to have and haven’t really been trained for) with care for all of us, to the best of their abilities, with a smile and a friendly enquiry about whether we’re enjoying our day. And if they see an opportunity to go an extra mile on something for us, they go do that too.
Talking to my Forever Girlfriend, (she’s entering the startup industry after decades in another industry) she’s absolutely gobsmacked about how nice everybody is to each other; how everybody is genuinely interested in what complete strangers are working on, trying to achieve, hoping to learn.
She can’t believe how many people she’s met in tech who are direct competitors and yet also good friends; how so many of us pay it forward for someone else that we’ve only just met in the coffee queue.
In other industries, interest in who you are and what you do is usually feigned because it’s necessary to be polite. It’s so rare that someone really means it when they say “it was good to meet you”, that you assume it’s probably not true. An offer to help is rarely fulfilled later. Professionals at events are either boastful, exclusionist and elitist, or scared, hungry and plotting, from the top ranks down to those just stepping up from unpaid intern.
Conferences and award events full of defensive, secretive, bitchy, envious, scared and ultimately lonely professionals who can’t wait to get it over with so they can get to the bar for drinks. Pretty grim but if it’s all you’ve ever known, how would you know it can be better without attending a Sunrise?
I think our open, sharing, caring industry culture is partly because the startup industry is not a zero-sum game. Someone else’s success will probably not be at our expense. Most sectors in our industry are wide-open. There could be 2x more competition and there would still be abundant opportunity for us all to thrive. If our venture fails it’s more likely that we were too early or too late than because we were wrong.
I think it’s also partly because so many of us identify with the newbies, the underdogs and the disadvantaged in startups, either because we’re that too, or because, just a few years ago, it was us. And we don’t quite believe how lucky we’ve been.
I know that’s true of Blackbird and Startmate. Both take our newbies, underdogs and the disadvantaged and turn them into successful entrepreneurs and skilled professionals in crazy-fast time. And they make sure that they and everyone they work with takes the surprise, the wonder and the excitement and turns it into acts of service for the rest of us.
So if you can, join me in taking a moment to thank the Blackbird and Startmate team member closest to you; someone whose face you recognise from the past two days, or perhaps just someone you randomly pick from these two pages, since they were all involved. Just pick a person, find their Twitter or their LinkedIn, and send them a quick message. Pay them back by thanking them for paying it forward so massively for us all:
https://www.blackbird.vc/team#all
https://www.startmate.com/about-us
Need help with what to say? Here’s a template:
Hey [Firstname], just wanted to drop you a quick note to say that I am very grateful for all your hard work making Sunrise happen this week. I know you already have a huge job to do, and you must be exhausted. You made it really special and I had an amazing time. I’ll try to pay it forward somehow.
