The Digital Economist
Hi, I'm Sam Birmingham. I love startups, innovation and challenging the status quo.
For the vast majority of my years, economies have grown, companies have profited and people have got richer on the back of a once-in-a-lifetime demographic shift and debt-fuelled boom. Those days are through.
Economies must evolve beyond rampant consumerism and confront the demographic headwind that had been a tailwind until the Baby Boomers began retiring. Companies must become nimble, innovate and invent new products to address customers' ever-changing needs in this digitally-disrupted world. And as people, we must focus on solving problems and learn to do more with less.
These are the challenges that excite me. They are what I want to get out of bed each morning and be a part of. This is where I share my thoughts.
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Startup Weekend Perth was one of the highlights of my past few years!
As much as everyone gets caught up on ideas, I have always maintained that Startup Weekend participants should focus on learning - their ideas are simply the vehicle by which to understand the processes and techniques, which can then be scaled across your next hundred and one ideas.
Our uber-judge Hugh Mason looks at it similarly:
“The legacy is not so much the startups, it’s actually the relationships.”
And in the words of our facilitator Dave Moskovitz:
“The primary purpose of Startup Weekend isn’t to produce startups in 54 hours. It is to inspire the people who come along to continue on their entrepreneurial journey and connect them with other people and resources in the ecosystem. When they leave Startup Weekend on the Monday morning, if their 54 hour startup is a winner then that’s fantastic, but if not, hey, it’s a safe place to fail. Maybe one, two or three of the startups that come out of here will be go-ers, but the people who come will all have a new set of skills and a whole new set of relationships that they can apply to working on a real startup.”
PS - Another awesome quote from Dave in this video:
“Startup Weekends are the crack cocaine of entrepreneurialism. We’re giving them their first hit for free at Startup Weekend…”
