Some of you know me as the cranky team drop down guy who fights with SB and gets nastygrams from Ken Montgomery.
But in real life I do economic development. That is this fuzzy term for sitting at the intersection between the public and the private sector to help facilitate job growth. So much of my job is connecting companies to resources and partnerships to help pain points - from finding space to expand to workforce training resources to making an average of about 200 (I counted) email introductions to people I can think can benefit from knowing one another. I love my job and career and enjoy it tremendously.
But I opened an email today and got really sad. So I thought I would post on BI cause why not.
It was a newsletter gushing in glowing terms about an entrepreneur who just took a consumer product and launched it on Shark tank. A local , she had been helped by a local incubator to hone her pitch and successfully got an investor or three on the episode that aired.
But I was not happy but sad. Cause that product wasn't going to really create many (any?) US jobs. Produced overseas at near slave wages, it would be distributed by the behemoth Amazon supply chain. Maybe some domestic jobs would be created in finance and marketing but that too could either be handled virtually or off shore. So I had just spent 10 minutes reading about her and 1000+ people had opened an email that was mostly about someone coming up with a better mousetrap to mint another US Milllionaire. Wheee.
Now I am not bashing entrepreneurship support programs. I guess it is cool. But I do this work not to enrich some owner or 'founder" but to help them employ people - to create broad prosperity and the dignity that comes from earning a wage and supporting a family and, lets be honest, to do the simple things like have a BBQ outside and catch a cal game on the internet.
Somewhere we lost our way. We SHOULD celebrate innovators and entpreneurs. But what made people like Andy Grove or David Packard great was not that they become gazzillionaires. It is because they built companies that provided a liveliohood to hundreds of thousands. That should be who is on TV. Not a founder who thought up a better hair tie.
But in real life I do economic development. That is this fuzzy term for sitting at the intersection between the public and the private sector to help facilitate job growth. So much of my job is connecting companies to resources and partnerships to help pain points - from finding space to expand to workforce training resources to making an average of about 200 (I counted) email introductions to people I can think can benefit from knowing one another. I love my job and career and enjoy it tremendously.
But I opened an email today and got really sad. So I thought I would post on BI cause why not.
It was a newsletter gushing in glowing terms about an entrepreneur who just took a consumer product and launched it on Shark tank. A local , she had been helped by a local incubator to hone her pitch and successfully got an investor or three on the episode that aired.
But I was not happy but sad. Cause that product wasn't going to really create many (any?) US jobs. Produced overseas at near slave wages, it would be distributed by the behemoth Amazon supply chain. Maybe some domestic jobs would be created in finance and marketing but that too could either be handled virtually or off shore. So I had just spent 10 minutes reading about her and 1000+ people had opened an email that was mostly about someone coming up with a better mousetrap to mint another US Milllionaire. Wheee.
Now I am not bashing entrepreneurship support programs. I guess it is cool. But I do this work not to enrich some owner or 'founder" but to help them employ people - to create broad prosperity and the dignity that comes from earning a wage and supporting a family and, lets be honest, to do the simple things like have a BBQ outside and catch a cal game on the internet.
Somewhere we lost our way. We SHOULD celebrate innovators and entpreneurs. But what made people like Andy Grove or David Packard great was not that they become gazzillionaires. It is because they built companies that provided a liveliohood to hundreds of thousands. That should be who is on TV. Not a founder who thought up a better hair tie.
Take care of your Chicken