Church, Cheese and The Frog

I write as the masks are finally coming off on public transport here in Singapore. Everyone is re-discovering the fun of getting together and being able to see each other smile. So I smiled earlier today when I got a message from 杨贺翔 at Glints , remembering the fun we all had at JFDI Open House events ten years ago, and asking if there is any secret sauce I could share about that kind of community creation. I post this now in case it's helpful to anyone else, and for folk who were there or who have done something similar to share their insights.

To set the context: in 2012 JFDI.Asia was Southeast Asia's first startup accelerator. We actively invested in pre-seed startups until 2015 and, today, the firm is in harvest mode enjoying seeing our alumni like Glints achieve the success that they worked so hard for. Many of them kindly said that JFDI made a difference but, looking back, I am not sure that the actual accelerator program we ran was our most valuable legacy. I wonder if it might have been the hundreds of events we ran each week for five years with support from our partners including Singtel , NUS Enterprise , SGInnovate and A*StartCentral . For sure, at a time when words like Lean Startup, Pivot and Platform Business Model still seemed like voodoo, the 100 day program itself did offer a structured framework through which mentors who had 'been there, done that' could share the emerging practices that worked. However, it was also clear that a startup accelerator is much more than a makeover process with experts.

A decade ago, I began exploring notions of community and belonging around startup accelerators in my Masters' Thesis . Brad Feld wrote a seminal book on the same subject which has been widely referenced and adapted to different contexts and cultures. Research evidence is now much clearer about what needs to go into a startup accelerator and the notion that 'it takes a village to raise a startup' is commonly recognised. IMHO it is absolutely right that public policy is now much less obsessed with individual star entrepreneurs, and what they might have done right, because that increasingly looks unpredictable and generally impossible to replicate . Instead, the spotlight has shifted to the ecosystems in which entrepreneurship emerges ... but whatever your theory about creating the right climate for entrepreneurship, eventually you're going to have to turn that theory into something practical. In the absence of some Universal Truth, you need a mental model. So, when Meng Weng Wong and I set up JFDI.Asia, the first thing we asked ourselves was "What is committing to a new venture most like?"

Our mental model was that, for practitioners, starting a new venture needs something like a faith. Despite not controlling all the resources you need, and even knowing that most startups fail, some of us still set out to try to shape the world in new ways. So Meng and I looked up the wikipedia article for religion to see what the practice of different faiths have in common. I checked today and the second paragraph is still something like what we saw all those years ago:

Religious practices may include rituals, sermons, commemoration or veneration (of deities or saints), sacrifices, festivals, feasts, trances, initiations, matrimonial and funerary services, meditation, prayer, music, art, dance, and/or public service. Religions have sacred histories and narratives, which may be preserved in sacred texts, symbols and holy places, that primarily aim to give life meaning.

Just for a moment we were distracted by the part about deities and saints because cults seemed great as a business model. If JFDI.Asia didn't work, we should set up one of those. Meanwhile, living in Singapore, the next two words we liked were festivals and feasts.

It seemed to us that most faiths have some rules about food that are unusual, so we decided that we should take foreign startup teams to eat frog porridge as a kind of rite-of-initiation, and also that we would always serve cheese at our open house events. Meng was quicker than me to realise how important it would be to do this in a consistent holy place where members of our community could get together for a weekly fellowship or communion to renew their faith. We had already chosen a frog as our symbol, so we were good to go.

The JFDI Open House Playbook

Now we just had to figure out how our weekly fellowship of frogs and cheese was going to run. The formula that worked for us came together quite quickly and, over the next five years, we ran something like 300 evening events using it almost unchanged. I have summarised it below.

1 Why did we run open house events?

1.1 Because entrepreneurship can be considered a faith, based on a?belief that we can change?tomorrow and make it the way we want if we get the right folk together. Most religions seem to have daily or weekly rituals when their faith is restored, so we modelled the timing on that.

1.2 Because?opportunities arise out of serendipity and 'it takes a village to raise a startup'. Open House events were a way to introduce people who should meet. Like putting chemicals in a test tube and shaking it: stand back and watch the reaction happen.

2 How did we run open house events?

2.1 We made it clear that the events would happen, come what may, every week. Knowing that you could bring a friend along, or recommend a visitor to go, or get inspiration by showing up, was important to get people through the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship.

2.2 We set a start time about 6.30. A few regulars would show up about 6.15 then the 70% who were new each time had mostly drifted in by 6.45. About 7pm, I or someone else would stand on a chair and welcome everyone and tell them the only purpose of the event is for great people to meet other great people and that most in the room didn't know each other yet so don't feel left out. To get introductions started I had used the previous 20-30 minutes to chat with a few unfamiliar faces to find out who they were. Then as I was standing up I would throw a toy plush frog at one of the people I had spoken with, say why I thought they were interesting and invite them to share with us for 30 seconds by handing over a microphone. Then I would invite them to throw the frog back to me or to someone else they thought was interesting. After about 3-6 people had spoken (6-8 mins max) I would say ok over to you all - everyone here wants to meet you so get chatting.

2.3 We would sometimes have a panel or run an open mic for anyone to talk but it was important not to let anyone suck the air out of the room. For example, sometimes a sponsor would provide beer or food and wanted to speak at length, usually to push a product or to recruit talent or whatever. That was OK but the rule was it had to happen in a side room so that everyone who had just showed up to enjoy being with people could do their thing. Nobody wants to start their weekend to start with a hard sell.

2.4 The frog branding turned out to be massively successful. People took frogs to have them photobomb pictures in exotic places, or with important people, and they brought us frog-themed souvenirs from around the world which they left in our space. They liked coming back a few weeks later with friends and seeing that their contribution was still there and everyone was enjoying it, making the space about the community, not about us.

3 What worked

Hand on heart, now that I am partway through a PhD exploring the conversations that lead to success or failure in entrepreneurship, I find it hard to explain a mechanism or to set out a cost-benefit analysis of what our open house events specifically contributed to the early days of the Singapore startup ecosystem. We had a lot of fun and people seem to remember them fondly but, as my supervisor would say, "correlation does not imply causation." I can say for sure that we introduced about 10,000 people over five years, we collectively consumed several hundred kilograms of cheese (Meng's favourite Beamster , mostly), and these events definitely did lead to at least two marriages (and several children). So that's something to be proud about.

4 What I would do differently if I tried this kind of community building again

This specific open house event turned out to be right for a certain place at a certain time. Reading Brad Feld's book made me realise how some of this stuff is very culturally dependent: parts of what worked for Techstars in its home location at Boulder, Colorado, definitely would not have worked in Singapore. I guess only 60% of the accelerator playbook that they generously shared with us eventually made it into JFDI, in part because the level of tacit knowledge about entreprenership in Boulder was very different to that in Singapore at the time, and also because communication styles in different places vary. As an aside, for anyone interested in those differences I can't recommend Geert Hofstede's website or Richard D Lewis' work highly enough.

By the same token, cheese isn't A Thing for everyone, and not all feel comfortable showing up to relatively unstructured events. I do know that some relatively introverted folk showed up to our open house events looking for more of an agenda and, when their expectations were not framed and their social role was left unassigned, they left before the fun began. Whether that was an accidentally positive self-selection mechanism that left people more likely to connect in the room or not, I will leave others to decide.

Finally, I recall that running an open event inevitably attracts very diverse people and one of the pleasures of JFDI.Asia was the way it brought in non-neurotypical folk and talented geeks with unconventional social styles. It was sometimes challenging, but always rewarding, to help those who felt they had found their tribe to connect.

Thank you to everyone who was there — you made the magic happen.