What were all these people and institutions failing to do to take the potential and convert it into a highly connected performing ecosystem?

They're three good questions.

I don't think I've ever told you this, but I had this idea, maybe even like pre-internet, that at some point in my career I would buy a building, load some servers in there, wire the building, and bring a bunch of my friends in to help founders get off the ground.

I thought that would be a pretty cool thing.

It turns out that at one point I start reading about Y Combinator and Techstars and realize I don't need to actually buy the building or the servers.

[laughs] But the dream was there, and it was real.

I actually expressed it probably five or six years before I was able to manifest it.

So what was it for you? Why were you doing that? What patterns were you trying to break when you would take this approach?

What does that mean to you? How would you describe that?

Yeah, so there's a couple different angles I could take into this.

Maybe we'll do a couple, but let me start with an easy one.

Government, city, county, state, federal even, across the world, but here in the United States, is trying desperately to understand that economic development has to have a portion of entrepreneurship as part of your economic development, hopefully success as a city, county, region, whatever it is.

So there's organizations and money and lots of things going.

And the first thing that most of these people wanna do is with the wrong thinking that they can engineer outcomes.

By the way, if you and I knew how to, if we had the playbook for engineering, we wouldn't be spending time on a podcast.

And so I want to give you some space just to talk about RDU Startup Week and then how folks can get in touch with