Removing Impediments

I believe I’m at the end of theoretical and big-picture strategy points that I wanted to make, and anything after here will be more tactical in nature, and just working opinions of mine on ways we could proceed.   I’ll ramble on for a few days on loosely related topics, and then share a few specific innovation ideas I have and stumble through some analysis of those to see if we can poke holes in them, or maybe some will actually float.

There are a few societal aspects we could address to make entrepreneurship easier to undertake, either by removing impediments or creating supports.  Let’s start with removing impediments.

Today, many start-ups are staffed by young people, those with access to private funding, or those retiring.  Why?  Young people with few obligations can take the chance to make it big without losing too much.  Those with access to money can of course do the same at any age, though often that means much of any upside goes to the investor, and my hope is we devise a more egalitarian approach than today’s VC climate.   Retirees have a source of income to survive on, and importantly, also have medical insurance, so turning 65 is actually a common start-up entry point. 

Let’s hit this point squarely:  medical insurance is a problem.  It’s a problem for the nation, for our state, for individuals, and certainly for the self-employed and small-business owner, which are exactly the sorts of people we want to have more of.  Medical care is too expensive for everybody, and many young people take a chance and simply don’t have any; while we want to sift for risk-takers, this isn’t the rational sort of risk-savvy behavior we want to encourage.  For individuals starting their own business, options are more expensive still.  I think for this idealistic tech-topia, one of the small-bets experiments we need is for medical, perhaps something like:

-          A group plan for catastrophic-only coverage, which should be reasonably affordable, especially for young people, which will be the bulk of our entrepreneurs.  Tie to memberships in a local incubator or part of a city-associated start-up program, and have the city negotiate the terms and manage the risk-pool.

-          A local physician, or perhaps a minor care facility, onsite for the co-working premises.  Members go for free, and for “outsiders” it’s just a normal visit.  Maybe one of our larger, more visionary philanthropists could fund the facility construction and first-year costs?

As for funding, perhaps as a state we could help organize and facilitate entrepreneurial survival.  As a society, it would be good if we made it easier for people to start small businesses – it’s part of our self-image of the American Dream (isn’t all of this?), yet the path isn’t clear or easy, and to some extent needlessly so.  It’s hard to envision income support at the city level, but we already do this at the state level, so it would seem logical to start there.

One of the authors I read, perhaps Ries, suggested that rather than only paying unemployment to the recently unintentionally unemployed, we could also choose to pay entrepreneurs similarly, at least for a period of time; after all, if we consider it reasonable to help support some workers, why not include start-up workers?   Maybe this is something OCAST could help with?

Tulsa already has co-working/incubator programs, and with any success these would need to grow.  Beside the space, data networking, basic office supports, an important function of such facilities is access to people, and a place for entrepreneurial thinkers and supports to interact.  Even if you have drive, ambition, and a great idea, you will need practical advice from lawyers, accountants, IT experts, and probably a host of other specialists that larger companies have in-house but individuals and small-business have to find outside.  A new enterprise may have only a few individuals who simply have never had to find such services, and one of the “networks of people” we talked about earlier should be a local ecosystem of support services.  Of course these could be start-ups and entrepreneurs too, part of the same overall programs.