Ten cities in 20 days. This was Australian entrepreneur Simon Walker’s plan of attack to understand U.S. startup hubs, a mission he has named Leeap Project.
And with Walker’s wish to visit the top 10 cities full of budding entrepreneurs, of course he didn’t miss LA. The video from his trip was published this week on Leeap Project’s YouTube channel (check it out below!).
The video features a few of LA’s most important players: Mahalo's Jason Calacanis, Science's Mike Jones, Qualaroo's Sean Ellis, Digital LA's Kevin Winston, PlayWerk's Shirin Salemnia, Bre.ad's Annake Jong, SiliconBeachLA.com's Robert Lambert, Cross Campus' Dan Dato and Coloft Academy's Yohei Nakajima.
LA was his first stop of Leeap Project and Walker said that the startup scene was exploding there with so many co-working spaces and accelerators over the last 18 months. Walker said he was particularly impressed with Coloft and its reputation in the community.
“Coloft is kind of the mom and pop institution,” Walker said. “It is strongly upheld by everyone. They just absolutely love the guys from Coloft.”
In LA and in every city he visited, Walker stayed with local entrepreneurs using Startup Stay, a couchsurfing platform for entrepreneurs. Stumbling across Startup Stay’s site in late September was actually the impetus for Leeap in the first place, Walker said, and planning his stays through the site allowed him to gather truthful representations of each city from actual entrepreneurs involved in the scene.
Leeap was aimed at Australians wanting to know about startup life in America because many have a skewed view, Walker said, and think that “Silicon Valley is the whole of America with billionaires working in dorm rooms everywhere.”
“As a businessperson, you are seriously wanting to cut the bullshit and have information that is relevant and is actually going to help entrepreneurs,” Walker said.
As he traveled, Walker said he quickly realized that Leeap would serve to educate not only Australian innovators, but also American entrepreneurs working in different cities because “a lot of people within America didn’t know what was going on next door.”
Despite the fragmentation of the national startup community, there was high local activity; Walker said he received dozens of emails each day of his trip informing him of different events in different cities.
“There was only so much I could achieve in every city and I really wanted to get many perspectives to hear about the realities of what’s going on,” Walker said. “I was speaking with entrepreneurs, accelerators, co-working spaces, investors to create a relatively holistic, educated opinion. It was great to see that there was so much support locally for the project.”
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N7I0Rv2nkQ]
