San Diego Tech Week Reflects Gains as Web Startups Amass Downtown
visibility of their startup community even more, Gordon and other local tech entrepreneurs have organized a “Demo Night,” “Startup Grind,” “Tech Crawl,” and other events next week as a way of leading up to the 2013 San Diego Venture Summit on July 12. She says if there is one lesson that San Diego’s fledgling community of Web startups has taken to heart since the Foundry Group’s Brad Feld visited in April, it’s that entrepreneurs have to step up to serve as the leaders of their own startup communities.
Brad Feld
As a co-founder and managing director at the Foundry Group, the Boulder, CO-based venture firm, Feld has invested in hundreds of tech startups, including such noteworthy deals as MakerBot, Fitbit, Zynga, and Cheezburger. For Gordon and others, Feld’s appearance in San Diego over two months ago (arranged by Xconomy and the Cooley law firm) became a tipping point in terms of rallying local entrepreneurs to action.
In his book “Startup Communities,” Feld writes:
In virtually every major city, there are long lists of different types of people and organizations who are involved in the startup community, including government, universities, investors, mentors, and service providers. Historically, many of these organizations try to play a leadership role in the development of their local startup community. Although their involvement is important, they can’t be the leaders. The entrepreneurs have to be the leaders.
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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