What’s wrong with how our industry is currently perceived?

After all, it’s not so long ago that we couldn’t get any awareness of our success at all. Now, we see a different young millionaire startup CEO featured on the cover of our business magazines every month, 

Celebrating our young millionaire success stories is exciting, and better than no awareness at all, but it portrays us as less of an industry and more of a temporary anomaly, or a series of high-risk mad scrambles at worst — no more influenced by sound business strategy than investing in scratch lottery tickets.

Most professional investors consider putting $100,000 in an early-stage tech startup like to putting the money on a single 100-to-one odds racehorse with no track record and no bloodline. Government wants to be seen to be supporting innovation but can’t move fast enough, can’t get the data it needs, and worries about all the ways industry support could backfire in the polls.

Business owners have all read about companies burned by offshore web developers, ripped-off by credit card hackers, and threatened by online-only competitors springing up overnight.

The millionaire startup CEOs under 40 make a great headline but they’re bad for our reputation. For every rocket-ride-to-the-moon there are a hundred tech startup businesses building stable, growing enterprises over the longer term. There are also a thousand businesses in ‘traditional’ industries discovering that the internet enables them to find new markets, develop new products and improve the profitability of existing businesses.

They’re achieving all this because, to paraphrase startup incubator Pollenizer’s tagline, there is now a science to building tech startups. Though valid, our ‘startup science’ is still new enough to be unevenly distributed, poorly taught and irregularly practiced.

A new publication and event series, From Little Things is intended to address all this, and to show industry, investors and government that tech startups aren’t a trend, or an anomaly, a side-effect or a gamble.

Tech startup science isn’t driving the new economy, it is the economy. Startups aren’t a trend, they are an industry, and in all industries.

From Little Things is a joint venture of Pollenizer, Event Directors and The New Agency. It’s a place to learn about startups, in a way that helps you apply those learnings, to your own startup plans, investment portfolio, and public policy.

Tell us what we can do better…