Discussing Community with Eli Finn, SJSU SpartUp Incubator
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Before the podcast officially launched, Mash sat down with Eli Finn, Program Manager of the SJSU SpartUp Incubator, to talk about something most programs undervalue: the community that forms between founders. Eli had just run a three-week summer intensive where 11 founders lived in the dorms together, and found that what they wanted most wasn’t more lectures. It was time with each other.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.
“Just have time with each other”
A lot of incubators and accelerators think the lecturing, authority view is important — “I’m going to tell you how to be successful.” There’s a place for that. But my experience is that the community that comes out of it matters more. Is that what you saw?
When we did the summer intensive this year, we had a really hard time getting people interested in lectures at all. Either they felt they could find the information on the internet somehow, or it was too advanced — “I’m an early-stage startup, I don’t really know what they’re talking about” — or it just wasn’t timely.
When we asked for feedback, what they said they wanted was time to work with the other people in the program. It was the only three weeks they’d have uninterrupted from pretty much everything else in their lives. They just wanted to sit in a room, maybe have some food, do some development, and have time with each other and their co-founders.
So what worked for building that community?
Them living together is a pretty good start. They lived in the dorms. You can definitely do it through one-at-a-time events, but when a bunch of people who’ve never met have to live with each other right away, it’s different. It was 11 people. Maybe two or three went home a few nights, but most were there every night. Someone came from Ohio, so he had no choice.
Finding out you’re wrong, early
How do you know it was effective? It’s one thing to say they showed up.
The main indication — and it was a little bit good and bad — was that everybody was questioning their business. In the past we’ve had a lot of people who are like, “No, I’m going to do this, it’s going to be done this way, and I want to solve this problem with this solution.” This year everybody was more unconvinced, and curious about whether what they were doing was right. And a lot of them pretty quickly discovered that no, it was very wrong.
But I think it’s way better that they find that out at that stage, when they don’t have rent to pay or anything.
I meet a lot of new founders who say, “I know it all,” and I can’t help someone who knows it all. Does putting them in a room with founders at the same stage make it easier to be honest — to find out nobody knows anything?
Yes. Nobody knows anything, and there’s some comfort in that. You don’t have to know everything, and you don’t have to know anything at first.
It also helped that, kind of coincidentally, there were two genres of startup: a lot of people in real estate and a few in careers. So they had shared knowledge, and could cover problems they’d had that would come up for others. That took a little while to cultivate. But once they figured out, “Oh, this is someone who’s had the same problems as me,” it really helped, because they didn’t have to make the same mistake again.
“I think it’s way better that they find that out at that stage.”
— Eli Finn · Inspiring Founders Podcast, Ep. 00
But don’t they also need someone who’s actually done it?
They definitely need some guidance. It was a great group, but a lot of founders had more confidence that the path they were choosing was right than I’d think is healthy. That always happens with founders — you start being a founder because you’re confident in something. So there were lessons people skipped that they needed to hear, and lessons they heard that just did not compute.
In a longer community session, I think they’d have opened up more and been able to tell each other, “Hey, you’re just not ready for funding.” I had to say that more times than I wanted to. It sucks to tell somebody, but it kept coming up — “I need funding for this to work” — when that very factually was not the stage they were at.
Mentors, one on one
Beyond the community inside the program, how did you help them reach a wider network — one that’s hard to build on your own?
Two ways. First, we brought in a lot of mentors they would never have met otherwise. And because of their feedback, it shifted from lectures to one-on-one mentorship. Sree from FalconX came in, and the day before, I asked her: “People have really different problems. Would you be open to rapid-fire, back-to-back one-on-ones?” We reserved the conference room and shuffled people in and out, and each got 20 minutes with her. Her original topic was going to be international entrepreneurship — being a founder on a visa. Some people talked about that, and the people it didn’t apply to talked about something else.
Second, I encouraged them to go to events we didn’t host. I shared some stories about good things that have happened to me at those. It didn’t take much convincing, and I didn’t force anybody. Most of the time a good five or six people went out.
A day in San Francisco
A lot of founders say, “I live in the South Bay, I don’t want to go to San Francisco, I don’t know anybody.” Tell me about your day up there, and how much effort it took.
You can tell the story and make it sound very relaxed, but it did take a lot of effort. I saw two startup founders I know. One had just gotten their first office, so I checked that out. A friend who’s a designer and developer had gotten a studio in a really cool artistic building in the Mission. And then I went to a Z Fellows event. It’s a fellowship, kind of like the Thiel Fellowship — kind of like Y Combinator, but instead of investing in companies, they pick a few people and give them money to live in San Francisco. To recruit people, they run events, so that one was the easiest to go to. You just sign up. And you can go on Luma and just scroll. I don’t know what percentage are good, but there are truly endless tech events.
Did you already know people up there, or did you start going through your network?
It started because I got invited to the Z Fellows event by someone I wanted to talk to. But I didn’t want to go to San Francisco for just one thing. So I thought about who else I knew there, who was in startups, who was available, and I just texted them: “Hey, I have between 12 and 2 or 3. Can you hang out?” I didn’t ask them to prepare anything, and I didn’t say it was business-related. It wasn’t really. It was hanging out — but that’s our shared interest, so that’s what we talked about.
That’s a skill. Pushing through the discomfort, putting an agenda together, and going up there to see people — I wish more founders had it. They’d rather stay in their room and code.
One takeaway from the first two people I visited — one of them just raised a lot of money — is that they’re always posting on LinkedIn and their company’s social media: “You can just come to our office. If you’re interested in this stuff” — they do AI coding software — “come here and we’ll give you a place to sit for an hour.” So I showed up. There are three people at the company. I really only talked to one; the other two were just working.
Three people, and they just raised a ton of money because they’re an AI startup.
Yeah. They’re hiring in San Francisco. It’s very stereotypical.
More conversations with founders on the Inspiring Founders Podcast.