Oren is one of my Facebook friends and he has been a member of the Content Strategy group I founded since 2012 - https://www.meetup.com/Dallas-Content-Strategy/members/12671412/ - but I suspect it's the whole "yesterday's darling is today's villain" kind of thing. It doesn't matter what I do, unless I am funding something that relates to their sphere of interest, very few of the late 20s early 30s crowd cares to engage. They know who I am. I am the guy they want to take out.
The reality is, I have been actually running profitable companies, paying for the livelihoods of my wife and child, building a family, speaking nationally at conferences (https://www.slideshare.net/axzm) and you know... actually doing, not just talking about it with my buddies. I literally do not have time to go to some obscure startup mixer across town to play politics with a bunch of 20 somethings. I see it in their eyes when I run across some of them though. They want the nice car. They want the family. They want a successful agency / consulting career. They want national speaking gigs. And if they don't, then they see me as the version of success they don't like or want to see fall to the waist side. I know at least 1/3 (if not half) the startup scene has jumped into web & digital marketing consulting (a space I have been in for over 14 years) and that is definitely where some (if not most) of the hyper-competitiveness has come from IMO. I've heard outright lies and a-typical positioning in the community (who I do not depend on to pay my bills) that basically talk a lot of trash about me and are just outright haters. Like I said, I have never done business with any of them (although I am sure I might have fired a few of them / or their friends for non-performance at my agency over the years). If I can call a spade a spade - I believe a good portion of Millennials in the south (as I have observed) have built this little meritocracy where they create a false reality and sphere of influence. All their buddies (who have nothing but time on their hands - because they aren't actually working on the two consulting accounts they have) say they are the best at X and no one really knows any better, so people reinforce that narrative because "community". Any outsider (especially market leaders and incumbents) are a potential threat/enemy to the righteous and morally correct way of doing X. Really, it's just a self perpetuated hype machine to funnel opportunity back into their pockets, whether they can actually perform for their client/project or not. Because community. I'm old school. Show and prove. Out teach the competition. Be it, don't talk about it. I will be speaking at General Assembly in Seattle next month if anyone in the Seattle startup scene wants to link up - https://www.meetup.com/Content-Strategy-Seattle/events/240054897/ On Monday, May 15, 2017 at 10:59:44 AM UTC-5, Angel Kwiatkowski wrote: > > Have you talked to Oren Solomon of Dallas Fort Work? > > On Monday, April 24, 2017 at 12:47:41 PM UTC-6, Steve Floyd wrote: >> >> After slimming down my web design & digital marketing >> <https://www.axzm.com> agency, I recently turned my 4500 sq ft office >> into a coworking space <https://frontierco.work/> to share resources w/ >> other people I often work with. I just had my son and wanted to lean down >> and take the stress levels down a notch from the weekly (sometimes daily) >> Chinese fire drill of running an agency. >> >> In starting to reach out and network, I received a good deal of hyper >> competitive behavior from many of the leading community figures in the >> local startup and coworking communities here in Dallas. I get it, I am the >> new guy - but I've been running businesses in the area (Deep Ellum) longer >> than all of these people. I get the feeling that there is a tight inner >> circle in those communities and they push people out they don't like or >> approve of. I've done nothing to any of them - I haven't even had a >> conversation with most of them. >> >> Does anyone here have any advice of how I might overcome this competitive >> atmosphere? >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
