Division and multiplication happen every day in every community.  The great communities have lots of multipliers and fewer dividers, the awful ones reverse and lots of mediocre happens in the middle. At gener8tor, we celebrate one of the most powerful multipliers in any community: the entrepreneurs.   These people—and lack of them—can define a community’s identity for generations and yet very little is said or done to encourage them in the pursuit of their goals.

If you’re wondering what the multiplier effect is like on the ground level, go talk with an entrepreneur.  You can pick just about any topic and they’ll start seeing opportunity.  My favorite personal example is grocery store expiration management: who would have thought there was an opportunity for a business model based around the relatively fast or slow pace of food expiration on grocery store shelves that wasn’t already chewed up by big IT companies? But check out DateCheckPro and you’ll see a company in its first year selling to grocery stores around the country while hiring local talent for good-paying jobs—and it’s led by a 19-year-old, first-time entrepreneur.   That’s a multiplier effect.

This is what makes entrepreneurs so valuable to a community.  They want to build things bigger than themselves.  Creating, building, doing—the entrepreneur’s way.

Unfortunately, there are too many communities that talk about entrepreneurs in an after-success-they-matter kind of way.  Or ones that look to technology and patents to avoid the risk that comes from betting on human capital.  Sure entrepreneurs matter after success.  But they matter before success too.  And they matter before and after failure for that matter.  What’s important is that their communities show entrepreneurs–from the moment they start building until the moment they go out with their boots on—the kind of commitment that entrepreneurs so often offer back in big and celebrated ways.

We see gener8tor as a function of the multipliers.  We’re asking others to see themselves as having the same role.  So whether you’re buying from brewcitybites.com or attending a shindig.it concert, mentoring a local startup, investing your time, capital or expertise or committing yourself to entrepreneurship, we appreciate the multiplier effect you’re contributing.  In other words, “for those about to rock, we salute you.”

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