I wanted to thank Kevin Spreng for 8 years of volunteer his service in Minneapolis. He helped establish the Bootstrappers’ Breakfast in Minneapolis with his existing relationships in the community and his facilitation skills. He has helped a number of firms form and progress over the years just from conversations that started at a breakfast. In addition he has fostered connections between novice entrepreneurs and more established ones by inviting many successful Minneapolis entrepreneurs to share lessons learned in interactive small group discussions early in the morning. We are extremely grateful for his years of service and appreciate all that he has done for bootstrappers in Minneapolis.
We are looking for some moderators to take his place and I thought I would share the history of how Bootstrappers’ Breakfast meetings got started in Minneapolis.
Kevin Spreng reached out to me in October of 2009 with a short message: “I would be interested in talking to you about starting a Bootstrappers Breakfast in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area. Let me know if this is a possibility.”
I replied
” Kevin, we should definitely talk. We are planning an expansion to San Diego in January. Challenges are quality control and consistent experience. We have let a volunteer facilitate our San Francisco after he had attended several breakfasts.
We would like the focus of the Bootstrapper Breakfast to be on early stage entrepreneurship. We view venture funding as one outcome that can occur after you have proven the business model and have a business plan that merits investment. We would like to avoid a sponsorship model (in preference to member subscriptions) on the theory that this will promote higher quality meetings and force us to stay more in touch with member satisfaction.
I will send you a copy of our moderation guidelines and I think we should have a couple of conversations to make sure we are aligned on goals. Our plan is to retain ownership of “Bootstrappers Breakfast” trademark and make sure that it continues stand for a certain kind of conversation–entrepreneurs who eat problems for breakfast.
Please let me know your availability for a phone call and any other questions I can answer for you. I would like to understand your objectives and encourage you to recruit a backup moderator or two to help you improve the event and to fill in if you are absent.
Kevin answered: Over the last several years it have become more and more clear to me that the amount of early stage funding (angel and VC) is decreasing and is not likely to come back anytime soon. I believe that in order to have a healthy startup/innovation ecosystem (which fuels to entire economy), entrepreneurs need to be bootstrappers. Even when a company does receive funding, being frugal is just good business and, in fact, allows them to keep more ownership of the company long term.
We had a conversation and it was immediately clear he was a well respected member of the Minneapolis startup community and would be an excellent facilitator.
Thank you, Kevin for all you have done for the bootstrapper community. – Sean Murphy