I am on the board of a non-profit called Upstate Venture Connect.  Nasir Ali, a good friend of mine, heads the organization.  Here is a guest post from Nasir sharing summary findings from a recently completely survey of upstate NY CEOs.  Enjoy!

Seeds of Growth are All Around Us

This year’s Global Entrepreneurship Week follows an election season where economic anxiety weighed heavily on American voters.  Nearly a decade of research from the Kauffman Foundation and other sources has confirmed that young, high-growth businesses create almost all the net new jobs. While Upstate NY leaders were busy trying to save (or attract) industrial era giants, a new generation of world-beating founders grew up in our midst, then left to launch companies like Android, airbnb, Priceline, Nvidia, etc. in more startup friendly communities.

As the head of Upstate Venture Connect (uvc.org), I am committed to building Upstate NY’s startup ecosystem. I meet incredibly talented and ambitious founders in every part of Upstate, proof that our region continues to produce high growth entrepreneurs. Yet, these emerging companies are still invisible in their home communities and business leaders and policymakers miss their economic impact.

This fall, UVC commissioned Rochester based Center for Governmental Research to conduct the first ever Upstate Venture CEO Survey. We wanted to hear from high growth founders and, in one month, 115 CEOs responded. Half of the companies were less than 6 years old and nearly all (90%) were targeting national/global customers. Below are three key findings from the survey and their implications for UVC and other Upstate NY ecosystem builders.

High growth companies are everywhere and disrupting everything.  The 115 respondents fall into 47 different industry codes. Our future is not going to be a single cluster per city, but a super-regional community that values and encourages out of the box thinking and a fast growth orientation. Emerging founders today often have peers that are a few highway exits away instead of being across the street.

High-paying jobs are available, especially for college graduates. Seventy-five percent of companies paid workers more than $40,000 on average. Forty percent reported an average payroll of more than $75,000/year. Three out of four companies said that 80% of their staff holds college degrees.

The economic impact is significant and growing: Taken together, the firms account for 4,700 direct jobs (70% in NY) and 4,400 additional jobs creating more than $450 million in annual wages for NYS. When asked for five year projections, the CEOs collectively are planning to add 9,600 direct jobs. If these jobs are in NYS, there could be as many as 12,800 new jobs created with $1.4 billion in payroll.

The data clearly shows that the seeds of growth are all around us. That is why UVC is doubling down on its efforts to raise awareness of the intrepid founders creating a path to the future. In the year to come, we will be highlighting the most exciting companies in each Upstate community via our online Ecosystem Map, Events Calendar, UNY Pulse e-newsletter and blog/social media activity. We will also continue to work with leaders in each community to form new angel investment funds, accelerate the growth of existing businesses, and showcase entrepreneurial career opportunities for ambitious and talented college grads.

To see how you can play a role in building Upstate NY’s new economy, please visit http://uvc.org and join our growing network of startup founders and supporters today. The full survey report and summary data can be viewed and downloaded at http://uvc.org/upstate-venture-ceo-report/.

You all likely know that most VCs consider the management team to be the top measure of potential success of the venture.  This post is not about that point, at least not directly.

I want to instead focus on the importance of the entire team (not just management) and the importance of making sure that the team can play together.   I am going to use my past weekend’s soccer experience as an analogy.

I organized and played on an Over 40 soccer team this past weekend in a small tournament in Ithaca.   There was no Over 50 bracket or I would have played in that!   So, there were 4 total teams in the Over 40 bracket.  Two teams from Ithaca (one of which was mine) and then one team from Vermont and one from Binghamton.  You are going to have to trust me that no matter how in good shape you might be, playing 4 soccer games in one weekend when you are over 40 means that you can barely walk come Monday.  Advil turns into candy.

When organizing the team, I managed to get this one guy who is an exceptional player – better than anyone else on the team.   I will call him Jim for purposes of this post.  On Saturday, we tied both of our games (against Vermont and Binghamton).  The catch was that Jim could not play on Sunday.  I knew this going in.  And to make things even more interesting, Vermont outplayed us and we literally tied the score on a questionable call that resulted in us getting a penalty kick, which Jim converted.   Time ran out and we tied 2-2.  Vermont team was pissed, but that is soccer.   We knew that the top 2 teams in the group would play for the championship Sunday afternoon.

Well, you guessed it…..the top 2 teams were mine and Vermont.  Vermont wanted revenge, clearly.  We were without Jim.  I was a bit concerned.  But we ended up playing exceptionally well – better without Jim!  We won 2-0.  It was kind of unbelievable.

Relating back to startups – it is not good to rely on one person.  Not the CEO, not the head of engineering, not the head of sales.  You get the point.  Playing together as a team is the path to the best results.  CEOs who don’t realize this will often get fired or just fail.  I think one of the primary roles of the CEO is to make sure that the team dynamics are as good as possible and get the entire company pulling in the same direction.  This is not to say that there cannot be stars on the team, but it is WAY better if the stars end up rotating around.  The larger the group of people that feel like they contributed to a win, the better off the company will perform.  And the successes will keep coming.

My entire Over 40 soccer team all felt that they contributed – we only had one sub for our last game so that is an understatement.  Team play captured the championship.  Make it happen!