Adventures in Startupland: Tales of enterprise from Pyongyang to Black Rock City

Starting a business has become big business. Over the last thirty years a vast global army of people has grown into a diverse industry which promotes, supports and celebrates starting and developing fast-growing entrepreneurial businesses. There are startup conferences, meetups, fairs, pitch sessions, competitions and all manner of workshops and seminars, in all sorts of settings, all over the world, even in North Korea. It is there, right here, in plain sight. Yet, a little like the second reality that opens up on platform nine and three-quarters in the Harry Potter novels, it is largely an imagined land, one made up of temporary event spaces, ideas, beliefs, talk, speeches, writing and performance. This is Startupland.

Adventures in Startupland is a collection of connected short stories about the experiences of two travellers in this new land. Both are business school academics, who have over the last decade or so participated in and observed gatherings of people at leading startup industry events, and have run startup workshops at the extreme geographical frontiers of Startupland. The stories combine the most defining and established with the most tenuous and fragile outposts of this new territory. At these gatherings wannabes vie for the attention of celebrity entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and business angels in the hope of clinching a life changing investment or fresh injection of operating cash, or they simply want to learn the ropes of starting a business. At workshops business academics and practitioners cobble-together a mix of academic research, workshop exercise favourites and case studies and call it startup education. The authors tell stories about their experiences at large startup events in the Nevada desert (Burning Man), Helsinki (Slush), London (Startup Grind) and elsewhere. In the UK they are inspired by young clinicians-entrepreneurs on an NHS startup programme, and tell the story of a mentor who made his fortune coding porn in Laos. At a workshop they organised in Beirut, they listen to young women who see starting their own business as their only hope of improving their society, achieving the good life, or escape. In Baku they hear government officials and incubator managers talk about how a startup revolution will erase the lingering legacy of the Soviet Union. And, in Pyongyang, North Korea, they tell the stories about how they ran the first university startup course and workshop, where starting a business is still technically illegal.