Why We Choose to Incubate People & Trust (vs Startups)
Alex Hillman
At a recent Project Night, a fun conversation turned into an informal oral history.
A mix of returning Indy Hall alumni, members, and new friends started swapping stories about the many community-minded projects and businesses launched by people in our community over the years.
For instance: did you know that the VERY first mobile app for checking SEPTA schedules wasn’t actually made by SEPTA itself? It’s true!
It was made by founding Indy Hall members Randy Schmidt, Jason Tremblay, and Chris Conley.
They worked around SEPTA’s clumsy PDFs to offer a really nice, touch-friendly interface for the early Apple devices long before they were popular.
This was 2008 - before the App Store even launched!
This little app made national news on Engadget and even got some local TV coverage too. Stay to the end of that video for a glimpse of Indy Hall’s VERY first website.
iSepta was just one example of many. In some 12-24 month periods, Indy Hall has spun out more successful businesses than any incubator in the city, across more industries than you can imagine!
The real surprise? We’ve never run an incubator or accelerator program.
We didn’t have a program, or pitch competitions, or demo days.
But we had something better: a community where people were actually working together - launching products and services, teaming up to create things that didn’t exist before.
One of the deepest bits of Indy Hall lore is that we experimented with a lightweight legal framework that would enable shared equity for co-created projects…about 2 years before the Obama administration made crowdfunding legal.
We learned a lot by taking a more “agricultural” approach to business.
One thread through all of the lessons stood out among the rest:
Most incubators focus on the technical aspects of a business - the pitch deck, the business model, the market size. Important stuff.
But they almost never focus on how people actually work together.
Scar Tissue from a lifetime of “Group Projects”
After watching thousands of projects and businesses start and fail over nearly 20 years, the thing that kills more of them than ANYTHING else is how people work together.
Most of us still carry scar tissue from group projects. You know the ones - where one person does all the work, resentment builds, and you vow to never collaborate again.
I have a theory about why this happens. Group projects put the work first and hope trust emerges along the way. Spoiler: it usually doesn’t.
Trust is the foundation.
Thing is, most people try to build trust while working, which means it never gets top priority. There’s always something else screaming for your attention.
But without trust, even the best of intentional collaboration becomes transactional. It requires more management, more overhead, more energy lost to friction.
Doesn’t matter how good you are, or how fast you are, if you don’t trust the people you work with.
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