Building an Ecosystem Is Not About Grand Plans. It's About Getting Out of the Way.

Most people get the startup ecosystem question completely backwards. They ask: "How do we build a thriving startup community?"

The wrong question. And it leads to terrible solutions.

You end up with government programs. With shiny incubators. With venture capital funds that don't know what they're doing. With conferences and networking events designed to force serendipity. And mostly, you end up with a bunch of stuff that looks good on paper and changes absolutely nothing about whether entrepreneurs succeed.

I recently talked to Oded Barel, who's been on both sides of this. He helped build the startup community in Jerusalem from the ground up at Siftech, an accelerator. Then he moved to the other side—the governmental side—running ecosystem development for the Jerusalem Development Authority. He's seen what works and what doesn't. And the answer is so different from what conventional wisdom tells you that it almost sounds too simple.

The real question isn't how to build an ecosystem. It's how to not kill it.

The Champions Already Exist. You Just Have to Find Them.

Here's what Oded discovered: The people who build ecosystems aren't the government. They're not the institutions. They're not the people with plans. They're the people with an obsession.

There are people in every city who can't sleep because they believe something needs to exist that doesn't exist yet. They're willing to work nights and weekends. They're willing to bet on themselves. They're willing to do the work nobody's paying them to do because they believe it matters.

Those people are the real architects of ecosystems. Everything else—all the programs and funding and infrastructure—is just supporting them.

Oded's big insight was this: Instead of building the ecosystem top-down, find the champions and help them do what they're already trying to do. Don't tell them what the ecosystem should be. Help them get what they need to build what they see.

At Siftech, they weren't running a traditional accelerator program and then hoping community would emerge around it. They were finding people who were already organizing—people starting hackathons, people launching community meetups, people building platforms—and they were saying: "What do you need? How can we help?"

That's the opposite of almost every institutional approach. Most institutions design first and then look for people to fit their design. Oded and the people at Siftech did it backwards. They found people who were already moving and asked how to remove obstacles.

And it worked. Not in a way you can measure with spreadsheets. But in a way you could feel. The city actually came alive.

The Generosity Question

This is the part that most institutional people struggle with because it doesn't have a clear ROI. But it might be the most important part of building an ecosystem.

Generosity. Not just in giving money, but in giving power.

Here's the trap that institutions always fall into: They want to maintain control. They want to direct the resources. They want to fund the projects that align with their vision of what the ecosystem should be. They want to manage the narrative.

And every single time, they kill the thing they're trying to build.

An ecosystem doesn't work if it's controlled from above. An ecosystem works when institutions—especially governmental institutions—get very generous with their resources and very comfortable with having no idea how those resources will be used.

This is hard. It goes against every instinct an organization has. But Oded figured out something important: If you're the government and you're trying to build startup culture, your job isn't to decide which startups win. Your job is to make sure the people with drive and vision have what they need to bet on themselves.

So the Jerusalem Development Authority started funding hackathons. They funded community meetups. They funded accelerators like Siftech. But they didn't tell Siftech which companies to fund. They didn't tell the hackathon organizers what projects would be approved. They just said: "Here's the money. You know what your community needs better than we do. We trust you."

That's the opposite of how most government programs work. And it's also why it actually worked.

The Three Ingredients (And Why Two of Them Are Broken in Most Places)

Oded referenced something Brad Feld wrote about—the Boulder thesis. Boulder is one of the few places in America where entrepreneurship actually thrives. And Feld identified something crucial: Entrepreneurs need to lead the ecosystem, not other stakeholders.

This seems obvious when you say it out loud. Of course entrepreneurs know what they need better than government or academia. But when you're actually running an institution, you want to be the one making decisions. You want your vision to matter. And that's exactly where things break.

Oded also referenced Nicholas Colin's work on startup ecosystems. Colin identified three ingredients that actually matter:

Capital—the funding and economic assets of a city.

Know-how—the people with relevant skills. The engineers, designers, builders who actually know how to make things.

Rebellion—a culture of challenging the status quo, of not accepting things as they are.

Here's the thing: Most cities have at least one of these. Some have two. Almost none have all three in the right proportions.

Israel didn't have capital in the 1990s. They had know-how (people who'd served in the military and learned technical skills). They had rebellion (a culture of questioning authority, of scrappy problem-solving). But no capital.

So what did they do? The Israeli government said: "What's missing is capital. We're going to create a program to fuel capital into companies." And they did. They created a venture capital industry. And suddenly all three ingredients were present.

Most governments just try to create the infrastructure and hope something happens. They build office parks. They hold conferences. They don't understand that you have to have all three ingredients, and if you're missing one, you have to actively address it.

Why You Can't Plan Serendipity

Here's the uncomfortable truth about building ecosystems: You cannot plan the random encounters that lead to partnerships.

You can create platforms for it. You can organize events. You can bring people together in the same room. But you cannot predict which connections will matter. You cannot anticipate which combination of people will stumble onto something revolutionary.

So the best you can do is create the conditions where random encounters are possible. Make it easy for people to bump into each other. Create platforms where people know about each other. Build communities where people are aware of who else is playing the game.

Oded called this "exposing people to one another." Creating a sense of community where people are aware that there are opportunities to work together and that there are other players in the city worth knowing about.

This is why community meetups matter so much. Not because they're going to generate great ideas (they might, but that's not the point). They matter because they make the community visible to itself. Before Siftech, there were probably plenty of people with entrepreneurial ideas in Jerusalem. But they didn't know each other. They didn't know it was possible. They didn't know they weren't alone.

The moment people understood that there was a scene, that there were other people trying to build things, that there was a community to tap into—everything changed.

The Organic Growth Problem

Oded referenced a book called "Rainforest" that uses an interesting metaphor: An ecosystem is like a rainforest. It's organic. It's chaotic. You can't plan it. You can't predict what's going to grow. You can only create the conditions for growth.

The mistake most ecosystem builders make is thinking they can design the rainforest. They try to control what grows. They trim the trees. They manage the canopy. And they end up with a manicured garden that looks nothing like a rainforest and produces nothing like a rainforest does.

Real ecosystems are messy. They're inefficient. They have way more growth than you'd ever plan for. They have parts that fail spectacularly. And that's where the magic is. That's where you get innovations nobody predicted because people had the freedom to explore.

Oded understood this. And instead of trying to manage it, he embraced it. The JDA funded things that looked like failures. They gave money to people to organize hackathons with no guaranteed output. They supported community initiatives that didn't have a clear business model. And somehow, that's how the ecosystem actually grew.

What This Actually Looks Like in Practice

If you're trying to build an ecosystem in your city, here's what Oded would probably tell you:

Stop planning. Start listening. Find the people who are already trying to build something. Find the people with energy and vision. Ask them what they need. Give them resources. Get out of their way.

Create platforms where people can encounter each other. Organize meetups. Fund hackathons. Build spaces where people can tell each other what they're working on and figure out how to collaborate.

Don't demand results. Trust the process. Some initiatives will fail. Most will produce things you didn't predict. And that's exactly what should happen.

Embrace the chaos. Stop trying to control which startups win. That's not your job. Your job is to make sure the people with drive and vision have what they need to bet on themselves. Everything else is ego.

Get the right people in leadership—people who understand that their job is to serve the ecosystem, not to control it. People who are comfortable with ambiguity. People who believe in the possibility more than they believe in their plan.

Why This Matters

You might not be trying to build a startup ecosystem. You might just be trying to build a team. Or a department. Or an organization that actually gets shit done instead of following processes.

But the principles are the same. The people doing the real work aren't the people with the fanciest titles or the best plans. They're the people with an obsession. Your job isn't to manage them. It's to get out of their way.

Find the champions in your organization. The ones who've already figured out what needs to happen. Ask them what they need. Give them resources. Then stay the fuck out of it.

That's how things actually happen.

The Full Conversation

If you want to understand how you build ecosystems—real ones, not the planned ones that look nice in presentations—listen to the conversation with Oded Barel on The School of Innovation podcast. He talks about the specific initiatives that worked, the mistakes institutions make, and how to think about your role as a builder instead of a controller.

Because here's the truth about ecosystems: They're not built. They're grown. And your job is to plant seeds and get out of the way, not to design the garden.