First Tuesday 10th Anniversary - 10/09/2009

This fortnight's issue is a little different - we're commemorating the 10th anniversary of First Tuesday going global.

We asked a selection of City Leaders from around the globe to reflect on what First Tuesday meant to them, how it helped foster a spirit of entrepreneurship in their worlds and how far we've travelled towards becoming an 'Entrepreneur Country'. Below are excerpts of their contributions, which are published in full on Entrepreneur Country.

A First Tuesday Aubade

Julie Meyer

I called First Tuesday my revenge on socialism. Maybe that's why Tony Blair, Prime Minister in 1999, always threatened to show up at a First Tuesday event, but never did.

From the first First Tuesday at the Alphabet Bar in Soho, to the second one where Brent Hoberman and Martha Lane Fox hugged the microphone, to the third where John Taysom talked about investing in Yahoo, to the fourth where the Microsoft Web TV guy spoke... my life was organised around which deals I could get done for whom between those Tuesdays... at one point, I scratched out £150 million of known deals that had been agreed at a London First Tuesday event - both the networking events and the more structured Matchmaking Evenings we started doing in the early months of 2000 where entrepreneurs would sign up to give First Tuesday 2 per cent of the funding of the deal.

I have often said that I felt we were a digital island back then at the Alphabet Bar and the Great Titchfield offices of Syzygy, but ten years on we are becoming an Entrepreneur Country. It's a good place to be.
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The End of the Beginning

Ross Laurie – Edinburgh

Back in 1999 I think we were a digital island – or we were certainly at the start of a journey to become one. In many ways we still are but it feels like a channel tunnel has been dug in the last 10 years and we are now seeing acceptance and connectivity on a wider scale.

That’s what First Tuesday was about – acceptance of ideas that COULD change the world and the connectivity required to help make these ideas happen. This is why I love entrepreneurs and why I believe we are now well on the way to wider acceptance in what we pushed for last century.

It’s a challenging time in world markets just now and I don’t believe we’ve even seen the worst of it but the collapse of our industry during the “dot com bubble burst” has prepared all of us well for the turmoils we face currently. We appreciate not only the things we need to do to make our own businesses successful but we also appreciate that we need to help (some) of our competitors and suppliers succeed too – to coin the old dot com phrase “to prove the business model works”. I feel we are very well prepared for the opportunities that uncertainty brings.
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The World as We Make It

Roberto Saint-Malo – Madrid

A few vivid memories about First Tuesday come to mind:

• the FT movement spreading like wildfire across cities, countries & even continents – FT became, seemingly overnight, a far-flung, budding macro-organisation;
• the tremendous diversity and even levels of experience among the City Champions... coupled with an overpowering sense of ownership, motivation and energy among these same champions;
• the plethora of diverging ideas among Champions and stakeholders as to how best to structure, organise and manage the FT dynamo (and how testing it proved to craft a formula that all supported);
• the additional multitude of crazy ideas that hovered about at each and every FT session (be they originated by red, green or yellow dots), many emerging from thin air and experience vacuums... but refreshing it all was, particularly when combined with all those mega-tons of energy floating around... it was a kind of huge, on-going, pseudo-global brainstorming session that would not abate;
• and then the bubble bursting and things getting quickly quiet... except on the inside of many who’d been significantly touched by FT, many of them City Champions themselves... many of whom are still pursuing life with a special FT-induced/enhanced entrepreneurial spirit.

If I had to specify what “touched me most” about the FT experience it would be the wide-spread sense that the traditional rules could be re-visited and re-written. To be reminded that the World is not “as it is”, but rather “as we make it”.
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Real "Face Value"

Tim Delhaes – Santiago de Chile

We started First Tuesday in Santiago de Chile only a few months after the launch in the UK. Within a few weeks we grew from 30 to more than 500 attendees per event and First Tuesday became the epicentre for technology and entrepreneurship in Chile. Like most cities, we went through the valley of death with the dotcom implosion but we were reborn last year.

Since March 2008, we grew our member base to over 6000 people, reached sustainability locally, helped San Salvador to get started, invented four different event formats and we are already negotiating sponsorship contracts for 2010.

I believe that the crisis has created a tremendous opportunity to redefine business ethics and how companies relate to society. A new generation of entrepreneurs now has the opportunity not only to create wealth for themselves but, as Obama put it, "be successful for somebody else". The spirit of the time is "do well and do good".

In an increasing on-line world of social networks, First Tuesday keeps on providing "face value". There is nothing better than meeting people in person.
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Building a Phenomenon

Steve Glange – Luxembourg

Early in my professional life, I was confronted with the choice of living and realising my own ideas or taking on a job in order to pay back the student loan, as well as pay the bills.

Hence when I look back sometimes, while not really with regret, I wonder what could have been different if I had taken the way of the entrepreneur directly. My choice was impacted by the fact that I did not have the necessary skills to survive in the business, nor the right network from which to find assistance as well as propulsion to the next level.

So when, in the late 1990s, I came across the phenomenon of the First Tuesday events being organised in some cities, I saw the opportunity to give something back, as well as to enable other aspiring entrepreneurs to live or at least give their dreams a try.

I posted a message to Steve Carlson's NowEurope newsletter/forum asking where was the closest event in my region (Luxembourg). Swiftly I got a reply from a lady called Julie Meyer informing me that there were none and asking if I would be interested in starting it up. Without long consideration or reflection, I took the opportunity and, together with a good friend who was connected to the media world at the time (and is now my wife), we spammed around 200 suspects.

To our first event on February 1st 2009 came 80 curious innovators, followed by crowds of 120 to sometimes 300 attendees at subsequent events.
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Motivation for Innovation

Michael Wright - South Africa

First Tuesday is an integral part of my life. Ten years ago I was making plans to join 35 other eager entrepreneurs in London at the birth of the First Tuesday Network. Now I find myself back in London growing my own business in the spirit of First Tuesday.

I had started Striata in February 1999 at the crest of the wave. Not a bad time to raise money, but the following years were not always a good time to be a "dot com" start-up. I became the founder of First Tuesday South Africa a couple months later after an introduction to Julie Meyer through Rob Hersov of Sportal.com fame.

I never looked back.

Within a year Striata had grown to 10 people, servicing both the eBilling and eMarketing arenas and I was officiating First Tuesday meetings with hundreds of people each month in Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban. At our peak we had 1000 people attend a First Tuesday to hear Mark Shuttleworth speak about selling Thawte to Verisign for $535 million. The possibilities of being a global entrepreneur hit home and any perceived tip-of-Africa glass ceiling was irrevocably shattered.
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