Growing a startup ecosystem can sound daunting — you’ve got to attract talent, streamline regulations, build capacity, ensure sufficient capital — and a quick glance at the Global Startup Ecosystem Report from my organization, Startup Genome, might not disabuse you of the notion. For our latest edition, released September 22nd, we analyzed 280 ecosystems, crunched data on 3 million startups, and used more than 100 metrics to quantify their performance.

As Startup Genome’s founder and CEO I’m here to offer a simplified view of startup ecosystem building. But, keep in mind, although it may sound simple, it’s not easy! You can broadly conceive of the process as following three basic steps.

Step 1: Build Critical Mass

As my professor Michael Porter used to say, startup ecosystems are essentially just industry clusters. That means that, at the beginning, growing an ecosystem is basically a local matter. It’s about fostering a private community with a common objective — to build innovative technology startups that will become an engine of economic growth and job creation. That’s why, at Startup Genome, we say startup ecosystems are economic communities.

Whether you’re a policy maker, local leader, or entrepreneur with big dreams for your hometown, your first focus is growth: to build a sizeable and tight-knit community of entrepreneurs with supporters around them and the right culture of learning, experimentation, and mutual support.

The only way to get a critical mass of people to start on the very risky entrepreneurial journey, and others to join them on that journey, is to offer them tangible support. Think of it as building private sub-communities that support the community of entrepreneurs at the center. This is why support organizations—acceleration and incubation programs, as well as places to work and gather—are key.

Capital is the most sought after form of support, so developing communities of investors is very important as well. Remember that 2+2 does not necessarily equal 4. Connections amplify impact. Each of these sub-communities need to connect and learn from each other to help support entrepreneurs and startups.

Covid-19 has made it clearer than ever that the transition to a digital economy and the health of entrepreneurial innovation ecosystems will be the most important engine of all our economies. Public and private leaders have a vested interest in doing this work to catalyze the development of their ecosystems, and they’re not flying blind.

After 25 years of experimentation by governments and agencies, we—the big “WE”—have accumulated a wealth of information about what policies and programs actually work and which ones don’t. Local leaders should learn from global experiences and implement global best practices, then use their knowledge to tailor and adapt those best practices to the local context and culture.

The ultimate goal of all this work is the same — to grow a critical mass of several hundred startups, so that the ecosystem starts to become capable of producing $50 million to $100 million exits.

Step 2: Tear Down Barriers

In the beginning, the focus is on growing the startup ecosystem — simply creating more startups and growing the sub-communities of support. As the ecosystem heats up, the role of local leaders must shift to identifying the biggest barriers to success—which we call Success Factor Gaps—and tearing them down. But before you can close gaps, you must have clarity on where they are.

We’ve spent a lot of time working with ecosystem builders and innovation agencies to develop  the first and still the only objective, data-driven assessment of success factor gaps in startup ecosystems so that governments can focus their scarce resources on what is not working and avoid meddling in what is.

Leaders should also work to identify and build on the strengths of their ecosystem from a vertical or horizontal point of view, like Fintech or AI. It’s simple: we achieve a higher return on investment when we bet on our strengths. We call this analysis the Innovation Edge framework. With this in hand, we can further focus our actions, save money and time, and foster more startup success.

Step 3: Plug Into The World

Finally, once an ecosystem is truly cooking, it enters the globalization stage. Then government’s role shifts from local to working globally to develop what we call ‘Global Connectedness’, i relationships between entrepreneurs (and investors and experts) in the local ecosystem and entrepreneurs in leading hubs around the world.

The first reason to create these connections is to attract global knowledge and develop relationships that will allow an ecosystem’s startups to achieve Global Market Reach. Local players need to learn what’s going on in the rest of the world, so they don’t copy business models that have already been done, or have already failed.

The collision of a new business model with global customers and the understanding of their top-of-mind needs is a prerequisite to building a global category leader that will create massive economic impact and job creation. According to Steve Blank’s ‘Customer Development process’ and Eric Ries’ ‘Lean Startup methodologies,’ to build a global product you need to work with global customers from the onset. This is the crucial beginning of a successful global market reach journey.

The result of all this hard work should be an ecosystem that is a dynamic engine of innovation, jobs, and economic growth, and later a magnet for talent and capital. Getting to this stage isn’t easy, but it’s not magic either.

The path to creating a globally-competitive startup ecosystem is long, arduous, and specific to each particular locality. But after decades of careful analysis of what’s worked and what hasn’t on a worldwide basis, it is well codified. Local leaders just need the commitment to adapt tried-and-tested strategies to their particular context.

How to be appreciated for your hard work as a developer

So you’re interested our Growth Quarters subbrand? Then join our online event, TNW2020 , where you’ll hear how the most successful founders kickstarted and grew their companies. Let me start with a simple exercise.

This article was originally published on ult by Tomasz Lakomy. . cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers. We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world.

Imagine that you’re a developer at Scqber – it’s like Uber, but for squirrels.

Scqber is a huge company (that still prefers to call itself ‘a startup,’ for some reason), with hundreds of engineers, product managers, and engineering managers all contributing to the same project.

Since you believe in the company‘s mission ( obviously ) and in growing your career, you work really hard, deliver features, bugs, bug-fixes, rollbacks, and all other deliverables on time.

And yet, annual review cycles come and go, your work is noticed but not really appreciated. Maybe even someone else gets credit for your long hours spent debugging that one Mobile Safari issue. Instead of getting promoted, your manager tells you: “Well, maybe next year.”

Sounds familiar? It might, from my experience the bigger the company or team, the harder it is to shine and get the appreciation you definitely deserve for your work.

Luckily, it doesn’t have to be that way.

Figuring out what to optimize for

As a developer, you often need to choose what to optimize for, whether it’s performance of the app, scalability of your infra or time to value metric.

When it comes to getting recognized for our hard work, it’s a similar problem. A while ago someone told me that in order to get noticed or appreciated, you need to make sure that your work is visible.

I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

If it were true, I could do this every time I finish developing a feature:

Please don’t do this.

Instead, there are two things I tend to optimize for myself, let’s go through them one by one.

Be useful

A while ago I’ve read Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker . Even though this book was published in 1966

Here’s why you should quit

Quitters never prosper. Never give up. If at first, you don’t succeed, try, try again.

There are so many sayings with the same basic message: quitting is bad. This idea is instilled in kids, internalized by adults, and generally just considered common sense.

It’s also often wrong.

I once had a job that, in retrospect, I should have quit earlier. I stuck around two years longer than made sense, all because I thought giving up would be a personal failure on my part. That was wrong. When I finally left, I was happier, more productive, and better off.

I quit, and then I prospered.

Why did I keep doing a job that wasn’t working for so long—even when I had other options? Because of the prevailing cultural norm that quitting is bad. I felt like walking away would be a failure on my part, so I put off doing it.

This idea — that quitting is bad — deserves to be questioned.

The sunk cost fallacy is real

Let’s lower the stakes a little. My Zapier coworker Katie recently told me that she used to force herself to finish books she hated. That’s relatable. If you spent money on a book, then spent a bunch of time reading it, it feels like you have to finish it. Wouldn’t that time and money be wasted otherwise?

It sounds logical, but it isn’t. It’s an example of the sunk cost fallacy, a cognitive bias that causes us to commit to continuing to do something we’ve already invested in.

It’s easy to think that, by not finishing a book you started, you’re somehow losing all the time you put into the book so far. That’s not true: your time is already gone, regardless of how you spend it going forward. Finishing the book won’t retroactively justify the bad time you’ve had reading it so far — it just means you’ll have more of a bad time.

Ask yourself: is reading more of a book that you hate the best thing you could be spending your time on going forward? Because that’s what you can control. You can’t change how you spent time in the past, but you can decide what you want to do going forward. You could spend time reading something you actually enjoy but only if you quit reading the thing you hate.

It’s also not true that the time you spent reading the book was wasted if you stop reading. You learned something about the kinds of books you don’t like, which is a good thing to know. You also tried something new, which is valuable in and of itself. And you now have the opportunity to write a scathing review on Goodreads or make jokes with your friends about the terrible book you never finished. These results apply regardless of whether you finish the book.

Quit. You’ll be better off.

It’s also true in business

All of this same logic applies to work, or running a company. It’s easy if you’ve put many hours into a project or career path, to think that you should continue working on that indefinitely — even if it’s not working out. After all, quitting means admitting that something isn’t working, and that’s a really hard line to cross.

The thinking here is exactly the same: if you stop now, all of the time you spent on the project or opportunity is wasted. It’s way too easy for this mentality to lead to spinning your wheels on something that’s not working.

Cortney, executive assistant here at Zapier, told me she had to do this before finding her current profession:

In some cases, you can salvage a project if you put more time into it — and some books have twist endings that retroactively justify how hard the beginning was to read. But not every time.

I’m not going to pretend I can tell you how to know which situation you’re in, but it’s important to consider the possibility that quitting is the best option.

Sometimes you have to move on — and learn from it

I already threw out a bunch of cliches, so here’s another one: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.” Einstein never said this , but someone did, at some point, and people attribute it to Einstein because they think it’s smart.

There’s no sense in continuing to do something that’s not working for you, and quitting is the easiest way to not continue. Another Zapier colleague Breetel put it well in a message she sent me:

This isn’t just true when it comes to reading books or doing your job. It’s true in every aspect of your life. Sometimes you’re going to put work into something — a hobby, say, or even a relationship — only to realize it’s not working. Knowing when to walk away is an essential life skill.

This isn’t to say that everyone reading this should quit their jobs if they don’t like them — there are good reasons to keep doing something that’s not perfect, or even far from ideal. But it’s too easy to keep on doing things that aren’t working, and our culture’s emphasis on not giving up only plays into this.

Keep this in mind, and maybe be a little less afraid of quitting in the future.

This article by Justin Pot was originally published on the Zapier blog and is republished here with permission. You can read the original article here .