If anyone should be able to define exactly what 'DC Tech' is, it would be Adam Zuckerman, CEO of local entrepreneurial community organization Fosterly. But even Zuckerman sees it as a fuzzy concept.
"At best, we are still working with incomplete information," Zuckerman, who is also director of innovations and ventures at Discovery Communications, told DC Inno in an interview. "That's not useful."
DC Tech is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot by those working in and around the area's startup community. There's no universal definition of the term though, despite its prevalence. Who or where it encompasses depends on who is you ask, with agreement really only on the fact that it's a large and ever-changing combination of people, companies and activities.
Trying to quantify that ever-changing idea of DC Tech, Fosterly rolled out a regional startup census this week to understand and paint a more clear picture of the D.C.-area's technology ecosystem.
"The reality is that no one has done a survey like this before," Zuckerman said. "We built a list of startups, but it hadn't been updated in four years."
The survey offers a comprehensive array of questions about everything from how a company is organized to the kind of tech it uses and financial prospects. Zuckerman loosely defines a startup as a company five years or younger with up to $10 million raised in investment, but he is encouraging a flexible definition. The more responses to the census, the better the potential data analysis.
Zuckerman defines startups for the purpose of the survey as less than five years old and having raised less than $1 million. That said, he was quick to add that it can be a flexible definition.
"I'm open to others that have a startup mentality," Zuckerman said. "We want to know all of their trends."
All but the top-level info will anonymized for the analysis. Those who take the survey become eligible for prizes from some of the sponsors, but its the final result that will really be interesting. The survey closes Dec. 2 and Zuckerman said the data crunching may take a month.
"We want to understand how startups operate in this ecosystem."
"There's big questions and smaller ones. Even if a startup is gone, that's an important data point," Zuckerman said. "One of the things startups often ask is, 'who do I go for, who do I want to work with?' This will be a resource for all of them."
The census is rolling out at the same time as Fosterly has revamped its online presence. Connecting entrepreneurs to others and to those who might help them is the whole reason Zuckerman founded Fosterly, and the census data will make it easier to connect people and groups simply by virtue of revealing where there are gaps.
"It's purely an ecosystem play," Zuckerman said. "We want to understand how startups operate in this ecosystem."
