The group, called the Sacramento Regional Innovation and Growth Council, on Monday released results from its 2016 State of Sacramento Startups Report Card survey. Launched in December, the questions covered a range of topics, such as hiring and diversity. In an interview on Tuesday with Techwire, Duane Wilson, managing partner of the group’s primary program, Founder Academy, and creator of the the survey, talked about how the initiative began and future installments of the report.
The Sacramento Regional Innovation and Growth Council is a volunteer group that came to fruition following a meeting with the Sacramento Mayor’s Office of Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Originally created as a resource for IT professionals, the council and its website are designed to provide a channel and private social network for both the state’s public-sector and business leaders.
“At the time, Greater Sacramento was primarily focused on bringing in large companies outside of the region,” Wilson said. “Our group was more focused on growing people and groups that were already local, giving them support and helping them grow into big companies but stay here to do that, as opposed to quickly leaving for a place like San Francisco or Austin, [Texas].”
The council has evolved from being a simple networking group to become a tool for capturing what’s going on in the region among startups, as well as a means for figuring out where to spend time and resources. As part of that broader effort to help entrepreneurs and small companies, Wilson created the report card in order to collect more data.
Wilson formed the questions in collaboration with data scientists based on a similar annual survey in San Francisco that typically receives anywhere from 500 to 800 responses sent to founders of venture-funded companies. Although the Sacramento council’s research gathered many fewer responses — 21 in this initial survey — Wilson said this first round will help inform how best to move forward with future versions of the survey
“The goal is for [the survey] to be an ongoing, living dashboard that we’re collecting information for and also sharing back out with anyone who’s interested in using the data sets,” Wilson said.
Here’s a quick look at five key findings included in the 2016 State of Sacramento Startups Report Card:
- Twenty of the 21 respondents agree that now is a good time to start a company, and nearly half said we aren’t currently in tech bubble.
- Twenty-nine percent of respondents said they believe that entrepreneurs will hold the power in future years. However, the majority of those surveyed said investors are the more powerful entity in both past and future years.
- Nineteen percent of companies do not have plans to promote diversity and inclusion. Out of the companies that do have plans, 48 percent have informal strategies, 29 percent have formal and 5 percent have plans in the works.
- More than half of respondents anticipate hiring as many as employees this year.
- The companies were asked to rate various fields of technology on a scale of one to 11, with one being “overhyped” and 11 being “underhyped.” Respondents put artificial intelligence, wearables and the sharing economy in the “overhyped” category, whereas clean technology, security and government technology were seen as “underhyped.”
