This was originally written as a guest post on Gus Sentementes’ BaltTech blog for the Baltimore Sun.

What if there was a place where freelancers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and financiers could meet up to collaborate on up-and-coming startup ideas? That place exists today, and it’s called Beehive Baltimore.

On October 1st, Beehive Baltimore will celebrate its first nine months of operation as a coworking facility, located in the Emerging Technology Center in Canton.

If you’re not familiar with coworking, it’s a shared workspace for creative professionals who might otherwise work at home or in a coffee shop. These days, anyone who works primarily via laptop and the internet is a great candidate for coworking!

Beehive Baltimore opened February 1, 2009 specifically to cater to these kinds of professionals, and the Beehive community now has over 40 members including people in web design, programming, marketing, public relations, finance and other information-based industries.

Last Thursday, we held an open house at the Hive for prospective members and others in the community to stop by, meet some of our members, and find out more about what coworking is all about.

Beehive is designed to be a community of peers, and does not aim to make a profit. Working in partnership with the Emerging Technology Center in Canton, Beehive aims to connect freelancers, seasoned entrepreneurs, and other professionals via long-term relationships that lead to mutual benefit – and possibly to new startups!

The Hive (as we call it) has also already given birth to multiple events and meet-ups that might not otherwise have a place to meet. Some of the groups that we either have hosted or have helped create include:

• Baltimore Angels (an angel investment group)
• Baltimore Hackers (a computer language study group)
• Baltimore/Washington Javascript meetup
• Baltimore Flash/Flex User Group (a group for users of Adobe’s Flex platform)
• Refresh Baltimore (a web professionals group)
• Barcamp Baltimore (a user-generated tech conference)
• TEDxMidAtlantic (coming on November 5th)

On October 1st at 12pm, Beehive Baltimore will host its first “Show and Tell” event, where participants are invited to share their projects, startups, or prototypes and get feedback from the group.

And on October 15th, Beehive Baltimore will be recognized by the Maryland Daily Record as an “Innovator of the Year.”

Several Beehive members and affiliates will be providing some guest posts for BaltTech over the next two weeks while Gus Sentementes is on vacation. So stay tuned for some voices from the Hive over the coming days!

Beehive Baltimore is part of a large coworking movement. Hundreds of cities all around the world from Los Angeles to Charlotte to Paris to Shanghai have implemented coworking facilities, and we see ourselves as connected to these communities.

And so coworking looks to be an integral part of the tech startup ecosystem – where entrepreneurs, creative talent, and angel investors can all come together to talk about the Next Big Idea.

To find out more about Beehive Baltimore, visit http://beehivebaltimore.org or email info@beehivebaltimore.org.

Approaching Baltimore by train from the north, as thousands do each day, a story unfolds.

You see the lone First Mariner tower off in the distance of Canton, and the new Legg Mason building unfolding in Harbor East.

Quickly, you are in the depths of northeast Baltimore. You see the iconic Johns Hopkins logo emblazoned on what appears to be a citadel of institutional hegemony. It is a sprawling campus of unknown purpose, insulated from the decay that surrounds it.

Your eyes are caught by some rowhouses that are burned out. Then some more: rowhouses you can see through front to back. Rowhouses that look like they are slowly melting. Rowhouses with junk, antennas, laundry, piles of God-knows-what out back. Not good. Scary, in fact. Ugly, at least.

Then a recent-ish sign proclaimig “The *New* East Baltimore.”  Visitors are shocked to see that the great Johns Hopkins (whatever it all is, they’ve just heard of it and don’t know the University and the Hospital are not colocated) is surrounded by such obvious blight.

Viewers are then thrust into the Pennsylvania Railroad Tunnel where they fester, shell-shocked for two minutes while they gather their bags to disembark at Penn Station, wondering if the city they are about to embark into will be the hell for which they just saw the trailer.

Appearances matter. Impressions matter. One task that social entrepreneurs could take on to improve the perception (and the reality) of Baltimore would be simply this: make Baltimore look better from the train.

We know that the reality of Baltimore is rich, complex, historic, beautiful and hopeful.  We ought to use the power of aesthetics and design to help the rest of the world begin to see the better parts of the city we love.

Author’s Note: my father-in-law Colby Rucker was the one that first pointed out to me how awful Baltimore looks from the train.  It was on a train trip from New York to Baltimore today that I was inspired to jot down this thought.

If you would like to read a good book about how places can make you feel and convey important impressions, read The Experience of Place (1991) by Tony Hiss (son of the controversial Alger Hiss). They were both Baltimoreans.

Here in Baltimore there is a great deal of uncertainty about the future of journalism, as there is everywhere. I have been involved in organizing some efforts by local new media publishers to study options for the future; my interest in this topic is purely personal.

Yesterday I attended a two-hour symposium arranged by the University of Maryland’s Merrill School of Journalism. In attendance on this panel were Monty Cook (Editor, Baltimore Sun), Tim Franklin (Former editor, Baltimore Sun), Jayne Miller (WBAL Television), Jake Oliver (Afro American Newspapers), Mark Potts (founder, WashingtonPost.com). It was moderated by Kevin Klose (former president, NPR) and sponsored by Abell Professor Sandy Banisky.

The discussion was mostly a paean to times long gone: to well-staffed newsrooms rich with sources, and benefit plans to match. It was an apologia from television to print, explicating the ability that cable-subscriber funded news operations have had to survive via subsidies that the press could never extract. It was a cursory overview of myriad efforts to invent new modes of journalism online. And it was a predictable declaration of heresy: “these so-called wanna-be websites” (Jake Oliver) “will never hold a candle to traditional journalism.” (Jayne Miller)

I quote directly.

And herein lies the problem. As observers, these trained journalists accurately state that a small, unfunded website run by “these kids” (many of whom are 20 year veterans of the press) can not effectively compete with some imagined newsroom of the past. However, these “small unfunded websites” are just starting out. They will grow. And these imagined news operations no longer exist, and the ones that still do are shrinking. The old and the new are on a collision course.

While the traditional media sticks its head in the sand and belittles the startup efforts of entrepreneurs and journalists, the world is shifting beneath its feet. And all the time spent on internal infighting, in denial, in testimony before congress, and in bankruptcy courts is time not spent reinventing the future of journalism. Their legacy costs, on health plans and labor unions and real estate and “right-sizing” are costs that aren’t being spent solving the market need.

What are the odds that the existing companies (the ones with the problem) will be the ones who come up with the solution? They are astronomically small. That’s almost never how things play out in markets.

A new, reasonably-funded journalistic startup today has access to all kinds of assets: a large pool of trained, laid-off journalists; incredible inexpensive distribution technology in the form of web, mobile, and Kindle; a motivated pool of citizen journalists; and most importantly, a startup mindset that is focused on being lean, nimble, and experimentational.

If I had to bet on whether a bloated 172-year old company that’s in bankruptcy will find the model, or whether it would be one of a field of startups, I’d bet on the field of startups every time. Why wouldn’t you?

The only coherent argument against new startups is really one of mass and heft – both in terms of startup capital and in terms of depth of connections. However, it is reasonable to expect that a reasonably-funded startup staffed with experienced businesspeople and journalists is going to be every bit as rich with contacts as a comparably-sized post-bankruptcy old-media concern. The difference? Less legacy DNA, less legacy expenses, and a lean, nimble, humble mindset that’s focused on finding the answers in an open market.

Failure of Imagination

Just as the failure to prevent the September 11 attacks was attributed to a “failure of imagination,” we see a comparable failure of imagination in journalism today.

The traditional media companies fail to imagine what the confluence of web, mobile, and citizen journalism might ultimately be able to deliver, and that it might be better than anything journalism has delivered to date.

Potential funders see all options as risky and want to bet first on “traditional” outlets. They see these brands not only as less risky, but as a restoration to a prior order.

“Restorations” are not how markets work. Things don’t get restored. They are creatively torn apart and reassembled.

The first investors to imagine the possibilities present in new journalistic startups will ultimately reap the rewards; rewards which will never be seen again in newspaper companies.

The companies that bring you local news today will most likely not be around in 10 years. A host of new companies will take their place.

The only question for those in the industry today is whether they want to be part of those solutions.

We teach entrepreneurs that they should pick an idea they are passionate about, work up a business plan, assemble resources and then execute it.

If we think about entrepreneurialism as a kind of gardening, this traditional approach in a sense encourages people to plant monocultures that are extremely vulnerable to disease. Furthermore, who wants a garden with just one kind of plant in it? Lastly, if the “idea” you choose to plant cannot grow well in your location or your climate, or the climate changes, you are left with a failed crop of your monoculture, and little recourse but to bankrupt yourself and start over.

Any gardener will tell you that putting together a good garden requires a kind of “flow” — getting “in the zone” to think about what plants will work where, what plants will complement each other, and how timing and horticultural relationships will play out to produce a garden that is maximally rewarding, whether those rewards are aesthetic or culinary.

Gardeners know what plants are native to their place, which require sun or shade, which are susceptible to parasite damage, and how to combine plants to achieve symbiotic results. They know how tightly certain plants should be planted, which ones need thinning, and which ones must be started as seedlings.

What you rarely see is a skilled gardener go out and plant a monoculture of, say, beets. Beets by themselves require a specialized kind of farming. A certain kind of soil. To really get a lot of beets, you need to apply particular pesticides and take a particular approach. And when the crop matures (assuming your bet on the conditions and climate pay off), you’ve got just one thing: beets. And, let’s face it: it’s pretty easy to get sick of beets.

“Pushing rocks uphill sucks.” – Sisyphus

In Greek mythology, Sisyphus was sentenced to push a boulder up a hill, only to watch it roll back down so he could push it again for all of eternity. This is a decidedly bad gig. Some businesses are like this too, and too many well-meaning, intelligent entrepreneurs spend time on these kind of Sisyphean enterprises – consuming a lot of precious resources and never getting traction.

In business, there are rocks to push sometimes: hard work is always part of doing something worthwhile. But successful businesses always reach the summit and get to watch the rock roll down the other side.

This is when business is fun. The world seems to love what you’re doing. People are clamoring to work for and with you, the press thinks you’re great, and the money keeps rolling in. New opportunities and ideas emerge at every turn and the sky seems to be the limit.

Great as these conditions are, they rarely last. Businesses nearly universally reach inflection points where their products fall out of favor or stop fulfilling a market need. They become old news, and seemingly out of nowhere, the business is pushing rocks uphill again – usually to the great surprise of management, investors, and customers.

When you’re pushing rocks uphill, you know it. Everyone knows it. The press remarks on it, and just as when things are going well you seem to be in an upward spiral of success, these conditions seem to dictate a downward spiral of failure. These times can be quite dark. Often, they can be sustained and overcome, until you reach a new summit where conditions have changed so that your boulder can roll freely downhill. But many don’t have the stomach to persist through these dark times. “Business turnaround experts” are really just people who can see what’s necessary to minimize drag and reposition a company to that next summit, where more favorable conditions can prevail again.

Towards a New Entrepreneurship

The old model of entrepreneurship creates arranged marriages between entrepreneurs and ideas, and these marriages often don’t work out. After years of struggle, they often end in disaster, and only in extremely forgiving climates do the entrepreneurs get a chance to even re-marry. Quite often, the entrepreneur decides to become celibate and return to its abusive relationship with The Man, while sometimes the wild-eyed ones manage to persist through a couple more failures before finally hitting upon a success.

According to this article based on a report by the National Bureau of Economic Research, the predicted success rate for first-time entrepreneurs is just 20.9%. That’s a one-in-five shot. Even more telling, the results for experienced entrepreneurs is not much better. Entrepreneurs with a track record of success see a 30.6% success rate on average, while serial entrepreneurs who failed in their prior venture are only successful 22.1% of the time on subsequent ventures. To pick a round number, these data show that about 75% of all startups fail.

Is this the best we can expect from the great capitalist engine? What if we could do better? How that might work?

You Don’t Suck – Your Idea Sucks

The data above tell us that experience doesn’t count for that much. In fact, ostensibly it counts for at most a 9.7% improvement in odds. Not a bad gain, but what if it’s an illusion? If an experienced entrepreneur and a first-time entrepreneur chase the same idea, I’d argue the odds of success are roughly equivalent. The only difference between a first-time and experienced entrepreneurs is that they have a better sense about what ideas to chase — and even that discernment may only count for a 9.7% improvement.

So the advice to all entrepreneurs thus becomes essentially the same: pick ideas that will work in the marketplace and expend resources only on those ideas.

Of course, this is easier said than done. How do you know what ideas will work? How can people try a lot of ideas without bankrupting themselves or running themselves ragged?

Starting a Garden of Ideas

First, we have to accept the fact that as individuals, people are really bad at knowing what ideas will work in the marketplace. This is the primary reason for the 75% failure rate we see amongst entrepreneurs. It’s also the reason why top-down planning failed in the Soviet Union. As a general rule of thumb, assume you know a lot less than you think you do about what ideas will work and what ideas won’t, because you’re likely wrong. So are your friends, your family, your trusted advisors, and other more experienced entrepreneurs.

Start thinking instead about what you want your idea garden to look like. What ideas motivate you, and fill you with a sense of childlike wonder? What ideas give you inner peace and create a sense of aesthetic fulfillment? What higher causes do you aspire to? What causes do you think you can motivate others to rally around? With these questions, you can start to get a sense of what you might start to try in your idea garden.

Resonance

Today, we have tools to test the resonance of ideas with fairly wide audiences — for free. Twitter, Facebook, the web, and other mechanisms allow us to expand our networks to find people to bounce our ideas off of. Start bouncing your ideas — the ideas you’re most passionate about — off of a wider audience. Put out feelers. See what sticks.

This wider audience should consist of at least a few hundred people, ideally, and you will get a sense of what ideas move people by listening to peoples’ reactions. If you don’t have an online audience of a few hundred people yet, start thinking about how to get one. Go to meetups and other events. Follow people online whose opinions you trust. Build up a good-sized audience and listen to what they tell you about your ideas.

Ideas Are Cheap

You may worry that sharing an idea with people will “let it out of the bag” and someone else will “steal it.”  You’re not so smart to have come up with an idea that no one else has thought of before. Really — believe that. Look through the US Patent Office site sometime and you’ll get a sense for just how cheap ideas really are.

What you must have that is unique and irreplaceable is the vision, passion, and relationships required to bring your idea to fruition.

But the idea itself — the raw two or three sentences that define your concept — has very little potential by itself. By sharing your idea with others, you can strengthen it. Others can contribute to it, pointing out the places where it’s weak, and repurposing it in ways you never imagined. Don’t be afraid to share your ideas, in whole or in part, so that others can help you bring them to fruition.

It could be that you do not want to put all your cards on the table at once. That’s fine. If your idea can be broken apart and tested amongst audiences that way, that can be a way of making your ideas public without disclosing the entire concept. This can be a valid approach when dealing with concepts that require patent protection. But those ideas are much rarer than you think.

You can expect that you will break down and reassemble your own ideas repeatedly before they make it to the market. It’s quite likely that you’ll combine the “resonant” parts of two ideas into one cohesive concept (CD’s by mail bad, DVD’s by mail good) that resonates in the marketplace. Be willing to play around with your ideas and allow them change over time.

Waiting It Out

One of the reasons the success rate for startups is so low is that we have taught entrepreneurs to set up housekeeping with the first viable idea they encounter. The societal pressure to be doing something (so, what are you up to these days anyway?) is very great and people want to perceive and project themselves as successful.

Idea Gardening is something that we as a society have decided is only a valid occupation for people like Richard Branson or Oprah Winfrey. And even they have specific ongoing successes that they can point to that seem to validate their modi operandi.

Gardening takes time — time for sunlight, for seed, for rain to converge in fecundity. The same is true of Idea Gardening. Patience is required for ideas, people, and resources to converge in a way that releases stored energy. If you’re having to use too much pesticide (lawyering) or fertilizer (cash) to make your idea work, you’re likely going against the forces of nature, and not taking advantage of the energy of the marketplace.

Don’t overextend yourself by sinking resources into the first idea you have that looks to be viable. As a committed gardener, you will have many sprouts and leads that are viable. Put your attention to the ideas that seem to be the strongest, and use all of your available resources to drive multiple ideas forward in parallel. Otherwise you’ll have the kind of fragile and brittle all-beet monoculture that will have a hard time surviving market conditions.

Over time, you will find that there are projects that you need to cull. Often, an idea is just premature for the market. But that doesn’t mean you can’t nurture it and keep it going in some form until conditions are right. Often, that is not a very expensive proposition and if you are passionate, it can be very fruitful in the future.

Sunk Costs

People are suckers for sunk costs; this is the instinct that makes folks want to double down in Vegas to recover their losses. But losses are losses, whether measured in time or in money, and chasing after a failed idea to recover yourself to some perceived baseline is a mistake.

In the past, entrepreneur failure often meant sunk costs in the form of infrastructure and time wasted. These sunk costs could run into the hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars. Entrepreneurs, wanting to perceive themselves as successful, very rarely will walk away from this kind of situation willingly or rationally. Likewise, investors (less often) sometimes fall into the same trap. It’s these kinds of sunk costs that keep good money chasing after bad in countless businesses.

Clearly the only rational thing to do is to stop burning money and move on to something that will work. It’s not your fault it didn’t work out — the market didn’t want what you were selling. So, without pride or prejudice, stop the bleeding and move on. It may be your idea is still viable, but it might be viable for someone else, someplace else, at some different point in time. Put it on ice and return to it then.

The key to avoiding the trap of sunk costs in the Idea Gardening model is to minimize costs until an idea looks to be viable. If you have 10 ideas you’re experimenting with, and 4 show promise, what can you do to put a minimal amount of investment in only those four that will advance them to a stage where you can learn more about their prospects?

After that round, it may be that only two show promise at that moment. What can you do to put a minimal amount of investment in only those two ideas that will advance them? It may be that one of those ideas is really ready to explode and is ready to accept a major investment. Do that. By adopting this methodology, all of your investments will be right-sized and appropriate to advancing your concepts. With the disciplined use of this approach, one could theoretically achieve a 75+% entrepreneurial success rate , rather than a 75% failure rate!

This is an entirely different approach to entrepreneurship. For the software developers out there, this is the agile approach to business. Start small, iterate, and follow the market need. This also means that failures, when they occur, happen quickly. And that is the best thing any entrepreneur could hope for.

Cost Control

Besides for only investing time and money into ideas that have promise, it is now more possible than ever to experiment with concepts for very low costs. Free, open source software like Ruby on Rails, PHP, MySQL, and Linux have made it possible to prototype complex concepts extremely inexpensively. If you know how to code the ideas yourself, you can lower costs even further. An entrepreneur who is also a software developer is uniquely positioned to try out dozens of ideas and let the market decide which ones will work.

Additionally, phone services like Google Voice and various other outsourced business services ranging from PayPal to GetFriday and Amazon Mechanical Turk enable incredible things to be done at rock-bottom prices. Cloud computing resources like Amazon EC2 and S3, and Google’s App Engine allow for fast and affordable scaling of ideas at very reasonable prices.

There has never been a better time to be a technology entrepreneur but many of the same forces help all entrepreneurs keep costs down. You won’t get trapped by sunk costs if they are very low;  you will walk away from $10,000 sooner than you will $100,000 or $500,000.

More Thomas Edison than Henry Ford

Many of the great industrial entrepreneurs of the last 100 years have been uniquely positioned — as much by accident as by anything else — to capitalize on emergent trends. Carnegie, Mellon, Fricke, Rockefeller, Henry Ford, Bill Gates, and Steve Jobs, all took advantage of (and helped to create) massive trends that could be pushed through society and thereby capitalized on.

You’re not those guys. The odds of any of us finding some “megatrend” that we can exploit profitably for very long are quite slim.

Look instead to Thomas Edison’s approach.

Edison put himself into the Idea Gardening business. His labs in Menlo Park, New Jersey were a virtual playground for engineers. They generated more than 1,500 patents and went on to form General Electric. He was famously quoted as saying that “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration,” but this is often misunderstood.

Edison wasn’t saying that entrepreneurship was driven by “hard work” of the Sisyphean kind — no one can sustain that kind of load and be that prolific. Rather, he was suggesting that the hard work of invention lay in hoeing the rows and planting countless seeds of innovation so that, in time, the best ideas could bear fruit and thereby transform the world.

So entrepreneurs, plant your gardens. Give them sun, water, and time. The rest will follow, and you, too, will go on to transform the world.

Many thanks to Bill Mill, Mike Subelsky, Gus Sentementes and Jennifer Troy who thoughtfully reviewed this essay.