Justin Williams, Founder CIVX, Tucson, AZ

Welcome to the KnolShare with Dr. Dave podcast, hosted on Grokshare.com and streamed on iTunes, Google Play, and Spotify.   You are listening to Episode #71 with Justin Williams founders of CIVX in Tucson AZ.

Interview

Dr. Dave Cornelius: Okay. Let’s start off with your name.

Justin Williams: My name is Justin Williams

Dr. Dave Cornelius: Okay. And what organization that you belong to or that you lead?

Justin Williams: Several, but I think the most relevant one would be CIVX.

Dr. Dave Cornelius: Okay. And that’s CIVX?

Justin Williams: Correct.

Dr. Dave Cornelius: Okay. So what led you to your current position in your journey?

Justin Williams: So with CIVX, it’s sort of the intersection of two threads of my world, that of an entrepreneur and an educator supporting the entrepreneurial innovation community here in Tucson, which is built on a paradigm of lean startup, and agile thinking, and customer value creation as a generalized set of principles and tools to help aspiring entrepreneurs build by creating high growth, often technology-enabled startup companies.

Justin Williams: I created an organization in 2011 around that space called Startup Tucson. It was built to be a framework for catalyzing the startup ecosystem here in Tucson. And so we built and launched and ran a variety of programs through Startup Tucson focused on things ranging from networking mixers, Startup Drinks, to pitch feedback meetups like 1 Million Cups, to growth incubator or we called it a venture development program called Thrive, and large scale multi thousand person innovation festival called TENWEST, along with a variety of other initiatives like a coworking space, colab workspace. Startup Tucson was an entrepreneur support organization and an incubator of initiatives to grow the ecosystem.

Justin Williams: Prior to that I had taken over the remnants of three nonprofits and merged them to become a local technology trade association called AMIT, Aerospace Manufacturing and IT. After running that for several years as the largest technology trade association in Tucson, we merged it with an organization called the Arizona Technology Council out of Phoenix and ran it for another three years before I left that organization. As part of leaving it, I also launched Startup Tucson at that point.

Justin Williams: The origin of this shift from the technology company, business economic development landscape to the more action-oriented individual work would actually be launching the event TEDx Tucson here in Tucson in 2010. So that was another key piece of this. And all of this is sort of the intersections of people who think about the future, who are willing to take actions, and feel empowered that they have the right to do something, that they have wisdom to contribute to making their community better.

Justin Williams: There’s an activist culture around leadership in a community, and so I began generalizing all of that work. The work in terms of building community through a trade association or a startup support organization using the values of having the empowerment or the permission structures that entrepreneurs and founders have to go implement some sort of change that they’d love to see instead of just feeling helpless, or feeling unable to, or without permission, or wisdom to be able to do something.

Justin Williams: That’s all one growth. From managing its trade association through and their vision to improve the world through their startup ideas.