June 2025

Welcome back to First Chair 🚠: Your rundown on Vermont’s startup scene brought to you by your friends at VCET. Today’s gems:

💎 Relationships not transactions

💎 6th Hardware meetup

💎 Rylan Blowers on Start Here

💎 Jobs, jobs, & jobs

Relationships Not Transactions

“Wanna partner up on this?” Many of us hear this pitch in our professional lives frequently. Given resource constraints, finding great allies to share the efforts and objectives is really attractive. Heck, who doesn’t want to increase reach, spread the risk and share the costs around business objectives. But, while it almost always sounds good on the surface, it is often so uncertain to know up front whether a proposed “partnering” or “partnership” offer is a good deal for all involved. Over time, I have learned the hard way when a partner does not meet our expectations, and also where I have failed to meet my business partner’s expectations too. There is always room for reflection and improvement.

One enduring VCET strength is our choice to maintain a few strategic long term partners for a blend of strategy, program delivery, financial support, and targeted outcomes. Here are few ideas and rules that we try to follow:

• Is this a transaction or a relationship being proposed? For example, being asked to partner as one of dozens of financial sponsors on an event or program is a transaction, not a strategic relationship. So, be candid and kind with the proposer and simply ask, “Do you primarily just want our money or mailing list? Or, is there something more being proposed that I am missing?”

• True partners are not short term. No relationship is perfect from the start, so it takes time (even years) to align, execute and hit the marks desired. For us,  we look at three year minimums for any new partnership. The first year you survive it, the second year you tune it and the third year you scale it.

• Beware the takers. Conduct some due diligence prior to initiating a new partnership with that organization or its leaders. Do they typically “give” or “just take”? Ask yourself if these are folks you trust and could share rowing a boat with? Takers seldom change over time, and the promised benefits to you are not often realized. No one likes a one way street partner, and so we all need to be reminded to walk the walk ourselves too.

• Select a few and commit. If you partner with everyone, everywhere and all at once then your organization is truly special to none of them. You risk dilution of your company’s brand and team’s time. Your unique value added to your partner is just too thinly spread as well. If a new partnership is not special and strategic, then pass. You’re better off being an annual event or initiative sponsor (i.e. $ transaction) versus pretending it is something more.

Hopefully, some of these insights and learnings are helpful. Lastly, to our kickass VCET partners, a heartfelt thank you for your enduring support, challenge and guidance. Truly, 1 +1 = 5.

-Dave

Special thanks to our incredible sponsors:

Burlington Hardware Meetup

Come hangout with us at DR Power! Pizza, Zero Gravity bevs, and hardware chats.

Event Info Here

👏 OhMD launches Nia, a human-in-the-loop AI assistant.

🚁 Duke Energy Corporation received their first Airbus Helicopters equipped with GPMS Foresight MX HUMS.

🤖 Fluency helps Union Street Media’s ad team of two feel like a team of five.

Stories by VCET Marketing Associate, Blaise Siefer

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Growing high-paying jobs in the state of Vermont is central to VCET’s purpose. Check out these sweet gigs with some of our portfolio companies.

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