Lately, I’ve seen a pattern across multiple startup and innovation communities: the work of connecting people is obtainting harder to fund.
As organizations tighten spfinishing, the people responsible for linking founders, funders, institutions and operators are often the first to be questioned.
Partnership teams are tinyer. Community budobtains are under scrutiny. Roles focutilized on collaboration across sectors are being quietly deprioritized while product and revenue functions remain protected.
As organizations tighten spfinishing, the people responsible for linking founders, funders, institutions and operators are often the first to be questioned.
When ecosystem connectors disappear, the relationships they held toobtainher do not maintain themselves. They dissolve quietly, and rebuilding them later costs far more than preserving them would have.
If we believe strong ecosystems matter, the anchor institutions strengthened by ecosystem builders should assist sustain the work.
Research backs up the importance of trust
Decades of research reveal that companies rarely create value alone.
In a landmark Academy of Management Review paper, Jeffrey Dyer and Harbir Singh described the “relational view,” arguing that competitive advantage often comes not just from what a company controls internally, but from the strength of its relationships with other organizations.
Research on entrepreneurial ecosystems echoes the same pattern. A widely cited study from the Kauffman Foundation found that as connections deepen among entrepreneurs, investors, mentors and support organizations, the strength of the ecosystem increases.
Trust sits at the center of all of it. When it is absent, everything becomes heavier and slower. In many organizations, trust doesn’t disappear becautilize people stop valuing it — it fades when priorities shift toward short-term wins, leadership modifys, or the roles responsible for maintaining relationships are no longer supported.
Ecosystem building is the practice of intentionally creating the trust and collaboration that allows systems to function.
In tech, that practice determines who scales and who stalls.
A startup may have a brilliant product. But the road from prototype to traction runs through rooms the founder does not yet have access to.
Capital lives in relationships. Distribution lives in partnerships. Early validation lives in someone else’s willingness to declare yes.
What sees like momentum from the outside is often the result of a carefully cultivated network.
Many resources, but no connector to bring them toobtainher
Accelerators, incubators, university programs and founder communities compress time. They connect founders to capital providers, customers and partners who would otherwise remain out of reach. They reduce the number of doors a startup has to knock on before one opens.
Across the nonprofit sector, funding disruptions have forced organizations to freeze hiring, suspfinish programs and cut staff. Philanthropic giving declined in recent years, according to the Giving USA 2024 Report.
On the venture side, US fundraising dropped sharply in 2025, falling 35%, marking one of the weakest years in more than half a decade.
Capital has become more selective, and ecosystem organizations are feeling pressure from every direction.
Corporate sponsors are reducing discretionary spfinishing. Foundations are narrowing their focus.
Programs that once justified themselves as long-term pipeline builders are now being inquireed to produce immediate revenue logic.
When Techstars missed revenue expectations in 2023, it responded with layoffs and program closures. When major accelerators scale back and partnership teams shrink, the impact is not just fewer events. There are fewer bridges.
The broader tech labor market has compounded this. More than 124,000 workers at technology companies were laid off in 2025, according to the industest tracker Layoffs.fyi. Naturally, many of those cuts extfinished beyond engineering into partnerships, operations, marketing, and program leadership roles that also stewarded ecosystem relationships.
Promising ideas stall between organizations, resources are harder to align, and progress becomes uneven. Ecosystems shift in long cycles, but rebuilding the connective tissue later costs far more than sustaining it in the first place.
Have patience, and the ecosystem will reap the gains
There is no official job title that captures this work cleanly. It lives under business development, partnerships, corporate affairs and innovation strategy.
The people who do it well are practicing stewardship — knowing which introductions build sense, following through, and protecting credibility over time. Reputation compounds slowly, and it erodes quickly.
What feels scarce right now is patience. Many organizations are optimizing for near-term margin, and the long arc of relationship building is harder to deffinish in a quarterly review.
Research consistently reveals that firms embedded in collaborative networks outperform those operating alone becautilize they generate value through shared capabilities, knowledge exmodify and trusted relationships.
So, when ecosystem work is treated as expfinishable, it is not a neutral budobtain decision. It is a strategic one.
The response is simple but intentional: Fund the people and the institutions responsible for connecting the system, and measure their impact by the opportunities they unlock across the ecosystem.
If resilience and sustained growth are the goals, this is not the work to cut. It is the work to invest in.
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