Here’s a math problem: Ten startup founders and CEOs hurtle down the long highway from Omaha to Lincoln, Nebraska, in a cornflower blue bus. One of the execs builds construction management software. Another runs a blog-hosting startup. A third makes medical devices used in colon surgeries. They sit facing each other on two banquettes, swapping war stories and offering each other advice on hiring and raising money. If at least two-thirds of venture capital investments go to companies in California, New York, and Massachusetts, how much of a chance do any of these Midwestern entrepreneurs have of getting funded?
The answer: a much smaller chance than if they were in California, New York, or Massachusetts.
So yeah, I’m not great at math. Luckily, this isn’t an elaborate SAT word problem. This is life along the Rise of the Rest bus tour, a road trip Steve Case launched to expose the often myopic investment communities on both coasts to entrepreneurs in what uppity coastal habitués would call “flyover country.
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Case and his team at Revolution, the venture capital firm behind the tour, have logged a lot of miles on that bus—about 6,000, with stops in 26 cities from Des Moines, Iowa, to Provo, Utah. In each city, they meet with and invest in founders building fast-growth businesses far from the hubs of San Francisco and New York. The mission all along, Case says: “Make sure that everybody, everywhere does feel like they have a shot at the American Dream.”
Case started his bus tours in 2014, but in November, that mission took on a new urgency. President Trump’s upset victory offered a startlingly efficient reminder that for people living somewhere between the booming coastal economies, that American Dream can seem like a foggy memory. The wealth technologists have amassed creating the so-called jobs of the future has scarcely touched vast swaths of the country. It’s little wonder, then, that the citizens of 33 states would vote for a man who promised to make that distant America dream a reality by restoring great industries of the past.
“There’s a reason they feel left behind. They kind of have been left behind,” Case says. “Some of the disruption funded in places like Silicon Valley is destroying jobs in other parts of the country.”
But if the new administration really wants to restore jobs in middle America, encouraging investment in startups—the companies responsible for nearly all net new US job creation—is the only way to do it, Case says. So Case has taken a break from the road. Instead, he has invited the many entrepreneurs, academics, and investors he’s met along the way to come to Washington.
‘The disruption funded in places like Silicon Valley is destroying jobs in other parts of the country.’ Steve Case, Rise of the Rest
Case’s two-day Rise of the Rest summit at the end of this month, will, like any tech conference, give business leaders a chance to schmooze and learn from one another’s mistakes and successes. But the meeting carries obvious symbolic weight. By coming together in the wake of a new administration, these middle American entrepreneurs can show East Coast Washington elites that you can boost the economy in other ways beyond gutting regulation and retreating from trade deals.
“There’s no question that just relying on big companies and just relying on old industries to be the mainstay of economic growth is a misguided strategy,” says Ron Klain, executive vice president of Revolution and former chief of staff to both vice presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden. “We have to take some of the fantastic opportunities in tech and bring them to the rest of the country.”
The summit will also include a trip to Capitol Hill, where senators Mark Warner (D-VA) and Ben Sasse (R-NE), as well as representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) and House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) will lay out their own visions for spurring entrepreneurship in the rest of the country.
“I think it has to happen at a federal level,” says Khanna, whose district encompasses the heart of Silicon Valley from Cupertino to Santa Clara to Sunnyvale. “We want it to be coordinated. We want folks in Silicon Valley to hear what folks in Appalachia want, what their needs are, what their interests are.”
The future of Khanna’s party, he believes, depends on this kind of mutual understanding. “We spent too much time as a party on the coasts. We didn’t visit these communities,” he says of the 2016 campaign, which gutted Democratic representation across the country. “We weren’t empathetic to the challenges and aspirations of their kids.” Next week, Khanna plans to travel to Kentucky, where he’ll visit a program, launched by the Obama administration’s TechHire initiative, that teaches coding skills to young people in a part of the state better known for its coal mines.
Of course, for programs like this to move beyond small experiments and become truly meaningful, the tech industry has a lot of work to do to revamp its post-election image. The same companies and tech leaders whose software and hardware have helped automate away jobs in everything from manufacturing to the service industry, made themselves known as some of Hillary Clinton’s most vocal supporters and donors. Tech magnates became, like Lena Dunham and Katy Perry, icons of a kind of snobbish liberal insensitivity.
Besides, not everyone who’s been displaced by the changing economy wants to be a software engineer. Case says the tech industry needs to do a better job telling the story of the network effects startups have beyond their own walls. “It’s not just the jobs created by these companies, but by the people who work at these companies and end up building houses and going to restaurants,” he says.
That can work for smaller cities like Omaha and Lincoln, at least. Case acknowledges that trying to build startups in truly rural America—the parts of the country that bought into Trump’s message most enthusiastically—poses a much bigger challenge. Startups tend to require some kind of population density and local sources of capital that such locales often don’t have. Sorting out how to economically elevate those “forgotten men and women,” as Trump calls them, is a different math problem altogether.