Small Cities Weekly | 09.22.2023
Follies, Batteries, & Cyberfoundries
As part of the work we are doing on the Small City Segment, we send out a brief weekly post of thoughts, links, and research in progress that reflect the week’s work. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, or things to add. Please forward this on to people you think might enjoy reading it.
Quick Reminder: we are running a 4-week Problem Sprint in Oct. to help founders define and validate the problem they are working on. It’s open to anyone interested in building for the Small City Segment and is free, virtual, and asynchronous. We will consider anyone that completes it for further support through our Studio and/or Fund. You can sign up here.
Follies
I’ve been reading about infrastructure built in the 19th century that allowed some small cities to really take off economically. These were the “platforms” of their day - things like South Bend’s West Race and Buffalo and Albany’s Erie Canal.
The public perception of projects of this type and ambition at the time is interesting.
Prior to the West Race being built and succeeding, the founder of South Bend, Alexis Coquillard, attempted a different race to connect the Kankakee headwaters to the St. Jospeh River. It ended up failing and cost him nearly $100,000 (almost $4M today). Publicly it became known as “Colquillard’s Folly”.
A decade earlier, Gov. DeWitt Clinton was pushing through the ambitious Erie Canal to connect Buffalo to Albany. Before even being built, it was was being called “Clinton’s Folly”, a short-lived moniker as the canal became almost an instant success.
Both of these endeavors (and the West Race that eventually was successful in South Bend) were entrepreneurial in their own right, but whose real impact was the platform for entrepreneurship they created for others. And potentially was also why they were considered “follies” at the time - they almost seemed too ambitious.
As most modern day platforms are digital and live in the cloud, not in a place (Shopify, AWS, Stripe), I’m wondering what place-based entrepreneurial platforms of today would look like - or if opportunities for them exist at all.
Links
A new role for small cities thinking big about infrastructure, Bloomberg Cities Network
They’re also prompting a growing number of small- and medium-sized cities to introduce a new role to their city halls: infrastructure coordinator.
The position is about more than pursuing the hundreds of new available grants—although that’s part of it. It’s also about helping cities think big about this unprecedented funding opportunity. “While many large cities have full teams dedicated to this work, small cities haven’t always had that capacity,” explains Ryan Whalen of Bloomberg Philanthropies, which, through its Local Infrastructure Hub, provides small- and medium-sized cities access to the resources their mayors say they need to overcome challenges to accessing and utilizing these federal funds. “Infrastructure coordinators are one of the innovative ways smaller cities are bridging that gap.”
A common theme across public and private organizations in small cities is “big enough to need certain resources, but too small to have teams that can chase them down thoughtfully.” I think this is messy middle is a huge opportunity area in any vertical - where can technology help to augment current teams to allow them to build, access, pursue, etc. things that would be really beneficial if they had the resources to do so?
Old West Virginia Steel Mill Becomes a Green-Energy Powerhouse, Scott Patterson, WSJ
Weirton’s tumbledown steel mill once provided work for more than 10,000 people before the plant stopped producing steel in the mid-2000s. The tiny town of about 18,000 people sits astride the former mill, whose defunct pipes and cables snake among its streets and buildings. The mill at its peak had four blast furnaces that could produce thousands of tons of steel a day.
The $760 million battery factory rising from the mill’s ashes will employ about 750 workers once completed, providing a mean salary of $63,000. Still, it represents a blooming industrial transformation in Appalachia and elsewhere in the U.S. fueled by the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, the 2021 infrastructure act and last year’s Chips Act.It’s hard to tell a better story than this when it comes to seeing how an economic past can inform an economic future for a small city. I hope more stories like this become commonplace. (Also the photos in this piece are stunning).
We need to bring manufacturing back to America | Rangeview, Saturday Startup Stories
“When I went to sell robotic arms to factories, it was like trying to sell a toaster to a house without electricity,” Cameron explained to me while filming at Rangeview’s El Segundo, CA headquarters.
What Cameron found while meeting with factories of all shapes in sizes is that most US factory management teams are aging out and retiring, as a result they don’t see a need to invest in new ways to innovate their processes.
Rangeview is trying to re-invent “the technology stack of precision casting and factory operations. Our product is a cyberfoundry.” They are based in L.A., and while still small, seem to be doing really interesting things. In my opinion, these are the kinds of businesses that could be born in small cities. The workforce and industries of small cities are way more likely to be in the physical world, not the digital one, and if you can find some progressive industry experts and pair them with technologists, you could produce those “weird niches” that we’ve talked about before.
What I’m Working On
Small City Industry Niches: I wrote my first exploration of this topic a few weeks ago, sharing origin stories of speciality insurance in Fort Wayne, orthopedics in Warsaw, and RVs in Elkhart. I’ve got a few more on the docket, but if you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them.
Small City Climate Change & Resilience Data: I’m interested in learning more behind the data being used to define and determine mitigation for climate change and resiliency and how that shows up in smaller cities.
If you…
are interested in building for the small city segment…
are already building for the small city segment…
know someone who might be/should be building for the small city segment…
want to contribute expertise to problem profiles…
or want to help us expand our networks of trust in small cities…
please subscribe and reach out at dustin@invanti.co.