Small Cities Weekly | 10.20.2023
Buffalo, More Founders, & Papertown
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.
But don’t we need vision?
The immediate thought I had was, “Earn a 140th year.”
I think there is some wisdom in this approach for startups, small cities, and the interactions between the two. Visions are great - and narrative is important for optimism. But there is also merit in focusing on doing the work that earns the right to do the next day’s work. I’m coming around to the thought that most of economic development in small cities is just this. Take the next step, do the work, and choose strategies that you can imagine sustaining for long periods of time.
I was on a call this week with a former mayor of a small city who reads the newsletter, and she said this had been rattling around in her head all week. She said her challenge with it was that sometimes it takes the motivation of a vision for people to even believe that the unsexy, day-to-day work is worth doing. So while it sounds great, it seems more complicated than the simple “Earn a 140th year” mantra.
I love this critique. I think she’s exactly right and it begs for a revision of what I wrote last week. Maybe it’s more that cities go through cycles - some need vision to inspire execution, and some need execution to fulfill the promise of visions. Finding the appropriate lever to pull at the appropriate time is most certainly a way to frame what being entrepreneurial is all about.
Links
How a Billion Dollars and a Startup Competition Flipped Buffalo's Ecosystem on Its Head--and How Your City Could Be Next, Zoya Hasa, Inc.
"Buffalo and 43North are a massive success story. Will it be repeated? I don't know. Can someone else do the same thing somewhere else and have the same outcome? Probably not," Hathaway says. "But they might. And that's the lesson of all this. These are very complex behavioral systems and you just have to try things and be experimental and humble about it."
I try to keep an open mind about the kind of strategies that small cities employ to use entrepreneurship for economic growth and resilience. The strategy Buffalo is using wouldn’t be my first instinct - but it is interesting to see how well it is working for them. I quoted the end of the article because I think it pushes back on the headline of the article - that just because Buffalo was able to make it work doesn’t make it a recipe for others. What it does say is that experimenting and getting your community committed to a strategy can have a massive impact - and that’s the better lesson to take away from Buffalo’s success.
Indiana needs more and better supported entrepreneurs, Melina Kennedy, Inside Indiana Business
“EPOP-IN found that nearly 60% of Indiana adults have taken at least some steps toward entrepreneurship. While this demonstrates that a large number of Hoosiers are interested in entrepreneurship, it falls below the national data which indicates slightly more than 65% of Americans have pursued entrepreneurial activity.
…
Nearly 60% of those planning new ventures and 67% of those who previously did some planning indicated “not knowing where to start” was a top challenge. Other common challenges include not having enough savings for start-up costs, finding customers, and finding time to pursue the idea.
Taken together, the above data points suggest that Indiana needs more entrepreneurs, and we need to support our entrepreneurs.”
I don’t have much to add except it’s good to see additional data points around entrepreneurship rates. Most programs start with the second statement - how do we support our entrepreneurs? At INVANTI, we are much more interested in the first - how do we activate more entrepreneurs?
The Last Days of Papertown, Lisa Rab, The Assembly
“Like Moore and West, Blythe was mourning a loss that was tough to name. It was more than a job or a sense of pride. It was a community of workers who looked after each other through sickness, floods and fires. The mill had sustained them for more than a century, and they weren’t sure how to get by without it.
“If it hadn’t been for this mill,” Blythe said, “Canton would not be here.”’
This piece is a heartbreaking read. The immediate and human toll of a large, anchor employer leaving is devastating. While Canton is more of a small town, it sits in the MSA of Asheville and shows how complicated these localized markets can be. I don’t know what the answer is to preventing the toll of stories like this, but it does remind me of a speech I heard Fmr. Mayor Pete Buttigieg give back in 2016. He talked of the days of being a “company town” being over, and instead of focusing on finding one employer of 10k people, we needed a 100 employers of 100 people. Those firms come through entrepreneurship - and makes the point that entrepreneurship isn’t just about growth, it’s even more so about resilience.
Interesting Companies for the Small City Segment
I’m going to start sharing companies that I come across in our research that I think are interesting for the Small City Segment. By default, assume we aren’t investors in and don’t know these companies. If we are/do, I’ll note it.
Emrgy - Emrgy builds small-scale, distributed water turbine systems, right now installing them in existing irrigation canals. They don’t have a small city thesis as far as I can tell, but with so many cities built historically on rivers, mill races, and canals, it seems there could be an adjacent application.
AmplifiedAg - Here in South Bend we have a company called Pure Green Farms which sits at the intersection of farming and manufacturing. They grow lettuce in less than 24 days, with 95% less water, 90% less land, package and deliver it from harvest in under 24 hours, and it doesn’t touch human hands until you open the package. AmplifiedAg is building a version of these systems, enabling others to own pods that can be used for year-round indoor farming. Bringing food production closer to consumption and having the ability to produce year-round is an interesting value propositions for small cities, especially those ones isolated or remote from the dominant produce growers in the US.
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.