Small Cities Weekly | 11.10.2023
In vs. Throughout Main St., Regional Hinterlands, & Neighborhood Maps
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.
In vs. Throughout a City
As I mentioned last week, we spent the last few days in Columbia, MO for the Main St. Summit. We really enjoyed ourselves and the hospitality and I have lots more to share over the coming weeks. But one thing I wanted to comment on right away is more about how they did the summit than the content of the summit.
Columbia is exactly the kind of city that we’ve been talking about over the last few months. It is small by most standards, but is also the home of the University of Missouri and companies like Veteran’s United Home Loans.
What I appreciated most about the summit was the way they integrated it with the city. The summit wasn’t held in Columbia, it was held throughout Columbia. Sessions weren’t in non-descript hotel conference rooms. They were in local theaters, backrooms of coffee shops, art galleries, and retailers. To go from one session to the next, you had to walk the city. To find the right room, you had to experience a local business. To grab lunch or a coffee, you had to peruse their local business list. You can get a feel for what I’m talking about by checking out their recap video here.
From the outside it might seem like a small difference in planning. But for a small city, 800+ people from all over the world wandering your downtown for two days means a lot. All of these people walked away with a real feel for the city, the food, and the culture. Those connections matter. Most of the 800+ people will never live there, but I’d bet money that the fact that they were there, and experienced Columbia in that way, will show up in interesting and unexpected ways in the future.
Links
Relational hinterlands in the USA have become disconnected from major global centres, Maximilian Buchholz & Harald Bathelt
Using LexisNexis Corporate Affiliations data, this paper shows that eight highly globally integrated US city regions have become dis-/less-connected with a large part of their prior domestic relational hinterlands. Intra-firm linkages that once connected these relational hinterlands with global centres and provided jobs, market access and knowledge flows were severed. At the same time, all global centres have experienced a dramatic increase in connectivity with each other, and with other locations around the world. These results strongly support the popular narrative that large, globally-integrated US city regions have left behind smaller, less-advantaged regions in recent decades, a narrative which up until this point has primarily been supported by anecdotal evidence.
This is a brand new research paper so I’m still digging into it, but I’m interested to see how this ties to capital importers vs retainers and the ideas we’ve explored around economic complexity. The gist of it is that there are less connections between larger cities and smaller cities through subsidiaries and that these smaller cities now have shown to have things like higher poverty rates.
Wade Foster (Co-founder and CEO of Zapier) on Nearly Bootstrapping to $5B, The Logan Bartlett Show
You know, we're in central Missouri. We don't have much exposure to Silicon Valley. It's not what we know.
This idea of going and raising a seed round and being able to pick up a million bucks, or I guess nowadays it might be $3 million or $5 million or whatever, that's just sort of a foreign concept. It just didn't seem like it was - like why would someone do that with us? And the company we'd all work for is this company, Veterans United, and that company is owned 50/50 by two brothers. They scaled a bunch of bootstrap businesses before and sold those.
This one, I was like the 500th employee there. And I'd left like ten months later to start Zapier and it was like 1000 employees at that point in time. So it's growing very quickly and we just sort of seen the front row seat to like, okay, you can build businesses differently. There's not one playbook here that's the quote unquote right playbook. And so that's sort of the bias that we're coming from.
We had the opportunity to see Wade speak at the Main St. Summit, as he is from Columbia, MO, where the summit was held. He talked quite a bit about what it was like starting in Columbia and how his background growing up in a small city vs Silicon Valley informed how he decided to take on capital and hire. It was pretty cool to see how this type of profitable, large, and durable business is possible to come from a city like Columbia. This episode is a good overview of his, and Zapier’s, story.
An Extremely Detailed Map of New York City Neighborhoods, NYTimes
Neighborhoods are not forever. Some stay, some change and some disappear. The borders you see on Google are not “official,” and neither are the ones used by real estate companies like StreetEasy. Even the city itself purposefully does not have an official city map of neighborhood borders.
“It’s not our place to define them,” said Casey Berkovitz, a spokesman for the city’s Planning Department. “We leave that up to New Yorkers themselves.”How cool would it be to have a map like this for all cities? I’d love to be a fly on the wall for the debates over coffee at diners across the city the morning after it’s released.
Interesting Companies for the Small City Segment
Common Trust - We had the chance to attend a panel on employee ownership transitions at the Main St. Summit and got to learn more about Common Trust. They help owners implement a really interesting model of ownership that differs from a co-op or ESOP. For cities that have a lot of SMBs struggling with succession plans, this could be a great option.
Big Tree Medical - This was another company we saw at the summit. In my words, they are creating a Costco-type model for primary care. You pay a membership fee of $70 every month, and they try to then get you as many primary care services as possible for free or at-cost. Concierge medicine has usually been assumed to be for the wealthy in large cities - but Big Tree is specifically going after counties with shortage of PCP providers and aiming for a price point that makes this affordable.
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