Some days, I just want to live someplace with cool folks who get it
I have days where I realize founding a tech startup where the sector isn’t quite developed (and by not quite developed I mean, non-existent) is perilous. I have very clear reasons for being here. Part of it is really about having cultivated a network and the fact that I’ve spent enough time here that I can see the potential for growth. Well and I’m something of a glutton for punishment too.
Upon leaving the Air Force, I had to transfer from Wash U because there was no way I could really afford to it. I had two choices: A school that didn’t have a debate team and one that did. The latter school offered me a scholarship and was cheaper, but I chose the school that didn’t have a debate team. I did it because I thought building my own program would be more rewarding and I wasn’t sure if I could handle being in a faculty-led program after being in a student-led one to start college.
Now there is a happy ending in a sense. I did indeed start a debate program there. And said program went from 9 members at our first meeting to about 60 in two months. But a lot of that was timing and responding to the market (I added Model UN and Quiz Bowl to the group’s offerings, debate wasn’t that popular initially) and well, the group went on to be student org of the year for both years I was there, we debated Oxford University, I hosted a national tournament…
…but that’s not the point.
The point is, some days I just want to live somewhere with cool people who get it. It’s not really all that complicated. Not everyone has the money, the time or the know-how to branch themselves out in a market that suffers from a large bout of radio silence. That is, there are all sorts of amazingly cool things happening, but you have to leave here to participate in them.
You know hard it is to find an AJAX, Ruby or C# hacker in Wyoming? No, you don’t. But I’ll tell you. It’s not easy. It’s not really so much about having to educate people about trends, because I’ve found that once you leave the (admittedly insular) tech sector, that lots of people struggle with trends and keeping up with what’s going on. Who can blame them? Folks have real jobs, families and other things that are far more interesting (or important) to them.
So I’m not complaining about that part. I actually enjoy the teaching and educating part most of the time. It’s really the lack of a critical mass that makes the startup environment in Wyoming so challenging.
When you’re dealing with the smallest population state, that’s one of the largest geographically, it presents a host of challenges. One of those is communication. Newspapers might be dying all over the country in print, but here they’ve got a vice grip on the conversation. Imagine a world where no one uses craigslist, where the Twitterverse might have fewer than 150 people statewide and save for walled garden social networks like Facebook or niche sites, there simply are no mass-market ways to get a message out to large parts of the stratified population.
While that’s a frustration, it’s also a challenge I relish. It’s not a problem endemic to Wyoming, as other rural areas suffer from the same problem. Difference here is, it’s an entire state and a lot of it has to do with culture and the mechanism of how things work and always have. Breaking through that is a delicate balance of political savvy and networking with folks “in the know.” And even then, you might lose.
It’s not just me, the interloping carpetbagger who chose to settle here who complains of this. I’ve got lots of friends who are frustrated with it too. Folks with generations of lineage here, some who have money, who can’t complain enough about how backwards certain things can be here and as a result,lots of them leave. (I once wrote an article about this…)
Don’t get me started on venture capital. Don’t let the tax haven status fool you. People come here to hide their money, not invest it. For that, head south to Boulder or head west to Utah. Or California, of course.
I was reluctant to write this post, because I don’t want to make it seem like it’s all bad. (Especially if I try to hire you in a few months…) It’s a great place to be, especially in the summer. And you have the opportunity to really make some nifty things happen in a place where no one would suspect it’d be possible, to be honest.
But illusions aside, this is truly the last frontier amongst the Lower 48 states for any sort of tech innovation. Now it’d be fine if you wanted to do work in energy or something, because you might get someone to listen to you. Maybe. But besides that? Forget it.
So that’s the uphill battle we face. The thing that gets me up everyday? I’ve met enough people, in enough places around the state that affirm what we’re doing. It’s not so much an issue of people not wanting to, it’s just a blind spot for those who control the purse strings and who dominate the conversations and the policy directions for startups in the state.
The people who are doing things need to realize they’re not alone. Luckily, there’s never been a better time to faciliate that, so that’s my task over the next few months. I doubt we’ll build Boulder in a day, much less Silicon Valley or anywhere else. It’ll never be that. But anything is a massive improvement over what we’ve got now.
In the meantime, there’s a reason I live between Laramie and Denver. You’ve got to stay connected to the pulse of what’s going on or you fall too far behind.
