| A Covid silver lining for one part of the country |
| | Good morning,
Over the past year, something has changed in the Midwest and South: access to a deeper pool of startup funding.
Venture capitalists who once spurned Indianapolis because they couldn't get there and back from the West Coast in a day are now airlifting cash into the city--not to mention Atlanta, Miami, Denver, and other towns that were never on their shortlist before. "When you have a total and absolute moratorium on physical travel, yet those dollars are being deployed, almost overnight things change," Kristian Andersen, co-founder of Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha, tells Inc. "We've been breaking down this legacy venture capital model."
That's exactly what America Online co-founder Steve Case, the CEO and founder of Washington D.C.-based VC firm Revolution, has been doing for the past six years. Case started Revolution to fund innovative startups but kept running into the same problem: Too many VCs lived on the coasts, meaning that firms in Boston, New York City, and Silicon Valley were sucking up 75 percent of the VC money. Out of that experience came Rise of the Rest, a campaign that kicked off in 2014 to bring attention to the heartland via a splashy annual bus tour.
Investment is only part of the plan. Case thinks more cities need to replicate the Silicon Valley ecosystem, in which new companies attract new talent and not only create new products but also spew out more new companies. Since Covid-19 hit, more and more VCs have started to agree with him. Read our story to learn how cities formerly known as investment deserts are becoming startup hot spots--and what might come next.
Note: Join us at the virtual Inc. Vision Summit, which starts today. Steve Case will share his insights on the future of tech and work on Thursday. |
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From refugee to leader
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