The housing cost of living in Silicon Valley could be diluted with the exportation of their technology to areas in the country without economic upturns. Flint, Michigan is one of those places on the map where investment makes sense.
April 13, 2018
By Seung Lee
Congressman Ro Khanna speaks from his office in Santa Clara, Calif., about issues facing Silicon Valley, Monday, March 12, 2018.
“I think we can have distributed networks of jobs, where these jobs don’t all have to be concentrated just here,” he said. “The digital devices have allowed people to shop, communicate and find entertainment in different ways. But the challenge is how are we going to allow people to earn a living in different ways as well.”
Having grown up on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Khanna constantly has the Rust Belt in mind. In February, he organized a tour with several Bay Area-based venture capitalists in a multi-city bus tour through Flint, Michigan; South Bend, Indiana; and Youngstown and Akron, Ohio, to encourage new tech incubators in these cities.
Khanna, who worked with Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan of Ohio to set up the tour, believes that these cities can become niche hubs of technology based on their existing strengths. For example, Akron and its nearby metropolis Cleveland can focus on health care technology because of its large health care infrastructure.
Khanna said the trip was productive, with one Flint-based startup incubator receiving $100,000 in funding, and may pave a way for Silicon Valley to want to invest in the future. Venture capitalists who joined the trip shared the same optimism....
...“I don’t see any downsides,” said Derek Sommer, founder of a Flint-based custom software company called SPUD Software. Sommer said he met with the venture capitalists when they were in town. “It’s a great market to tap. We do have the brains, the energy and the drive here, and we need that financial backing to take it to that next step. It’s a lot tighter community here than what I imagine in the Bay Area.”
Paul Knific doesn’t need to imagine. Knific, a Flint native, moved to the Bay Area for a few months for an internship in Sunnyvale. He grew homesick and experienced a culture shock living in a dense urban metropolis, where people commute to work in packed trains, not by pickup trucks.
Knific now runs a company that uses information technology to help sell fresh fruits and vegetables in Flint, a city still reeling from a water crisis in which more than 100,000 residents were exposed to high levels of lead.
“One way to combat poisoned water is providing nutritious food,” said Knific, who also attended the meeting with Bay Area venture capitalists. “The way we build companies is different here. Our companies don’t burn through a lot of cash. We have low overhead and we find a customer fit. We will use resources from California to scale up.”...
