Look to the Heartland

"How Cincinnati Salvaged the Nation’s Most Dangerous Neighborhood" (Politico, 2016)

The spiritual hollowness of an all-consuming "greed-is-good" mentality has spread beyond Wall Street into other business settings, and in the startup mentality it's found fertile ground.

Here in the Bay Area we pay lip service to work-life balance, but in order to get to the top of the mountain many find that they have to cast aside the weights that are slowing them down, i.e., marriage, children, family, religious observance, and education outside of their specialty.

Efforts to right the ship, especially if they come from a Christian sensibility, don't get heard because of the scorn for traditional values that permeates this region (an exception is made for Christians who mouth their fealty to the anti-structural-racism, social-justice, and group-identity objectives of progressivism, but that is a topic for another day).

To find a place where religious solutions are given a sincere trial one has to go geographically and culturally remote fly-over country, a place like Cincinnati.

welcome to the worlds of both Christian and startup evangelism—worlds that, as recent trends in the American Midwest demonstrate, are increasingly intertwined...as the demographics of tech have become incrementally more Midwestern, those regional outposts have also set about remaking the industry in their own likeness—particularly where matters of faith are concerned...

Kristi Zuhlke

But perhaps the most interesting part of the Midwestern convergence of faith and technology, the most salient for believers and nonbelievers alike, is the way people there have begun to question the culture of tech entrepreneurship—and try to make it more humane. “Being an entrepreneur, you go through some very dark moments,” says Kristi Zuhlke, the 37-year-old cofounder of KnowledgeHound, a Chicago-based data visualization startup. “Raising funding is very lonely. You're basically convincing everyone that your idea is amazing while they constantly shoot you down.” It's the sort of thing that can make people question their faith, she continued, “or, if you don't have a faith, you start to clamor for hope that there's light at the end of the tunnel.”

Cincinnati, which has become one of the Midwest's leading tech cities, has also become a hub for people trying to find some relief from the loneliness at the heart of an industry that prizes unending drive and competition.

Cincinnati reached its nadir in 2001, when after decades of business closures and white flight, unarmed black teenager Timothy Thomas was shot and killed by police. Riots ensued, dozens were arrested, and $millions in property damage occurred.

Today Cincinnati is on its way back (Democratic Mayor John Cranley: “the Cincinnati Miracle") with a tech-based revival fueled by public-private-nonprofit seed capital.

Its resurgence has been paralleled by the growth of Crossroads, a Cincinnati-based church with tens of thousands of members who attend services physically and online. Many Crossroads attendees are themselves entrepreneurs who have created business-counseling-financial networks of kindred spirits.

American innovations in technology and culture have often come out of the West, but I suspect that in the 21st century we will be looking to its heartland.