Phase Shift, Rise of the Second Cities.

The struggle of society to adapt to where the world is going and untapped Innovation capacity.

A few months ago, I read an article on PitchBook a while ago that was touching on ‘Work from Home” and the flight from the big metros. Things are changing for the better — being in NYC or SF is no longer being seen as a requirement. Those that are choosing not to live in those locations are (hopefully) no longer being seen as those who ‘could not cut it’ in the ‘real world’. The real world, and those that work hard to build, exists outside of those bubbles.

Around the same time I read a tweet thread from Chris Herd, I became super optimistic about what the future might look like, how post pandemic changes can lead us to a better and stronger society. In this thread, there are a bunch of things touched on.. asynchronous work — being able to do the work whenever and not needing to be ‘9 to 5’.. more diversity — diversity has been shown to produce better outcomes — ideas from outside the echo chambers make companies stronger. There are many things mentioned that I think would be beneficial to explore.

Call me an early adopter, my own situation reflects changes I made to my life pre-pandemic that were already inline with where things might be going.

I live in a small town. Eugene, Oregon is a great place to live and a great place to raise a family. I moved here in 1993 to go to school (actually to rock-climb and ride mountain bikes) and ended up not leaving. My commute to downtown is 7 minutes. Traffic during rush hour, if you could call it that, is a slowdown to 30 mph for about 3/4 of a mile over the Ferry Street Bridge.

The local area surrounding town is a combination of small pastoral farms and wineries. The Southern Willamette Valley is a picture perfect place to vacation, complete with covered bridges spanning pristine rivers and stunning vistas. We can be kayaking on a river or hiking in the woods in minutes.

I started a company here. My startup journey began in 2001, right after the dot-bomb and before the concept of accelerators or digital online communities existed. Information about how to start a company was hard to find. We figured it out, and then sold our company to our publisher, which also happened to be in Eugene. We grew that company and sold it.

It was a life changing event for many people. It was life changing for me. After a few years the parent company decided to move headquarters, and while some moved, and some departed to answer the call of Silicon Valley, many stayed.

I made the intentional choice to stay put for very personal reasons. At the time, in 2009, my children were 7 and 3 years old. I decided, that after 8 years of 80 hour weeks and feeling like I was always running, to slow down.

I spent the next few years mostly with my wife and kids. I was ‘there’ for some very important years. I volunteered at my daughters school painting sets for school plays — I went with my son to the park as he trained to become an ‘American Ninja Warrior’. We took long vacations. We hiked to see waterfalls. We flew kites at the coast. We planted vegetables in the garden. We walked both of my kids to school every morning (both the elementary and middle school are a 1/4 mile from our house). I would never trade those years for anything.

There comes a time in your life where you trade the nightly club scene for coaching soccer and school plays. I have no need to become rich famous for the sake of social signaling my success. I have more than I thought I would ever have. I don’t need more stuff, and if wealth is described as being able to be a master of how one spends their time, then I am, but that definition, very wealthy.

I am not a big city person. An introvert by nature, I was raised in a somewhat rural town in NJ. My childhood was filled with long solo walks in the woods, climbing trees, and weekends chopping wood. When I did live in a city, I spent most of my weekends engaged in pursuits that had me trying to get out of it for a few days.

I think that when you are young, you are somehow imprinted with the experiences of your childhood, and always want to return home.

Now, with my children a little bit older ( almost 18 and 14 respectively), I have more time to myself. My daughter is a young woman focused on starting a career in the arts. My son mostly plays Fortnite and gets annoyed when I want to hang out with him, (as teenage boys do).

I have never been one to sit still, and I am getting a little antsy and have an urge to build. Thoughts of a startup are never far away.

Knowing what it took to start and build a startup, I am a little reluctant to dive right back in and do another. I know the long term commitment it takes, and I am hesitant to subject my family to my absence and to force them to deal with a founder going through the experience of what it is to be a startup founder.

If I do another startup, I am going to shoot big. Very, very big. I have been, at least in my analysis, confronted with what seems like a decision to choose between living where I want to live and building what I want to build.

Given the current state of the world and the changes that are happening, the need to make the binary choice of ‘go big or go home’ can be transformed in ‘go big AND stay home’. I may have never ‘checked in’ to the valley scene, but I was just checking different boxes.

Right now, given the changes that are happening, I no longer feel like I have to make that choice. I can have both.

In Eugene, we have quite a few ‘boomerangs’. Boomerangs are the people that came home. Parents age, and in the later years, it is great to have grandparents connect with their grandkids and to reconnect with your parents as they face their twilight years.

With the virus creating a situation where ‘Work From Home’ has become a real option, small cities across the nation are experiencing an influx of boomerangs as they flee the metro areas — returning home, and bringing all their experience, knowledge, and networks with them.

Collectively, the amount of talent and experience that exists and it presently underutilized is, I suspect, MASSIVE. I feel like I am working at 30% of my capacity. I know that I could do a LOT more- I am having some trouble finding an outlet for the energy. I redirect this energy into my hobbies, but I would be, I think, more happy directing that energy into building something. I know of others that feel the same way.

Right now, we will be heading into ‘virus recovery’ mode. Because of the virus, we have seen many ‘cracks’ in the system- In government, in healthcare, and education. We also have the ever present issues around climate change that are not being addressed to the extent they should be.

How can we harness the collective brainpower, experience, and networks to revitalize our economy? I know SO many that have so much more to give but have accepted ‘less’ in terms of work and challenge to gain time with those they love. I find this maddening. Why can’t we as a society find a way to tap this underutilized resource?

I actually believe it is essential that we look for a way to tap this if we are to recover from covid and to chart a more inclusive path to our future that, ideally, shares the prosperity that I have experienced with more people.

I think it is imperative that this rebuilding, and the harnesses of our collective skills and desire to build a better future be distributed a bit more equally around the nation. In these times of increased connectivity, we don’t need to have geography divide the haves from the have-nots.

I unfortunately don’t have a clear, bold solution, just a recognition of a problem. We need to rebuild, and we certainly have the capacity, and in smaller metros, an over-abundance of ability. We need, in my opinion, programs that got us out of the great depression, but focused on the new economy — building a new infrastructure that allows ideas to flourish and allows participation from everywhere.

I was recently reading Peter Drucker’s Post-Capitalism Society as part of my own exploration of where we are as a society, to try to figure out where we might be going.

I was struck my Drucker’s clear definition of innovation. Which he characterized as the organized abandonment of everything we do. I like better the more optimistic framing using the the Japanese concept of Kaizen , using the broad and less specific meaning of “change for better”.

It is time to rethink, restructure, reformat, and change things for the better. We need to abandon the things that are no longer working and replace them with things that are.

Getting more people engaged in the change and contributing all their full capacity is essential. We will fix the growing inequality not by rolling back the clock to the economic model of the last century, but by innovating, not just in technology, but in governance, education, and attitude.

We are not going to see SF and NYC shrink and become less productive. I think they will thrive, and my hope is that we will see other areas start to rebound, and participate a little more equally in what I hope becomes a new renaissance.

I am all in.