The co-founder of AOL has joined forces with J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” to promote entrepreneurship across the United States and seed investments in cities often overlooked by venture capital funds. In doing so, the two men have recruited a list of who’s who in business, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, to be part of their investment fund.
The fund is part of a larger movement to reimagine company towns, and a challenge for venture capital funds to look beyond California, New York and Massachusetts — the three states that receive 75 percent of venture capital in the United States.
“It takes a set of ingredients, including a comfort with new ideas and diversity,” said Walter Isaacson, the authorized biographer of “Steve Jobs” and a history professor. “It takes a willingness to take risks and even to fail at times.”
That is the magic of her city, Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle said in conversation with Isaacson and Case at the Cities for Tomorrow conference. The city reimagined itself from the 1962 World’s Fair and is the home of Amazon, Nordstrom, Microsoft, Starbucks and Costco — what Durkan called “small mom-and-pop companies that stay below the radar until they’re not.”
But on the conference stage, the discussion shifted from the benefits of rising cities to the reality of one rising sector.
“Even in the successful cities, the success masks this other part of the city that hasn’t risen,” Durkan said. “And we’ve seen that in Seattle, with the huge growth of tech and the new economy, but it masks some real displacement, some real lack of opportunity.”
The elephant in the room was Amazon. Across North America, 238 cities applied to be home for the company’s next headquarters, and last month Amazon selected Long Island City, Queens, and Crystal City, Virginia, for HQ2.
Case pointed to the other 236 cities as ones with real opportunities also awaiting them. Those are the cities that can really rise, he said.
“My hope is that the 236 that lost, if they take half of the energy they put into rallying their community, driving collaboration, and half of the dollars they were putting on the table to lure them, and refocus that on their startup community, they might create the next Amazon,” he said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.