Screw the Valley by Timothy Sprinkle

Author:Timothy Sprinkle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BenBella Books, Inc.
Published: 2015-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

6

“What Kansas City’s growing tech density demonstrates is that the metropolitan area had a strongly growing technology sector prior to recent milestones, such as the advent of the high-speed Internet service potential of Google Fiber.”

—Dane Stangler, former director of research and

policy, Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation

KANSAS CITY IS A METRO AREA divided in two—one side in Kansas, one side in Missouri—with a small, two-lane residential street (conveniently named State Line Road) running north/ south along the state line. The neighborhoods in this area are vintage—dating to around the 1940s and ’50s—and filled with small bungalows and ranch homes: compact two-bedroom kit houses on tree-lined streets complete with sidewalks, gravel alleyways, and the occasional picket fence. It honestly doesn’t look like much at first glance—just a normal, suburban neighborhood; the kind of area where most people’s grandparents likely live. But hidden in plain sight among the young families, the small-time hair salons, and the retired couples, the neighborhood is, in fact, becoming home to one of the most surprising, effective, and thriving startup communities in the Midwest.

“So two vice presidents from Hallmark purchased this home with their own money,” explains Brittain Kovac, pointing to a one-story gray-and-white bungalow with a covered front porch and small driveway on the west side of the street, the Kansas side. Kovac is the semi-official tour guide for the Kansas City Startup Village (KCSV), a loose collection of about twenty-five tech startups that are based out of this residential neighborhood a few miles southwest of Downtown Kansas City. “They don’t live there; they have their own families, their own homes, but they purchased it to support the Village. There are four companies that work out of there and one person that lives there. The person that lives there is nineteen; he’s from South Carolina.”

Just up the block, on the far side of the street, there is a modest, white-and-maroon home that happens to be owned by Boulder, Colorado–based tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Brad Feld, one of the cofounders of startup accelerator TechStars. He bought the place sight-unseen in 2012 as a way to support the Kansas City startup scene, and, at the time of my visit, was offering the house up free of charge to a startup called Handprint, a four-person team from Boston that was developing an easy way for Web users to arrange for 3-D printing jobs online.

“He has pretty good relations with the Kauffman Foundation,” Kovac explains of Feld’s involvement, “so I think that just through that trusted network he decided to show his support for the area and the Startup Village. He purchased this home before he ever saw it. He came by about a month later; he did a presentation at Kauffman and they swung him by here on the way to the airport.”

Out-of-town VCs notwithstanding, the Kansas City Startup Village is an organic product of the local startup community, an entrepreneur-led, grassroots initiative to solidify the Kansas City ecosystem around a concentrated “neighborhood” of startups, most of which are operating out of what were once residential homes.

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