Opinion: A Call to Remember Rural/Mid America - 7/27/22
Out of my 632 LinkedIn connections that are not living in my hometown or college, 309 are currently living in either New York City, San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Chicago. That’s 49% of my network, and I bet yours reflects something similar, if not higher.
In May I was lucky enough to attend the 75th Cannes International Film Festival, a mecca for creators and storytellers from all over the globe. I took to asking a handful of non-Americans what they think of when they think of the United States, America, and Americans. Many took to describing New York or Los Angeles, and the lifestyles we have come to expect from these places. Not a single person commented on the lifestyles lived out by the some 46 million Americans living in “Rural America” (US Department of Agriculture). And that’s only counting people that live in towns smaller than 23,000 people (~Ypsilanti, MI population).
Many people that know me, know that I’m fascinated by rural and middle America, the lifestyle it affords, and the people who call it home. I’m so enthralled with this part of our country, that it’s the dominate theme of my first published book.
I write this to share a call to action, to remember middle and rural America when going throughout your everyday life.
In 2021, 69.7% of venture capital investment went to the Bay Area, New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles (Bloomberg). There’s nothing inherently wrong with this stat. With that being said, just as the foreigners who I interviewed at Cannes were blind to the promise and prowess of rural America, we as investors, politicians, and students, must not forget to remember the roots on which our country was built – the heartlands.
It’s not just me who cares about rural America either though. A huge inspiration of mine is entrepreneur Steve Case, who created the Rise of the Rest Seed Fund. Steve and his team took an RV across middle America and invested in hundreds of promising entrepreneurs, supporting a thesis similar to my own: there are thousands of brilliant entrepreneurs and builders waiting to be unleashed outside our major metropolitan cities. We just have to go looking for them.
If you need more convincing that rural America is worth paying attention to, just ask legendary investor and entrepreneur Warren Buffett. In May my friends and I drove across the heartland to Omaha, Nebraska to attend the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders meeting. While Web 3 NFT Projects and the latest tech unicorns were the talk of my Twitter feed, when I arrived in Omaha, I went from talking about blockchains, to tractor treads. In the day preceding the shareholder meeting, a handful of Berkshire’s portfolio companies setup booths in a convention center. Companies selling RVs, oil, lubricants, metal parts, fertilizers, and pet supplies dominated the showroom. All the networking events surrounding the shareholder meeting similarly focused on petrochemicals, fertilizers, and agricultural technology. It wasn’t sexy, but it was a slap in the face that demanded I pull my eyes away from the bright shiny lights of Silicon Valley.
If you still don’t believe in the potential of the heartland, I’ll leave you with two more stories from rural America. During my last trip to rural America, I traversed Texas and New Mexico. I met two incredible women who inspired me, Marta and Alex. These are their stories and why they appreciate living in rural America.
I met Marta living on the outskirts of Alpine, Texas, one of the largest ‘small towns’ we visited. Marta was a mother of three, and a grandmother of eight. She was born in Mexico, but her father moved her family to Texas when she was a child. She grew up outside of Alpine and never left. She commutes some thirty miles down the road to where she works, just so she can stay where she feels is her forever home. The nearest “big city” to Alpine is nearly 2.5 hours away.
I learned that Marta is friends with one of the candidates for Alpine’s next mayor. When I stopped by Marta’s house to interview her, I asked about the construction going on behind her home. She told me how her friend, the candidate for mayor, was building a drive through liquor store and restaurant behind her home. As she told me about the project, I noticed her five-year-old grandson running around the front yard. When I asked about the project and its potential to bring a lot of Alpine’s citizens into her backyard and disrupt the tranquility of the space she’d created here for her eight grandchildren, she chuckled. Although slightly worried about the noise, Marta was happy to see her friend succeed in his project, and even more excited to be at the new epicenter of her beloved town and her many friends and family that reside there.
Marta continued to tell me about the extensive family she had living right up the road. At this point, she had lost count, but something like 30+ direct and extended family members all lived right down the road from her in a small clustering of cul-de-sacs. Among many things, it became obvious that Marta appreciated a few key tenets of her small-town lifestyle.
1. The reduced speed at which life passes by and the intentionality that allows for in how residents live their lives.
Many of Marta’s children had fled Alpine in search of the big city lights. Marta, however, appreciates the more methodic pace of rural America. Things don’t move as quickly, and people take the time to get to know one another.
2. An intense sense of community that develops - everyone knows everyone and looks out for one another.
Marta described an environment of little crime. Her hypothesis for why: most citizens looked at one another as family. They looked after each other’s chiodren, sat in the bleachers together at the Friday night high school football games, and they all knew each other far too well to bring harm to the city.
Alex wowed me when I met her at the Mayhill Country Store. In addition to selling me quite possibly the best cherry cider I’ve ever drank, Alex told me about growing up in a town of less than 50. Her parents moved to rural New Mexico to start a farm and take on a life of ranching. Alex was thus born, quite literally, in the middle of nowhere. Mayhill, not much bigger than Alex’s town, hovering around a population of 50, was one of the smallest towns I encountered on the trip.
Alex described what it was like being a child with little in the form of organized entertainment and infrastructure (no movie theater, amusement park, arcade, etc.) A story deserving of its entire own article, I was bamboozled to say the least. What impressed me most about Alex though, were her plans and ambitions to innovate in her sleepy, middle of nowhere town.
Alex was excited to soon be finishing high school and moving onto a small 2-year college. After that she planned to transfer to a 4-year institution, complete a bachelors degree, and likely one day return to her small town to innovate on her parents’ agricultural business.
On my way into the general store, I spotted a flyer on the door advertising a rodeo, dance, hybrid event at a fairground not too far away that coming weekend. Disappointed I wouldn’t be around to attend, I asked Alex if she knew what it was all about. She didn’t just know what it was all about, she had been the one to orchestrate it. In its first year of operation, Alex had fundraised and partnered with a handful of local businesses to put on this event for a series of small towns in the vicinity of Mayhill. All the funds raised by the event and its attendees would go towards creating a scholarship, so high school students could follow in Alex’s footsteps to a 4-year university. It wasn’t just any scholarship though, to Alex’s knowledge, it was the first college scholarship that had been endowed to support her community of tiny towns in New Mexico.
Millions of people like Marta and Alex call rural America home. This article is just urging you to not forget they exist!