The people who change things share the same reflex. They act before they feel ready. They build the room instead of waiting for an invitation.
Buffalo once believed greatness was something that would return someday, waiting for validation from somewhere else. But it wasn’t. It was something the city had to decide for itself.
About 20 years ago, the city began to embrace a different rule. That you don’t wait for permission. You get to work. You see it in the converted warehouses that look like they were willed into existence. You see it in the backyard startups running with $1000 and a folding table. You see it in the murals that turn grain elevators into landmarks.
This place now doesn’t ask the world to understand it before it creates something it wants. It just builds anyway.
When I first started designing for Buffalo organizations, I felt something I didn’t feel in other cities. People weren’t chasing trends. They weren’t trying to look like San Francisco or New York. They were chasing believability. They wanted things that felt earned. Like the brand or the website or the product had grown out of the soil here instead of being flown in by a design agency three hours behind us.
That shaped me more than any design book ever has. Good design doesn’t try to impress. Good design belongs. It fits into the fabric like an old brick in a new wall.
Settled. Solid. Inevitable.
Here’s the tricky part. You cannot fake that. You can buy templates. You can mimic aesthetics. You can swap in a new color palette and call it a day. But you cannot automate belonging.
Belonging has to be built with your hands, with your time, with your story. I think about the early days of Open Coffee Club or Startup Weekends. Back when a few people in this city looked around and realized something important: nobody else was coming. Nobody was going to build the ecosystem for us. Nobody was going to pave the way or make the momentum.
So folks took action and did what Buffalo needed. They built the room. They created the initiative themselves. Those early meetups had scrappy energy. The coffee wasn’t great. The venues were local shops. The chairs didn’t match. But there was clarity in the air. People were tired of asking who was going to step in and help Buffalo grow. They realized the answer was sitting in the room.
So they stopped waiting.
That was the genesis of a new local ethos. A whole generation of builders who believed that if you want to change the trajectory of your city, you don’t write a proposal.
You pick up a bag.
You give up another morning.
You pour one more cup of ambition at 9:30pm.
You show up again and again until something starts to exist that wasn’t there before.
I’ve worked with founders here for 20 years. The ones who make real progress share the same reflex. They act. They move. They build before they feel ready. They make things real instead of theoretical. I’ve seen the opposite too. The hesitancy. The waiting for someone else to grant permission.
That’s not how Buffalo has grown over the last two or three decades. Our wins have come from people who aren’t afraid to go first.
That’s what pulls me into projects like Series B. It’s not just design. It’s civic storytelling. It’s a platform built with the same spirit that built those early rooms. A belief that Buffalo isn’t a comeback story. It’s a continuation story.
This city doesn’t need permission to innovate. It just needs a small group of people who are willing to push the next domino. And if I’m being honest, that’s what excites me most right now. We’re in a moment where the energy feels familiar. People are gathering again. People are experimenting again. You can feel a new chapter forming between the lines. It reminds me of something we say all the time at Radial Ventures. If you want something to exist, stop asking who is going to do it. Be the person responsible.
A couple months ago in a group thread with friends, someone asked where the AI meetup was in Buffalo. I laughed. I already knew the answer. Same place it has always been. It’s wherever the first person says alright, let’s get together and do it ourselves.
Eyes up. We’re just getting started.
