Perception matters when building a community around high-growth innovation.
Buffalo must challenge its own tendency for humility if it's going to compete.
Keep Buffalo A Secret is a great rallying cry and speaks to the hidden gems that only locals know about.
It echoes the slogan of the last city I lived in that told residents to Keep Austin Weird. What I’ve seen from the people who live in these cities though, is a deep ambition for greatness, one that forces its residents to contend with the tension of holding onto what makes a city special and making room for change that will take it to where it needs to go.
I lived through that tension as Austin became one of the fastest growing cities in the country and one of the best for startups. Alongside this rise were many missteps- lack of city infrastructure, gentrification, displacement, dilution of culture and rising cost of living- that many derided in the regular refrain, “Austin’s just not the same anymore.”
Of course it isn’t.
While I understand the sentiment and have been taken in by the pursuit of nostalgia myself, no city is the same as it was decades ago and if it’s still thriving, won’t be in the coming decades.
I find myself making a lot of parallels to the startup ecosystem when this conversation inevitably comes up. The startup adage that you either “grow or die”, applies to cities too, especially cities that hope to position themselves as the next startup hub.
Buffalo has all the pieces it needs to become the next major startup hub. In just the last year, it’s been named a Top 10 most supportive city for startups by MarketBeat, identified as home of one of the top university entrepreneurial programs by Princeton Review and listed as a focused mover in AI by the Brookings Institute.
At the same time, lifestyle rankings reinforce the city’s appeal for founders: Buffalo has been named the #1 hottest housing market in the U.S two years running by Zillow, has appeared in the top 50 Best Places to Live list by US News and has been highlighted as Buffalo one of America's best new food scenes by Bloomberg and CNN.
None of that matters though if we’re not screaming it from the rooftop.
Austin grew because it campaigned to bring in new talent, entrepreneurs and investors. I heard the call and answered, as did a number of founders who moved there around the same time in 2018. Those transplants turned into ambassadors themselves, creating a flywheel of startup activity.
Talk to any founder from my NYC hometown or that lives in the Bay Area and they’ll eventually tell you that you HAVE to move there at some point in your life if you want to be a successful founder.
What do those cities breed people who can’t keep their city a secret? Because bringing in new ideas, perspectives and energy creates the core breeding ground for innovation.
We know that teams with diverse perspectives perform better, the same is true for cities. Learning and inspiration come from the mix of wisdom, tradition and experience that locals bring; and the immigration of culture and outside perspective that transplants provide.
Startups especially need that constant churn of new ideas and people. In NYC and the Bay Area, it creates a healthy competition where founders inspire each other and the strongest rise to the top.
It’s no surprise that NYC’s own unofficial slogan is “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.” That influx of people pushes people to be great.
The entire ethos of a startup ecosystem is built on the next big thing. This applies to technology, brands and trends in every aspect of the ecosystem, but it also applies to location. Founders want well-known investors on their cap tables, they want team members that have worked at recognizable companies, they put together logo slides of their press and customers.
In an industry that relies heavily on signals, a city’s positioning matters.
I’m not saying Buffalo should aspire to be like any of the cities I mentioned. Buffalo is special and unique in its own way and there’s a reason it’s drawn me back. But if we’re looking to build a thriving startup ecosystem, we can no longer afford to keep Buffalo a secret.
