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Ross Baird’s new baby boy was born on the 4th of July, an auspicious precursor for his new book, which is filled with love of country and solid suggestions for reviving places outside the venture capital hotspots of the Bay Area, Boston and New York.
Village Capital and a handful of other investors are actively looking for companies to back in places like Cincinnatti, Des Moines, Tulsa — and Charlottesville, the home of the University of Virginia, where Baird went to college (see Baird’s piece on ImpactAlpha this summer, “After Charlottesville, does impact investing even matter?”). I learned from the book that there’s a word for such love of place: topophilia.
The decline of entrepreneurship is also hurting job-creation and community health. Small and medium-sized companies produce the bulk of new jobs and local companies are more likely to support Little Leagues and local nonprofits.
“The jobs that we are losing for average middle-class people are not coming from automation or offshoring. They are coming from increasingly consolidated big companies and a dearth of startups,” Baird told me in our interview. “If you’re worries about jobs in Tulsa, you need to think about the businesses forming in Tulsa. Those are the firms that are going to employ people.”