I have been wondering why metro Kansas City is home to a lot of interesting projects: Open Source Ecology, The Urban Farming Guys, Google Fiber. For a mid-sized city, it has a maker space and a Ruby User's Group. But what's in Kansas City?
Lots of artists and tech people in a small community where it's possible for everyone to know each other an work together on interesting stuff helps.
Add in a bunch of rich people who don't have to spend a lot to live luxuriously and get bored easily means a lot of cutting edge stuff gets funded that you wouldn't expect.
And then you have a culture of giving back that includes the Kauffman foundation, which is the 4th largest foundation in the US and focused on education and entrepreneurship. They us KC as a testing ground for a lot of their pilot programs in teaching entrepreneurship. So the city has more startup resources than just about anywhere else.
But the city has long been a testing ground for new products and services over the years due to having a lot of basically isolated areas that mimic demographic conditions in all other parts of the country. That was part of the reason for the google fiber coming here, and the fact that as it spreads across the country it will end up following railroad right of ways to keep expansion costs down. And KC being a transportation hub in the middle of the country makes this a natural match.
You have to realize that it's basically the entertainment, financial, and technological hub for about 30-40million people living within an 8 state radius. So there are a lot of things centered here that normally couldn't be supported in a city of the same actual population.
Kauffman Foundation, great BBQ, an innovate sports franchise (Sporting Kansas City playing in probably the most wired stadium in America), Stowers Institute for life sciences doing basic research into curing cancer with world class scientists, built on a star line which creates public-sector competitive pressures which businesses can play to their benefit. Huge tdevelopment alent engines in Sprint, Cerner, Garmin and access to talent from Omaha, Des Moines, Lincoln, Columbia.
It's not SV, it's not Austin, but it has a huge reach for a lot of talent and it is starting to spawn dividends.
We have a lot of biotech & life science investment here, too.
Our Ruby talent pool lost some talent with the Google acquisition and subsequent moving of a local company, but we're back up to 40 at our Ruby group meetings twice a month. We have the Ruby Midwest conference and other developer conferences. Lots of opportunities to meet and hack with other developers.
I would totally offer up my basement, but I'm just outside of the first round of fiber rollouts.
Tax-write-off wars and the Big 5. Awesome.