While luxury car salesman Bernie Moreno attempts to corral local leaders around a “Blockland” initiative, (Moreno’s vision of making Cleveland the “national epicenter for all things blockchain”), Stack is now proposing a “Betaland” initiative, his vision of transforming the region into a “vast proving ground for innovation.”
What that means and how it will take shape is still unclear. Stack proposed a series of City Club forums to plan and implement this vision. But the pitch is basically that Cleveland should lure start-ups to the region not with funding but with consumers, local guinea pigs who would be selected to test fledgling products and services; and with a bountiful supply of free and/or cheap labor, courtesy of the “world’s largest startup intern program”
Speaking as if the program already exists, per local custom, Stack writes that the Betaland intern program “leverages our 200,000 regional university students to assist startups and simultaneously prevent brain drain.” The hope would be that these local interns go on to staff the new start-ups or start their own.
What’s ironic about Stack’s column is his suggestion that his vision is more “all-encompassing” than the others that have been circulating in the months since Amazon declined to name Cleveland a finalist for its second headquarters and leaders have been scrambling for something new and grand and unprecedented to get excited about.
Even the economic development conversations themselves have been unprecedented, in Stack’s view, which is why he says the region has a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to change the its trajectory.
“The outgrowth of these [economic development] conversations is a flurry of great but largely disconnected ideas,” Stack writes. “All these great concepts are largely based on recruiting and cultivating more startups.”
Stack proceeds to introduce a disconnected idea based on recruiting and cultivating more start-ups.
Not to keep going back to attorney Jon Pinney, but isn’t this sort of thing precisely symptomatic of the “egosystem” he criticized in his June City Club speech? It sure doesn’t seem all that collaborative for Stack, less than a week after leaders gathered at Cleveland.com HQ to brainstorm ideas for the Blockchain conference, (tentatively scheduled for the first week of December), and to hear Pinney’s pitch for transforming Tower City into a blockchain tech campus, to take to the Plain Dealer and propose a “new and more all-encompassing” vision.
How many new and all-encompassing visions can the region sustain? How many in a single week?
Maybe Blockland and Betaland can co-exist, but the impression one can’t help receiving is that these two grand and all-encompassing visions are in competition. Even their stupid names are the same, the lazy and self-aggrandizing [Something]-land formation, as if the very city will be remade in the image of their fleeting idea.
Incidentally, Stack’s column appeared alongside another — all part of a lively ongoing discussion grouped under the header, “Cleveland’s Future” — by Brad Whitehead. Whitehead is the Executive Director of the Fund for our Economic Future, which put out the Two Tomorrows report earlier this year.
Two Tomorrows presaged Pinney’s City Club talk in many ways. But it had concrete plans attached: It suggested that the region should prioritize job creation, job preparation and job access as pathways to economic progress. It also, (uniquely, if I’m not mistaken), emphasized the importance of racial equity in all economic development discussions moving forward.
In his piece Sunday, Whitehead seemed to anticipate Stack’s column. He said that good ideas were important, but that acting on them — “greater civic alignment and commitment to implementation at scale” — is what’s needed most. Big audacious ideas mean jacksquat, in other words, if we don’t bother to follow through.
“Perhaps what we really have,” Whitehead writes, “is a cultural problem masquerading as a strategy question.”
This article appears in Jul 25-31, 2018.
Hi there! I am COO of Flashstarts & Charless business partner. We are already doing this work – at a smaller scale, and have tested out this concept over the past 5 years. For instance – right now we have 28 interns supporting 11 teams from across the globe. Those teams are working with corporate and invidual beta users. So….unlike others in our region- we have already started to do this work. The announcement was to allow more people to sign up and collaborate. In fact- we are also working with Moreno & Pinney to ensure that we do not build more silos. We are a lean startup accelerator so we depend on the press to help us get the word out and we have little interest in being the lone genius. All good things come from collaboration! Thanks for helping to spread the message even if it has a stupid name.
Why doesn’t the city just open a nail factory or two? Highly labor intensive, literacy not required, and at worst, sell at cost. If the company loses money, it would be less than what we pay for the welfare of non working people, and the cost of policing and jailing them.
To think smart people are going to move here is just foolish. We have 50 years to get people to learn to work, then we can think about attracting PhD’s.
All these “big idea guys” are just fishing for public funding. 28 non-paying jobs is not a winning strategy. And, not all good things come from collaboration. There are many lone inventors breaking ground that can’t get any support or financing here.
Every day the paper reports another local company being snapped up by private equity and getting deconstructed. Today, Forest City. So let’s stop the bleeding before more big ego driven ideas. Let these guys run for mayor if they want to keep talking.