building a startup community deep in "Flyover Country"

I am one of fairly few people that graduated with a STEM degree and stayed in the state of Mississippi.

I’d like to give you some thrilling, heroic, self-centered story on why I stayed. The truth is, I tried to leave. I had every plan on jetting off to one of the “cool cities” to get a high-paying job, spend half my salary on rent in a small apartment, surround myself with brilliant people and work a cool tech job.

I didn’t, though, and a fairly big reason for that is my (awesome) wife. My family and her family as well as my whole family are all here in Mississippi, one of the poorest, deepest-red states in the country. We struggled with the decision to stay, but we quickly started a family, and we knew we valued our kids growing up with their grandparents and cousins close by.

So, I stayed.

I’ve worked remotely for the last 8 years, all in the cyber security industry. The pay has ranged from “very good” to “incredible”, enough to make up for 3 layoffs in 2 years. I can honestly say if I couldn’t have a salary like that working remotely, I probably would have made a different decision. We’ve been very blessed on that front.

My wife went back to school and got her doctorate to work as a nurse practitioner. I couldn’t have afforded her school, my kids private school and a mortgage on an old but very comfortable house in any of the big tech hubs. Again, we have been extremely blessed.

That said, this decision came with a lot of sacrifices. There are a lot of things that are extremely backward about this state. It can be extremely unwelcoming to LGBTQ folks. I see confederate flags just about everywhere i drive. The state has some of the worst health outcomes in the country due to obesity, lack of education and poverty. Many of the state’s politicians seem stuck tongue-to-boot to some of the worst folks in DC. Hattiesburg, the city I live in, is in the middle of the Brett Favre welfare scandal that rocked the state and has already sent a couple folks to prison.

It’s not great.

We’re also the poster child state for the brain drain. It’s cheap to live here and very cheap to go to college here, even for out of state students. We even have some really solid medical schools, cyber security programs and computer science departments. So it’s become very common for folks to go to college to get a STEM degree and duck out as soon as possible.

I do not want to make it sound like I blame the students for leaving. I tried to. The state has done very little to try to keep folks here.

Over the years, this became more and more frustrating. I had no community around me while I built startups and studied cyber security. I had no mentorship, and i was, in large part by my own fault, very isolated.

It came to a head as I watched friends in New York and Silicon Valley build startups with a community of geniuses around them. I went to my wife and told her we had to leave. I needed to be around builders. She very politely and very kindly and very graciously told me to shut the hell up. That’s not how she worded it, obviously, but she rightfully told me that if I was going to complain about the problems and refuse to become part of the solutions, I had no right to complain.

She was right, of course. I didn’t vote, I went to the occasional protest on my own, I hadn’t tried forming or joining any groups at all. I was just… complaining and not doing anything about it, while the problems continued worsening.

Hub City Hackers started right after that conversation.

Hub City Hackers, at the Time of Writing

We’re still very new. I hosted our first meetup in a small conference room in the computer science department at USM. I was hoping for 3 or 4 attendees, maybe 1 of which would be an active participant. We had 25 extremely engaged attendees, including the associate director of the Center for Entrepreneurship.

It turns out, we were all suffering the same problems. Lack of mentorship, lack of community, lack of funding. We all knew that the state is suffering from a lack of technological innovation, and we all knew there wasn’t any real reason for it aside from a lack of ambition and focus on fixing the problem.

We found out that InnovateMS, the biggest venture capital fund in the state, has literally tens of millions of dollars sitting around waiting on startups to fund. They just have nobody coming to them for funding.

Since then, the group has grown. Dozens on the mailing list and in the Discord server. Hundreds of web views in the first few weeks. I’m working with 3 departments at the university, venture capital folks in two cities and folks in city government working to grow the community. Already, we have a couple of very promising startups and technical services companies sprouting up and building momentum.

We have a very long way to go, but the progress we’ve made already is huge. I’ve got massive visions for this crew, and they’re pushing me every day to build it bigger.