This is not a love note.
And it’s not because I don’t love this place I call home, nor the world I’ve helped cover for the last three-and-a-half years. Technical.ly gave me the chance to see Maryland’s biggest city with new eyes, to dig deep into parts of where I live that I hadn’t yet seen. I got to take this enhanced ecosystem-focused lens and dig deep into parts of Baltimore and, later, DC, Maryland and Virginia that I didn’t know existed.
Through all these geographies and their tech-related threads, I found stories of resilience, hope against the odds, latent genius and exceptionally driven people trying to make their marks in a competitive, fast-evolving set of industries.
To those who opened their brains, hearts, offices and term sheets to me since February 2022 — and the coterie of excellent journalists that trusted me with their skills, sources and words through that time — my gratitude knows no bounds.
But this is no homage. Instead, it’s a call for you, for us, to do better.
This is no homage. Instead, it’s a call for you, for us, to do better.
We’re not doing poorly, to be sure. The preponderance of meetups, accelerators, grants, investments, new buildings and all manner of ostensibly good news affecting anybody involved in this ecosystem suggests some forward momentum.
And despite the bile the federal government’s hurled over this region, from the rapid-fire layoffs to the real and possible military deployment in our cities, y’all keep coming through with news about your products, hires, achievements, programs — all signs that even if we were rearranging furniture on the Titanic, you at least see a future beyond the present. And I’m grateful for your telling us about them, even when time and capacity kept us from covering everything.
But problems big and small don’t disappear just because you don’t think about them, or a PR rep or board member tells you not to talk on the record with a journalist. They linger just out of sight, waiting for the chance to ruin your day before jumping right back toward the margins. And they always come home to roost.
I’ve written this admittedly solipsistic piece because they came home to roost inside Technical.ly, too.
Today is my last at Technical.ly. Despite the publication’s successful fundraising throughout the regions we cover, increasingly and principally through the support of regional economic development agencies invested in telling their startup ecosystems’ stories, we didn’t get enough support soon enough in Maryland, DC or Virginia to keep me in my role overseeing coverage of those areas.
Our CEO, Christopher Wink, who made Baltimore Technical.ly’s first market outside of Philly over a decade ago, would tell you our model is successful despite this hurdle, and cite the remarkable news of an expansion (look for that soon) as proof. He wouldn’t be wrong, and if we trust successful founders’ prognoses, few wins are more exceptional than keeping a media company alive in the 21st century for over 15 years.
Still, and these often public-private funders’ support notwithstanding, there’s no getting around how the federal government’s slash-and-burn economic strategies trickled down to them, and then to us. Economic development organizations, alongside the foundations and private companies that might’ve funded us more in the past, cannot support Technical.ly the way we’d hope. Never mind how much they appreciate our coverage, tell us how important we are to the ecosystems — the money’s just not there right now. And, so, neither am I.
If you read anger or resentment in my words, it’s not toward any specific target. Trust that it doesn’t really rest on some wish that, say, the Greater Baltimore Committee or Northern Virginia Tech Council matched their boosterism by funding our work telling their regions’ entrepreneurship stories to Technical.ly’s large, industry-relevant audience.
Instead, it rests on one priority: the truth. Not the spin, not the cynical attempts to minimize a problem, but the absolute truth. Whether or not it’s actually subjective, in this era of misinformation and social media influencers and news outlets squandering their goodwill, is ultimately irrelevant. We all need to do better at the truth.
That brings me to my overriding question: What kind of world do you actually want to build?
The conversations I’ve had with many of you — at meetups and panels, afterparties and dinners, in email threads and LinkedIn DMs — suggest your interest in an economically robust and ethical world. A world dynamic enough that we don’t need to rely on the government to keep people employed, where the region’s universities do more to help than hurt that economy, where any individual or institution’s self-interest doesn’t compromise our collective uplift, where one person’s win doesn’t invariably hurt someone with way less power to get that win.
In other words: A world so rich with potential that when our leaders say it’s possible, we don’t simply wait for them to disappoint.
An inability to treat the truth as a thing to be molded, a hand to deal in the constant chess games life and work force us to play, remains my Achilles heel. Even now, the weight of what to say or exclude from this piece, the opportunity costs risked to my career and relationships, makes my chest tighten. I’ve lost sleep over some of the things you, your PR reps or others tell me or my colleagues off the record.
I wouldn’t say any of this if I didn’t believe in sunlight’s power to disinfect. And I definitely wouldn’t say it if I didn’t know so many of you to be good, decent people who truly care about improving where they live and work.
To that end, a few parting thoughts from this special perch.
Describing people as economic widgets dehumanizes them
This tendency is understandable, and you’ll surely find Technical.ly articles that do it. It’s sometimes a good idea, since money talks and people who believe the false idea that immigrants take jobs from US citizens might feel differently if they knew how quickly their economies fall apart without those immigrants.
But people who need to justify someone’s humanity with economic analysis misunderstand the source of humanity. And if the right data convinced them, suffice to say, we wouldn’t be in this situation.
Call me radical, but I personally do not care at all how much my possibly undocumented neighbors pay in taxes, how well they know JavaScript or what they do for their communities. They could check none of these boxes, and I’d still despair when ICE deports them to parts unknown. I know plenty of US citizens who’ve quiet-quit their jobs, or have trouble holding one down; I don’t want them disappeared, either.
This logic doesn’t just fail immigrants. Using Black people’s high entrepreneurship rates as some evidence of prospective funders’ return on investment doesn’t actually lead to more Black founders getting money. The same goes for women, or any other group for whom the numbers about their economic impact, evidenced in study after study, never materialize as real support, or, say, equal protection under the law. If anything, that logic backfires, as US history evidences.
Those who would restrict the rights of dispossessed people don’t find compassion just because they see money left on the table. If they did, companies that depend on H-1B visa holders’ labor wouldn’t align themselves with an administration hellbent on scaring them away.
So go ahead, commission as many reports as you want about their economic contributions. But we know it’s never enough.
DEI initiatives are flawed. Protect them.
In my previous job, I covered a few diverse hiring initiatives at law firms, trying to ascertain what the push for diversity, equity and inclusion meant as a response to a policeman murdering George Floyd and subsequent global unrest. At least one firm had so wide a definition of diverse groups that it included veterans, who are a kind of minority these days. Another firm with international offices hired a chief diversity officer whom they wouldn’t let me interview after I asked how they could ensure representative hiring in countries where, say, any LGBTQ attorney they hired could end up imprisoned for existing.
In tech, like other fields, the DEI push didn’t enable lasting change, and the narrow-sighted, flashy displays of priority didn’t help. A preponderance of white and Asian male leaders throughout the sector didn’t suddenly step down so a Black woman could run the company. Even with some halting progress, the underrepresentation remained dire for Black workers and women when the EEOC last explored it.
Our own CEO suggested that DEI failed because of its top-down implementation. I’m inclined to disagree, because the policies don’t come down by the barrel of a gun — there’s no incentive for any company to stick to DEI promises beyond its own economic logic about DEI’s benefits (which, if you read the above section, is the problem). Tell me if I missed this, but nobody’s ever tipped me about a Salvadoran, nonbinary founder who turned away all these white male candidates because they hated white men. Not in Charles Village, not in Mount Pleasant, not anywhere.
These programs’ structure and implementation rarely engendered confidence. But now, even bland DEI isn’t possible. We had the chance to really make this economy work for people who’ve seen their wealth-building destroyed by violence and racist policies. And we threw it away.
Now, the people in this presidential administration actually took a hatchet to everything that even smacks of DEI, with even our military — that great regional employer, whose jobs and contracts employ so many of our friends and family — scrapping anyone and everything Secretary Hegseth doesn’t deem worth protecting.
But Sameer, if we don’t take a wide lens or cut the DEI lingo, we’ll end up like the Fearless Fund and can’t help anybody! Dude, that was gonna happen anyway. And just as crackdowns on Palestinian solidarity protests didn’t restore all of Columbia’s cut research funds, being toothless doesn’t protect you.
Is a toothless world the one you want to build?
Some other things that don’t feel like ‘innovation’
- Saying you want a dynamic economy, then putting money into university spinouts, biotech, defense and all these other legacy industries that already got heavy funding without helping people on the aggregate (and maybe even destroying their lives).
- Saying you want a dynamic economy, then welcoming Big Tech firms and their contested science with open arms. Bending over backwards for titans of industry is actually pretty played out.
- Trying to grow a tech ecosystem in endemically disconnected places where one internet service provider reigns supreme, where children have to organize so a multinational gives them better internet. Literally as I write this, my browser’s slowing down; you think full-stack developers will flock to your locality for this?
- Championing the defense sector in an era where the best tech, already profitably deployed against the rest of the world, gets turned inside our borders to destroy our neighbors’ lives
- Disingenuously celebrating the value of artificial intelligence and data centers, with refrains like, “Data centers create jobs” and “AI won’t take your job, but someone who knows how to use it will.” Anti-AI hysteria frustratingly misses the ways AI truly helps, and personally, I want to understand it better. But it’s way less harmful than pretending AI doesn’t already threaten jobs, jack up your energy bills or hurt the environment your kids (or someone’s kids) inherit.
What moves us forward: honesty
A friend once recalled having gone to a regional economic development event, and hearing a person who worked for a suburban agency say, frankly, that she didn’t want to see companies move to Baltimore City. To her, a rising tide from Maryland’s economic engine didn’t lift the boats she cared about.
Pretty messed up, IMHO. But at least she was real.
Too often, we’re afraid to be honest about the problems we face. The strategies we don’t think work, the entities that wave around a lot of resources but don’t seem to do much with them, the appeals to collective uplift that barely cloak self-interest, the developers clearly building stuff for rich suburbanites.
But I know you see these problems, because you’ve told me about them. I’m certain that Kaela, Maria, Katie and the rest of the Technical.ly team that’ll keep covering this region will shine a light on so much more. But we won’t need to shine this light if we’re actually committed to building a world that shines on its own, without the cynicism and wink-and-nudge bullshit we think works. And the stakes have never been higher.
So, I ask you again: What kind of world do you want to build?
Let me know if I can help with it — I’m looking for a job.
