No one owns Baltimore’s tech scene: We are still the ones we’re looking for

Leaders were leaving — leaving town, leaving companies, leaving a life of organizing technologists for few thank yous and little pay to start families.

Over cans of Natty Boh, we asked ourselves: Who will take up the community mantle and carry Baltimore forward? It takes time and commitment, passion and drive, knowledge and comfort with everyone and a willingness to connect them.

After talking through the potential names for a while and telling stories of the last half-decade, we arrived at an answer.

We are the ones we’re looking for.

We said this not because we looked around and thought we were the only people who could do it. Rather, it was because we were two people choosing to consider ourselves and realizing not just that we could do it, but that we wanted to do it. Many others could find their own inspiration, and we agreed to trust that they would join us, too.

Over a decade spent reporting on Baltimore with Technical.ly, this was one of many moments that helped me recognize that the tech community’s strength flows from its people, and I had become one of those people.

I arrived in the role first and foremost as a journalist, which meant that I saw my job first and foremost as observing out-of-the-way stories of people with specific expertise, and interpreting what they did in language that would allow the rest of the world to understand, and hopefully, learn from what they did.

So I set out to learn about technology in Baltimore, as though I had recently landed in this port town from thousands of miles away. It helped that I had.

A culture of creativity and connection

It didn’t take long to learn that people in Baltimore always had a knack for finding solutions that work around inefficiencies in the system and use the tools we have in our hands. Before the sharing economy, people in Baltimore shared. They had already been hacking rides for years before Uber and Lyft worked out a regulatory framework to operate in town.

Baltimore has also had no trouble blending art and tech. The underground music collective had its own lightshow app then, and now, the experimental theater doubles as the lab for a software company that lights up the Olympics. The local NFL team works with the local virtual reality studio, and a former Ravens player runs an animation studio.

Outlook OVFX’s Trevor Pryce (second from left) during a BIW 2022 panel. (Courtesy Baltimore Innovation Week)

I never thought it was a mistake that my first love — punk bands — and startups shared lots of similarities. Small teams came together to work on big dreams, nurtured by committed organizers and housed in unassuming venues owned by generous business people that accidentally became legendary. Over time, bands break up and startups shut down. The names change and so do the lineups. The guitarist from one band wants to work with the singer from another. The chief engineer of one startup finally decides to launch a company with her friend who works at Northrop Grumman.

With all of this movement, the one constant is that no one owns the scene. Some rise to become leaders for a time, but they move on, and that sustains it. In my hometown, punk bands still play in basements for small crowds and gas money. In Baltimore, technologists and entrepreneurs still gather for monthly meetups and annual award ceremonies. You can check back in and find that the faces and locales may have changed, but all of the activities you remember still happen.

The scene remains, and pushes forward

Scenes are also unmistakably grassroots while constantly teetering on the edge of being overtaken by people with tons of money and little understanding of why it all matters. Outsiders with big plans for change can be viewed with skepticism. Newcomers can get in, but you have to show up, show us that you care and demonstrate that you get what we are trying to do here. Then, all of the doors will be generously opened for you.

Baltimore’s tech community has many parts. Companies and investors. Incubators and labs. Universities and hospitals. Over the last 15 years, it got so big that we at Technical.ly always struggled with how exactly to define it — and where its limit lies. We turn to data as a tool, but the answer always exists in the stories of people and the experiences we share.

For those involved, the Baltimore tech scene has always been wrapped up with the moments where a self-selected few from across those varying sides came together.

Consider the events with little agenda, where food and beer were provided and conversation followed. There were informal gatherings such as happy hours at Betamore and ETC, sunrise networking at TechBreakfast and SocEnt Breakfast, countless meetups with endless pizza sponsored by SmartLogic and parties like #notatSXSW. Startup Soiree offered content that helped entrepreneurs learn, and a connection point to creative disciplines beyond technology. Equitech Tuesdays has taken up the mantle in recent years.

The premise is simple: Show up at the same place every week. Catch up with old friends and make new connections. Sometimes there are special guests or themes, but little else is needed. That’s as it should be.

A scene from an Equitech Tuesdays gathering. (Courtesy UpSurge Baltimore)

It was at the hackathons and community organizations where you worked on something outside of work, and where the passion came through. The Baltimore Hackathon was a place to work with new technologists, while the Digital Harbor Foundation’s rec-to-tech center and computer science classes Code in the Schools were where to share skills with youth. Social entrepreneurship-focused events like Hack for Impact and the Abilities Hackathon offered room to discuss challenges of those not often considered and build with purpose.

It was the new events that put innovation on the map, but weren’t actually startups themselves. The early days boasted BohConf, Startup Weekend, Ignite Baltimore, TEDxBaltimore and Art Bytes. Then it grew to Baltimore Innovation Week, Hack Baltimore, Beer n’ Bots and Open Mic Pitch Night.

The premise is simple: Show up at the same place every week. Catch up with old friends and make new connections. Sometimes there are special guests or themes, but little else is needed. That’s as it should be.

These multi-day events weren’t companies themselves and, for the most part, didn’t employ anyone. But they were crucial to Baltimore’s economy. They’re where founders met each other, where ideas turned into MVPs and products turned into companies. You could write an entire oral history of Startup Weekends alone, given how its organizers and attendees went on to become leaders. It birthed Parking Panda, Allovue, Team Password and Mailstrom — all of which went on to raise millions or be one of the few local companies to exit or become sustainable tech businesses. And you could write another history of how those weekend events gave way to accelerators like Accelerate Baltimore, DreamIt Health Baltimore and, now, Techstars.

It was even the informal gatherings that didn’t have an Eventbrite page. Talk to technologists at these events long enough and you’re bound to find out about how they get together to run and work out in the mornings. They gather around dinner tables and sit on barstools. They see bands at clubs or taste whiskey at each others’ homes. This is where relationships are built.

Building from the bottom up

Going to all of these events and becoming close with the people involved helped me understand that I wasn’t just a journalist. I was one of those people deeply involved with the scene, and the relationships built within it are what lasts. Events and programs end. Products get bought and sold. Offices and incubators move. People endure, and they find a new home.

This is the bottom-up approach to building an innovation economy. Companies consist of people who come together around a passion to build something better than what exists now. They start by solving a problem that they observe where they are, and grow by figuring out how to solve it for a larger group of people.

These people are already here. Attracting them doesn’t require an ad campaign, or winning a beauty pageant against other cities.

Inside Accelerate Baltimore’s 2018 Demo Day. (Technical.ly/Stephen Babcock)

In Baltimore, we’re still figuring out how to bridge the grassroots with the institutional. More universities and corporations are now involved in the tech community, and the grassroots continues to seek the best way to interface with them. Over the years, more people have stepped forward with big ideas about how to transform the city’s economy and give technologists a home. Some have succeeded, some have become memories. That cycle will continue, but we must learn the lessons.

Too often, newcomer businesspeople and staid institutions alike start by anchoring these initiatives to construction of a new building and not talking to those who were developing community for decades. They open the building, but often find its reason for existing later. In some cases, they’re unable to connect a seeming market gap on paper to the living community that’s actually here, and the space ends up empty.

They too frequently show up by declaring themselves the center of Baltimore tech. They ask how they can bring people to their initiative, rather than what they can give the city. The scene welcomes newcomers, but you have to give before you get. Show up with a plan, talk to the leaders to understand what they seek to accomplish and follow through on putting forward what they say matters.

Lead with generosity, start from a willingness to learn and you’ll earn trust. It may take more time than you expect, but you’ll go further in the long run. You don’t get to come to your first show and say that the music sucks, and you don’t get to show up to your first meetup and say what’s missing. It’s not yet yours to improve.

These people are already here. Attracting them doesn’t require an ad campaign, or winning a beauty pageant against other cities.

To find grassroots energy, we don’t have to turn back 15 years. Some of the same community groundswell of the early 2010s returned with the onset of the pandemic that opened this decade. People from different groups organized to meet the needs being observed. Response work spawned bigger initiatives. What started as handing out baskets to businesses gave way to a virtual accelerator to provide them resources, which then moved into a building to house them.

It was especially notable that many united around the cause of closing the digital divide, adding a civic bent to the activities of building products and forming initiatives. Many of these initiatives arrived to meet the moment, and won’t go on.

In truth, they don’t have to.

That’s true of any part of this community. The people will change, there will be new leaders. Companies will start and fail. Coworking spaces and accelerators will open, move and shut down. We’ll tell stories of the people who connected us and those who never felt quite right. Some will move to a national stage and continue to inspire us, while others will disappoint us. We’ll run into some people at various events around town, even though we didn’t mean to, for the rest of our lives; others will leave and we’ll never hear from them again.

Technical.ly will take on the big job of attempting to chart it all. Some reporters will move onto other publications, others will work in a different industry or make the jump to a startup, like I did.

Change is inevitable, but the scene endures. Everything that starts is reborn as something else. The music doesn’t stop. The ideas don’t stop.  What matters is that we keep building from the bottom up. That we stay grassroots. That we stay punk rock. That we recognize the strength in ourselves.

We are the ones we’re looking for.

In February 2009, Technical.ly published our first article. Fifteen years later, we're still here — but a lot has changed. We're celebrating our anniversary with a look back, and a look forward.