Equitech Tuesday ended after 200 meetups. Now, organizers want Baltimore’s input on what’s next.

A long-standing gathering for Baltimore’s startup founders and supporters, Equitech Tuesday, ended yesterday, but its organizers say there will be something new to replace it come autumn.

“It’s more of a graduation than a sun-setting,” said Kory Bailey, the meetup’s creator, as the literal sun set over the high-rise outdoor space where several dozen entrepreneurs, meetup organizers and other innovation scene players celebrated the last Equitech Tuesday meetup.

Bailey, his colleagues and various attendees spent a chunk of the evening sharing stories about what the meetup had done for them, both professionally and personally. One, founder Dexter Carr Jr. of Game4Good, even noted how he met his fiancée, Fem Equity leader Adeola Ajani, through Equitech Tuesday. 

While this meetup will end, some kind of programming will return in the fall, according to Bailey, chief ecosystem officer at the Greater Baltimore Committee (GBC). To that end, he encouraged Baltimore ecosystem members to fill out a short survey that will help the organizers determine what people want going forward. 

The patio, which offered sweeping views of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and downtown skyline, sits adjacent to the offices of the GBC, an economic development organization and private sector booster whose footprint includes the city and six surrounding counties. The space and circumstances of being there underscored the meetup’s tremendous evolution since Bailey first developed it over four years ago. 

From Zoom rooms to the innovation economy’s front door

In the spring of 2021, Bailey was still in his early tenure as the relationship development director for the then-new ecosystem-building organization UpSurge Baltimore. 

He and his team organized roughly two months of “speed dating” Zoom meetings to link founders, funders and program leaders. This went in-person on May 25, 2021, when UpSurge hosted an “Ask Me Anything” event at Impact Hub. The event then dovetailed into a recurring gathering of innovation, creative and civic professionals at the Venezuelan restaurant Alma Cocina in Station North, Bailey said.

Soon after, the gathering called “the Future of Baltimore” took on the name “Equitech Tuesday.” The moniker drew on the “equitech” concept that UpSurge promoted throughout its work, in which inclusive principles are inextricably connected to a tech scene’s vitality. 

“We were trying to give more awareness to this equitech vision — to build an ecosystem that was inclusive of the entire city, and not just certain institutions,” Bailey said, “and that was building technologies that could actually have a profit [and] create equity, opportunity and reduce barriers in the world as well.” 

A lot has changed since those early days. The meetup grew, moved to Guilford Hall Brewery on Greenmount Avenue (among other one-off locales), partnered with local events and organizations and drew attendees from throughout the broader region. It even celebrated the 200th meetup a few weeks ago. 

UpSurge evolved during that time, too. The organization’s staff increased, with Bailey becoming its CEO in late 2023, and extended its equitech vision to an accelerator with Techstars, a Maryland-backed entrepreneurship fund and recurring studies of the sector. It also played a key role in the successful bid to designate Baltimore a federal Tech Hub, as well as the ongoing GBC-led process to solicit millions of dollars from the Economic Development Administration. 

This year, it completed its merger with the GBC, which put UpSurge’s team and work under the other organization’s umbrella. Bailey said that this integration with an organization undergoing its own rebrand, as well as the broader evolution of an ecosystem with meetups and offerings that weren’t there in 2021, offered a chance to assess what the community wants going forward while bringing different stakeholders into the fold. 

To that end, a new steering committee with various private sector and local civic players will explore how to best transition UpSurge’s work. 

“Now that we have the opportunity with GBC to maximize the partnerships that have been built over the last 70 years with the corporate community, and really bring startup voices and leaders into that activity and in closer proximity with them,” Bailey said, “we believe that we can create some more event series and convenings for impact. And we just want to have the summer to be able to reorient the strategy towards that.” 

Equitech Tuesday concludes against the backdrop of the anti-DEI stance of the current presidential administration, from which the GBC still seeks Tech Hub funds. Bailey did not link the ending to this political moment, but did say the principles behind the equitech lens won’t disappear from the work to make Baltimore more economically robust and independent of federal resources. 

“Equitech has always been about, ‘How do we include everyone in the economic progress of the region?’” he said. “That will not change.”

Fill out UpSurge’s survey and scroll down to check out more scenes from the final Equitech Tuesday.