This Baltimore tech exec is using improv and ‘activation energy’ to build community

After 13 years living here and growing up in a nearby suburb, tech executive Barry Wright is doubling down on Baltimore.

He’s currently chief of staff at Noom, a New York-based health and wellness tech company, and was previously a product manager at Spotify. But throughout it all, he’s made it a priority to stay in Charm City.

It’s a possibility enabled by COVID and post-COVID-era changes in office culture, he told Technical.ly.

“The remote work options were numerous [during my search] and I was able to stay in Baltimore, but still move into a role that was developmental for me,” said Wright.

Beyond his choice to live here, Wright stays engaged with the city as the cofounder of Highwire Improv, a local organization using improvisational theatre to build bridges with local communities. In tandem with this focus, a part of his resolutions for 2024 is to learn more about and work with as many Baltimore neighborhoods as possible.

Wright recently shared insights drawn from discussions with other Baltimore tech folks and a contact of his at Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures. The conversations centered around the challenges startups face while establishing themselves in the city. He emphasized the importance of maintaining connections and going to meetups. While staying social isn’t a technical skill, it ultimately can help people find a role or develop the skills to get a role.

These conversations and reflections relate to Wright’s own work to stay enmeshed in an ecosystem where he lives and works, even if his company isn’t based here. He believes that these meetups and connections can help retain talent locally.

“If there’s not options for people with a robust tech community here, people might not feel like they can make the leap to bring stuff here,” Wright said. “So that’s been really interesting to me and thinking about, you know, how can I stay connected with various tech communities here? I’ve been going to you know, things like Code & Coffee.”

As the cofounder of a company at the intersection of creativity and community,  Wright has provided applied improv training for corporate organizations, including Baltimore’s World Trade Center Institute, Expii in Pittsburgh and Crossbeam in Philly. His experiences with all aspects of this work helped shape his views about geography’s role in connectivity.

“It’s been just awesome to go into individual neighborhoods in Baltimore, and meet with people, you know?” he said. “[It] increases accessibility, it increases kind of a depth of connection for people. And so, thinking about two very different sides of the same coin around geography, like how do we make sure that people can work globally while living in Baltimore, but how can we make sure people can also work super locally? And you know, figure out the right balance between those two things.”

Wright, a member of Co-Balt Workspace, said that outside of formal meetups, folks are using apps like Slack to say, “Hey, I’m co-working here today.” It’s a phenomenon he called “activation energy” and thinks could help folks build new habits in 2024 and beyond.

“It’s just, like, hard to get people in the habit of doing these new things,” said Wright. “And so my sense is that there’s a lot of people trying to do little groups here and there. I think people don’t always consider that [small meetups] as an option.”

He said that a local directory of all those things happening in Baltimore might be worthwhile for people who want to know that people are meeting up.

“The other thing I’ll say is: Space is just so challenging for small groups to come by,” he added.