Making the best of ‘Smalltimore’: Inside the RealLIST happy hour for rising startup founders

The 2025 RealLIST Startups happy hour in Baltimore is supported by Kaiser Permanente. Technical.ly is a free news resource thanks to financial partners like this Technical.ly client.

People who talk about “Smalltimore” hit on something crucial: The reality that nothing really happens unless people with common interests or passions actually come together to get things done. 

The corollary: Put yourself out there, and you’ll just start meeting people. Come at it with an ounce of curiosity and humility, and you might find your next job, investment, coworker or professionally useful skill. 

At its best, “Smalltimore” means Baltimore is small enough that you’ll start running into the same people again and again, probably even in different contexts. The barrier to entry can be way easier to clear in a city this small, where you don’t compete with millions of others for the same space and opportunities.   

On the flip side, “Smalltimore” allows people to keep operating in their own particular silos, whether that’s in the Johns Hopkins bubble (with its own myriad of silos) or in redlined Black neighborhoods. You don’t need to know about the next generation of software developers coming out of the city’s STEM high schools if you don’t concern yourself with hiring locally. The fortunes of a startup on the rise don’t matter if you work for a major private employer and never have to meet hungry entrepreneurs. 

We at Technical.ly have tried to be connectors across these divisions ever since we began focused reporting in Baltimore roughly 13 years ago. That’s why, last week, we celebrated our latest RealLIST Startups — our annual feature honoring the region’s most promising early-stage companies — with a happy hour that brought many of those winning firms’ founders together to mingle with others from throughout the local economy. 

Regional leaders and staffers from Kaiser Permanente, T. Rowe Price and the Sport & Entertainment Corporation of Maryland joined various innovation ecosystem players to celebrate these companies at Spark Coworking, a longtime player in this small-business scene. Remarks from Technical.ly CEO Christopher Wink and Kaiser Permanente vice president Gracelyn McDermott punctuated a night filled with the informal connections that help make “Smalltimore” something more expansive, beyond county and industry boundaries. 

Check out some photos from the celebration, courtesy of several of its attendees.