I’ve lived in Mississippi most of my life.
I spent 3 months in Shanghai and 6 months in Frisco, Texas. Aside from that, I’ve always lived in Mississippi, and for the last 8 years, Hattiesburg specifically has been my home.
That said, I was one of many STEM grads that figured I’d graduate here, leave the state for a high-paying tech job and come back a couple times a year to visit. When I graduated, all of the high paying jobs were anywhere else but here. In many cases, even remote jobs payed more to work remotely in other states instead of here in Mississippi.
What initially kept me here was the promise of well-paid remote work in a cheap cost-of-living area. Then it was family: I got married to an amazing woman and had two awesome kids. My whole family is here, and so is my wife’s. They’re healthcare workers, police officers, retired military, teachers and educators. They help watch my kids, pick them up from school, host dinners and go on vacation with us.
What kept me here even more is the promise that Hattiesburg and the state of Mississippi has, and what is at stake if we do it wrong. I learned about what is at stake when I failed launching multiple startups from the state of Mississippi. I am learning more and more about the potential we have every day.
The Problem
The problem is that I am an exception to a rule that is as obvious to any given Mississippian as the summer heat: we cannot keep young people here. Our smartest grads, our most ambitious builders, entrepreneurs, musicians, healthcare professionals, educators, just about everyone except folks in the service industry, manufacturing and logistics leave, and we aren’t really holding on to folks in those professions very well either.
Mississippi is known for a lot of things, but one thing we excel at is being at the top of the bad lists and the bottom of the good ones. We’re near the bottom of the country in education, in infrastructure, in average wages, in GDP, in healthcare outcomes and, yes, in entrepreneurship.
It’s not that we aren’t creating intelligent, capable and ambitious students. I graduated from the University of Mississippi with some absolute geniuses. Most of them didn’t stay, though. They left the state, at least in part because there is nobody here to employ them. I have judged several hackathons at the University of Southern Mississippi, listening to students present awesome entrepreneurial ideas they’ve worked on tirelessly over weeks prior. They don’t start those businesses, or if they do, they do it outside of the state.
The brain drain is killing us.
I don’t mean that melodramatically, either. We’re among the worst states in the country in terms of health outcomes. We have a poverty level rivaling most other states in the country as well. These aren’t easy problems to solve, but a lot of the causes can “simply” stem from our tax base.
The state of Mississippi does not have a growing or bustling tax base that many other states with a healthy tech sector have. Our tax base is shrinking, and it’s growing older as young folks leave and older folks age into drawing more money in retirement benefits than they’re contributing to the economy.
Our healthcare system, also struggling as a result of the brain drain siphoning Mississippi nurses and healthcare providers to other states, is increasingly strained by the aging population, alongside many of the other ailments in the state with some of the worst health outcomes, obesity and hypertension rates in the country.
I’m not saying that all we need to do to fix the demographic crisis and save old people is to build more tech businesses. I’m saying that the demographic shifts, tax base shrinkage and brain drain have to be fixed and one of the many ways we can help fix it is by stemming the flood of brilliant tech workers leaving the state, and giving them a reason to stay.
The Solution
The solution is simple: we just need to innovate more.
Notice I said simple, not easy. There are a lot of things that are holding us back from building a technology hub in the Hub City. There are also solutions to a lot of those problems.
As I’ve built startups over the last few years, I’ve begun taking note of a lot of the gaps along the way. One of the biggest ones is community, and that is where Hub City Hackers is starting first.
Community
There has not been a place for folks who are building tech, who are wanting to mentor folks in tech or who are interested in learning how they can join, start or fund a local tech startup in Hattiesburg. We don’t have a room to meet in. We don’t have meetups. We don’t really even know if anyone else in tech exists.
This has been a surprisingly easy problem to solve. Hub City Hackers had our first monthly meetup in mid-August, and our second one is coming up this week on September 3rd. I was really hoping for 5 people to show up in a conference room at USM for our first Meetup. I was hoping 3 of those 5 people would be attentive and engaged. I bought a few pizzas, put the word out on Nextdoor and crossed my fingers. Aside from that and 2 social posts from early partners, there was very little marketing.
We had 25 people show up at the first meetup, so many we had to bring in chairs. They ate all the pizza. Every last one of them was incredibly engaged, most of them even more excited about the community than I was. They stayed for 2 hours after I was done presenting my vision to talk about their background and how excited they were about Hub City Hackers’ mission.
We’re starting weekly meetups next (as soon as I can get a room big enough for it) and our next monthly meetup is on the schedule. Community is being built.
Now, we need momentum.
Momentum
There is currently no momentum for tech to be built in Hattiesburg. There are a few founders putting in a ton of leg work, and a handful of exceptional tech companies in the city, but as a systemic community, there’s 0 momentum.
This has to come next.
What this looks like is continued, repeated efforts to build startups, mentor founders and builders and create something awesome in our city. We can’t do this through a Discord server, a Facebook group or a once-monthly tech meetup.
Every week, HCH has the Weekly Standup. Folks send me updates on their work from the week, either on Discord, over EMail or in person. We trade lessons learned, ideas, struggles and successes with each other, and I highlight some of the major updates in the weekly newsletter. Part of this is to encourage folks to build - give me something cool to show off in the newsletter, and I’ll put your project’s name in front of investors and a growing newsletter audience.
But part of it is to encourage that momentum. We need that drive to build things that keeps us up at night, that ambition to succeed that drives the 2AM coding sessions, the 30th cold call or the 50th email of the day to prospective customers. It’s not a monthly pep rally that’s going to get us there, it is every day, pushing code, testing experiments, working with users, building marketing copy, designing a new interface and working harder than we thought was possible to achieve what we want to build.
Those are the kinds of founders that you spin up once and they build their momentum every day afterwards. That’s what we’re looking for.
Those founders, and this community, can’t do it alone. We need partners.
Partners
I am the rare founder that will look you dead in the eye and tell you that my project, Hub City Hackers, is not built for profit.
What we’re building is a community, a long term project meant to help folks build superspreader, hypergrowth tech startups, as well as sustainable services-focused consultancies. We’re going to need partners for that project.
USM’s Computer Science department and their Center for Entrepreneurship emerged very early on as early partners. I had a conference room reserved roughly 5 minutes after I emailed Dr. Lee telling her about my vision. The Center for Entrepreneurship sent me students, marketed the meetup and have served as fantastic early mentors for HCH.
We need even more.
Over the coming months I’ll be reaching out to venture capital investors to come speak and listen to pitches from founders in HCH, I’ll be reaching out to founders, entrepreneurs and angels who have already gone through the funding wringer or have funded companies themselves to tell their story. I’ll be reaching out to local businesses to help sponsor HCH and cover some of the costs, to provide space for meetups and time with founders to help guide their product roadmap. I’ll be reaching out to journalists to cover our story and mission, and local and state politicians to guide us and listen to what we need from them.
What’s awesome is that I know that when I reach out, it’ll be to a warm community of folks who also want Hattiesburg to succeed. The Hattiesburg community is one of the biggest reasons I’ve stayed, and it’s one of the biggest reasons I started Hub City Hackers. I’ve never met a community more willing to collaborate and work to improve the city they love.
(This goes without saying, if you want to be an HCH partner in literally any way… reach out)
Now, the obvious: funding.
Funding
This surprised me: Mississippi has a pretty decent amount of venture capital that could be going to founders.
We just don’t have founders.
InnovateMS, the largest VC fund in the state, has more money than they have founders to spend it on. We have universities that would love to pour some of their budgets into writing angel checks. We have wealthy individuals who have the cash to put into some venture checks as well.
We just… don’t have founders.
So when I say we need funding, we don’t really need capital. More money very often causes more problems, not less. A ton of venture capital sitting still in a bank somewhere doesn’t do us any good. What we really need, then, is founders making it to a stage where they’re ready for funding. We need to hook funding up to founders, make introductions and get the capital flowing.
We need founders.
Founders
This is the biggest need of all. We don’t just need community to come and hang out in a room and talk tech. We don’t just need momentum to get us excited about the next meetup. We don’t just need partners to give us a cool space to talk in. We don’t just need venture capitalists to come to our meetups and hear our pitches.
We need founders. Like, a lot of them.
We’re creating tons of computer science students, we’ve got tons of talent, we’ve got tons of intelligence. I’m working on getting them all in a room together, I’m working on finding benefits like API credits and free hosting, I’m working on starting a physical co-working space for new startups to work out of. I’ve got plenty of gears turning… but none of it is going to matter if we don’t get founders in the door.
So if you’ve got some crazy idea on how to change the world, we want you here. Hop in the Discord, join the newsletter, come to a Meetup or send me an email. I want to get you what you need to succeed.
I have massive plans for the future, ones I don’t even want to go into here because you’ll think I’m crazy. Regardless, you’re going to want to be part of it. I want as many people, organizations, companies and groups to be part of it.
If you’re a media organization wanting an interview, or just wanting to know more about what we’re about, send me an email. If you’re a company wanting to sponsor HCH, send me an email. If you’re a founder wanting to build something huge, send me an email. If you’re a dev, mentor, marketer or business person wanting to get involved but you don’t know how, email me.
We’re going to do huge things in Hattiesburg. You’re going to want to be part of it.