An AOL co-founder travels by bus on a series of tours around the country in search of local entrepreneurship.
Steve Case, a co-founder of AOL, was one of the early internet pioneers. But he is not a creature of Silicon Valley. AOL, he points out in “The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places Are Building the New American Dream,” was based in the Washington, D.C., area, and many of the early tech firms, like Dell, were not started in Silicon Valley. Hence his conviction that successful entrepreneurship can happen anywhere.
To prove it, he launched an initiative called Rise of the Rest. Since 2014 Mr. Case has been taking a coach bus on a series of tours all over the United States to see local entrepreneurship in action. The tours feature what sounds like a mashup of “American Idol” and “Shark Tank.” At the end of each one, Mr. Case holds a public competition for 10 local startups and, in a “high-octane finale,” awards the winner a $100,000 investment. The book describes some of the people he met and the companies he learned about on his journey.
Continue reading the entire piece here at The Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Allison Schrager is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal.
This piece originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal