Below are my notes, and video, from the remarks I offered to kickoff the second day of our Technically Builders Conference, which also doubled as the closing of the 15th annual Philly Tech Week. It informed this story we published on Technically. My slides are here.
Starting in 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club was a regular gathering of tech enthusiasts in northern California.
The group was made famous for inspiring Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. But hundreds of computer clubs emerged around the country then. The Philadelphia Area Computer Society (PACS), for example, was first organized in spring 1976.
You don’t have to care about a few dozen computer nerds getting together 50 years ago. How they did has shaped the work we do, though, and has a few lessons for our future.
Today is the last day of the 15th annual Philly Tech Week Presented by Comcast, led this year by 1Philadelphia and featuring 50+ events across the city. It is also the close of the Technical.ly Builders Conference, where we gather entrepreneurs and ecosystem builders from around the country to think about storytelling.
To pull this all together, today we’re looking at the biggest reason we all do what we do: Giving more people their shot at prosperity. Their shot at starting a company, or advancing their career, or leveraging technology for good. In policy and intellectual circles this gets called “economic mobility.”
Economic mobility is best understood as the likelihood of any given person ending up better off than their parents. Better off can mean different things to different people but because the data is available we most often mean: Do you earn more money than your parents did at your age?
This matters so much because it is at the very heart of our sense of fairness — how can most people get their shot. In a moment, you’ll hear a discussion about how entrepreneurship can affect economic mobility. Then, a discussion on the role tech jobs and skills play in economic mobility.
Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s updated research from last fall is being heavily relied upon in Philadelphia, and in many cities around the country right now. Good thing.
The big headline from Chetty is that economic mobility rates vary widely, from state to state, county to county, even at the neighborhood and block level. The most straightforward prescription he gives to improve economic mobility is income integration, where rich, poor and middle class meet each other. Housing, schools, social networks and information.
Economic mobility for a given place, then, is another way of answering: Do rich and poor people live near each other, go to school together, have overlapping friends and access similar information? Most big Northeast and Midwest cities are getting worse at this – Philadelphia got especially poor marks among big cities.
So for anyone working to improve economic mobility, a good self-reflection is: Where do you live, where do you and your kids go to school, who are your friends and who provides information in your community?
Here is where I take inspiration from early tech organizing. Lots went wrong with the early days of computing. But the lesson from those earliest computing clubs was that the compounding interest of regular, small gatherings can change our world. They weren’t industry events. They were gatherings of people who became friends who had a shared interest. There were small costs. People with graduate degrees and without high school diplomas came together to better understand new, exciting and complicated technologies.
Today we call this ecosystem building. The company behind Meetup.com puts out an annual report. In 2019, every one of the top 10 most popular meetups was tech and entrepreneurship related. In 2021, they were all friendship and outdoors related. Last year, many were still people doing sports and hobbies together — but there was a rise in groups focused on practical uses of AI.
Many of them were humble gatherings of people from many different backgrounds coming together to better understand new, exciting and complicated technologies.
We at Technical.ly have always taken this spirit – we fight like hell to keep our reporting from going behind a paywall. God’s honest truth: I got a text last week from a North Philadelphia native who had just gotten what is at least the third job he attributes back to Technical.ly. Freely available information, low or no cost ecosystem events over time, outreach to new communities and, crucially, still engaging experienced professionals too.
That’s the heart of healthy ecosystem building around the country. This is the bedrock of Philly Tech Week as a melting pot, and it’s at the very heart of 1Philadelphia’s work.
Yesterday at the first day of our Builders Conference, I introduced Technical.ly’s first analysis of the effects of storytelling: tech and startup ecosystems with a dedicated news resource got 60% more coverage than peers without one, and they generated startups worth twice as much as those without one.
Lots of complex policy and big economic development strategies matter for economic mobility of course. But time and again the bottom-up change happens with people intentionally gathering and welcoming each other. It’s ecosystem building. It’s what Philly Tech Week has been about for 15 years, so it’s heartening that in this sliver of one economy — representation has slowly changed.
Economic mobility is shaped by where we live, where we go to school, who our friends are and how available information is.
Technology, entrepreneurship and economic development has lots to say about that.