We met Billy Bicket recently and we were impressed by the experience and skills he brings to Memphis – a city he chose after considering several others as well. Prior to moving to Memphis, he has been leading the design and development of capacity-building and community-based programs around the globe for over 20 years. Over the last eight years, he had brought his private and public sector experience to a social enterprise in San Francisco called TechSoup Global. As Vice President of Community & Platform, his team built social platforms and programs for nonprofits in 42 countries. He architected global frameworks to enable local community leadership through campaigns, convenings, and community-building events. Learn more about his experience and what others say about his work here.
He and his partner, Laney Strange, wrote an illuminating, must-read column recently in the Commercial Appeal about their new hometown:
Many of the founders of startup businesses we know gave little consideration to their choice of a home-base city. In their eyes, the right locale is so obvious that there’s barely a need to raise the question at all.
Entrepreneurs need talent, access to funding and a network of supporters who can get behind a promising new technology or idea. You can get all of that in all the places startups still flock to: San Francisco and New York City, Boston and Austin, D.C. and Chicago.
And Memphis? Memphis is attractive to entrepreneurs, too. Its allure is more subtle, more nuanced than the usual-suspect cities. But the desirability of Memphis for startups is real and has the potential to grow substantially in the coming years.
In fact, the unique appeal of Memphis is why we left San Francisco to launch our digital creative studio here in July.
As creative technologists living and working in Silicon Valley, we had been directing our energies into an international social enterprise based in San Francisco and Warsaw. We launched and cultivated networks for social entrepreneurs, designed and built technology platforms and organized technology events in the U.S. and Eastern Europe.
When we decided to strike out on our own, the natural place for us to be was right where we were. But we wanted to make an objective, well-analyzed choice, not a lazy one. So we did one of our favorite things, which was to make a list. Here’s what we were looking for:
1) The bustling factor: The new city would have to have a population between 500,000 and 800,000 — enough people to create some density and a “hustle and bustle” that is essential for most small businesses, without being so overcrowded that you can hardly think.
2) The startup factor: The new city would need a rising startup culture, to ensure our business would have access to services such as co-working space, relevant meet-up groups and access to potential funding sources.
3) Affordability: We’re not looking to make a zillion dollars. Our sights are set modestly, but we still need to be able to live off our profits. In a city where rent doesn’t cost an arm and a leg every month, this is much easier to accomplish, and there’s less pressure to be an overnight mega-success.
4) Running infrastructure: We’ve both recommitted to running in recent years to ensure we’re taking care of our health as we get older. Our new city had to have some runnable roads and trails, so we’re not stuck risking our lives on a 40-mph roadway with no sidewalks.
5) Diversity in race, age and class: Cities without diversity, where you immediately know everyone’s story, get boring fast. We wanted to be able to reach different types of people with our business and also engage them in our personal lives.
6) Availability of higher education: We wanted the buzz of a college environment and the opportunity to take advantage of the infrastructure and services that colleges provide.
As we analyzed the factors we had identified, it was easy to see that, for us, Memphis beat out San Francisco or New York. Memphis may not make every entrepreneur’s where-to-launch top-5 list, but it definitely made ours, and last summer we followed our noses to the boogie-down South.
And so here we are, but we’ve already learned that our list overlooked some significant factors. After years in the Bay Area, we didn’t know that the bits and pieces of culture that make San Francisco an easy place to live — coffee shops on every corner, Wi-Fi in every bodega, bike lanes and consistently beautiful weather — would be part of Memphis’ downside.
And we didn’t realize that in this small-town/big-city hybrid, people count on face-to-face connections instead of information that is online and shareable.
The first time we rolled into town, back in May, we figured we’d set up at a coffee shop while sorting out our next steps on the fly. After driving for 30 minutes without seeing a coffee shop, we realized we’d have to look one up, and then — wait, what do you mean, you don’t have Wi-Fi?
Later we hopped on our bikes to check out the town, and — oops, where’d that bike lane go?
We needed to find a storage space and get the oil changed, but Yelp was whisper-quiet. We needed to find somewhere to live, but the Craigslist ads were from real estate companies instead of people.
It turns out that Memphis is a face-to-face town, which has had real implications for our business. As we strive to build a network of trusted services and partners, it’s taking much longer than we expected to find them, and to let them know we’re here.
In some ways the face-to-face factor is a great strength of this city, but it can be limiting as Memphis positions itself to attract and integrate more small businesses from across the region. The face-to-face tradition needs to be balanced with a wired-in culture that is essential to attracting young digital entrepreneurs.
We landed here anyway, and we’re glad we did, but if similar businesses are to follow suit, Memphis needs to cast its small-town charm against a digital background that creates an environment for technical vocations and creative workers to thrive.
Billy Bicket and Elena “Laney” Strange are co-founders of the digital creative agency Memphis Punch Studios.
