Why Big Omaha
The chef Daniel Barber loves to talk about “the food that your food eats.” In order for your food to have nutritional value and, more importantly, be very tasty, it has to grow in an environment where those same qualities of nutritional attractiveness are present. The soil a tomato grows in has to be full of beneficial bugs and micro nutrients for that tomato to become ripe, red and luscious. If you grow your own food, you have to start by growing your own soil.
When I moved into my house, I had a lovely back yard. There were fruit trees, bamboo, flowers — a creek running down the middle. I also had a large patch of dirt in which nothing would grow. the landlord had built a retaining wall, about 2 feet tall, and about 12 foot by 12 foot — and put into it fill dirt from other projects. The soil was hard-pack clay. I considered this soil as ‘dead’. It was a dull grey mound that stored heat in the summer. It was the hard earthen mound that the dogs loved to nap on. Nothing could grow in it and there was no way for water to penetrate it. It was from this sad mound that I learned what dirt means.
I was pretty sure that, if I was going to grow anything on this spot, I would have to dig out all of this ‘dead dirt’ and replace it. Over the Spring, I would pick at it, and plant various things. And watch as those various things did poorly, despite the compost I packed around them.
My ignorance about soil was rewarded with many lessons. Chief among them — dirt is never ‘dead’ dead — it needs to be fed. Through a process of soil amendment, I broke up the hard clay. I stirred in compost and sand and ground shells. Onto that I sewed clover to fix the nitrogen levels. Planting legumes is always the first step in creating soil that lovely things will grow in. It also creates a root system that helps keep the soil broken up, so water can penetrate.
A year has passed since that effort, and the dirt is rich and loamy. I just pulled a massive amount of volunteer growth out of that earth — the clover, but also comfree and borage, wild herbs whose seeds found purchase. The borage brought the bees. There are worms and bugs now — this soil now has the potential to be a cradle for my garden. It is a rich, diverse landscape, capable of supporting a diverse planting of things, all of which will grow dense and rich and lush.
The metaphor is this; Big Omaha is a signifier that there is a diverse and verdant economy happening in the prairie states. Not only is it attracting people from San Francisco and LA and New York, but it is pulling in a group of young, native entrepreneurs who, in a previous generation would have left the area for richer climes.
I don’t know what precipitated the change — how an economic diversity began to take shape in the region — but it did. It came from arts funding, creating a vibrant cultural landscape. It came from the vision of someone like Warren Buffet, who refused to leave his home state. It came from big corporations who moved their call centers to the plaines — because the accent is ‘neutral’ — and bringing with those call centers, tech jobs. These are certainly some of the seeds that started the change.
Also — and this is a weird observation — but I will make it — and I will compare it to Ireland in the early ’90's. There was a removal of shame on what it meant to be from Kansas, or Nebraska or Iowa. Instead of a young person moving to the coast in an effort to erase that history, young people have been embracing that heritage — celebrating their culture.
One of the speakers at the Conference, Dr. Jennifer Jones (EntrepreneurSHIFT) spoke of mirror neurons — that how you feel will be felt by those around you. In terms of this area, you can feel how people feel about Omaha (and Kansas City, etc) They are excited to be there. Exciting things are happening as a result. People with big dreams are no longer graduating from the University of Nebraska and moving away in order to start companies. Hudl, a company that helps sports teams, from Highschool to pro leagues, video tape and create player analytics, was started by some grads from UN. Rather than move away to start the company, they wanted to stay close to home. The people I talked with from Hudl all said they couldn’t hire fast enough. I talked with one new hire who moved to the area from D.C.
Aaron Cass formed ACASS systems last year — a lifelong roadie with a brilliant idea, brought that vision home to Omaha. I spoke with him last year, when he was just getting started. He showed me pictures of what he was building— a year later, he has several employees, and is international.
I’m getting ahead of myself a little bit here — I just wanted to create some context around Big Omaha itself. See - Big Omaha starts before the actual event begins. For me, it started on the Uber ride from Ebberly Field. Talking with the driver who had this fantastic idea, even a working prototype. He was driving an Uber to pay medical bills, and trying to find a way to find a backer for his project. He wasn’t just driving a car, he was dreaming big. And Smart.
I told him about Big Omaha and gave him some pointers (not that I know much more — ).
Opening night at Big Omaha could be considered a flat-file. Sponsors, attendees and speakers all meet on the same floor — no one really knows anyone else. Everyone mingles and talking to new people is kind of a sport. I ended up speaking with a lot of the folks from AIM — the IT non-profit that bought Big Omaha last year.
I talked with a lot of people that night, and I was introduced to many more. There was one lone hold out who I tried to introduce myself to, who gave me a very cold shoulder. It was remarkable not for the rudeness of the gesture but for the weirdness of it in the midst of so much openness.
The Feels
The conference itself — I was asked what I would bring back to my work team from the conference. That is a challenge — the speakers were diverse, the companies represented were equally diverse. And the predominant message from every speaker pretty much boiled down to The Feels.
Themes of Fear, Communication, Small Ideas becoming Big Ideas. Big Omaha this year felt like it was about the importance of doing, rather than the importance of succeeding. We all want to succeed, sure, but fulfillment comes from doing — facing fear, facing inertia, facing civic policy, and continuing. Speaker after speaker, regardless of the way they got to the message said, basically: You can start a company to make money, sure, but that’s a very different set of choices than starting a company because you have an idea you have to share.
At a tech conference, talking about The Feels rather than focusing solely on the technical side of doing is a dicey thing. It is too easy to get into the maudlin and the sentimental — to get into cheap plaudits and cheap answers. But speaker after speaker effectively delivered The Feels with real message: Success Breeds Success, Failure Also Breeds Success wrote Dr. Jennifer Jones.
Marc Hemeon started with a video of surfers dropping into giant waves, and wrapped it up with quotes from Thomas Merton: “We must make the choices that enable us to fulfill the deepest capacities of our real selves.”
Jamie Tworkowski sat on stage, at home with the giant nerve endings of depression and talked about the nature of shame. It could have been hapless and maudlin and easy, but he sat in that vulnerability and allowed a room full of people to do the same.
We forget we are animals, in the end. And have highly developed senses. We know when something is out of alignment in our environment. Gavin DeBeckers “The Gift of Fear”, while not about starting a company, touches on the same sense of animal spirit that the Big Omaha event is about. Communitee. Growth. Honing and Trusing your instincts and leaning in to integrity.
The last speaker, Elle Luna, author of The Crossroads of Should and Must (easy to find on Medium, and now in bookstores) elaborated on that topic. There are many shoulds, but really only one or two things we MUST do for ourselves. We can all have a job, a career and a calling. In an ideal world, all three are one. But the three can be mixed like a recipe to adjust and refine what each of us is in a community.
I have enough history, now, in the world, to find something like Big Omaha something other than inspirational. It is that — but it exists outside the old corporate theme of good enough. Big Companies used to survive on that — Good Enough. Hoping that the customer’s need for the product will outweigh the annoyance they have with that same product.
Sitting in a room full of people who are itching to build something better, who are listening to person after person exorting them to be great. To know that communication within and without is a key factor to success and that each user, each customer, each client is a personal relationship and that THAT relationship is paramount to success. — Musashi, the swordsman wrote in the Book of Five Rings: Treat many adversaries as one. Treat one adversary as many — no client is an adversary certainly, but no client is a cookie cutter. Remember too as you build a business, that you are helping your community of users do the same thing.
We are all building a garden. We are all feeding the soil for another generation. It is good to be reminded of this.
