Upper Hand

8Learning the Language of Innovation

Undividing the World

There were armored military tanks in Uptown Charlotte when I hopped off the plane from Virginia, following a pitch competition and press tour I was covering. The National Guard had been called to quell the protests flaring across the city in the wake of the killing of Keith Lamont Scott by a police officer in late September 2016.

I'd spent the better part of a year interviewing founders, reporting on innovative entrepreneurs and communities of color, working full‐time on contract at Google Fiber, and naively driving the narrative that we could think and build our way out of inequality and racial discrimination.

As the news flared, my phone blew up with text message after text message from friends, activists, and local city leaders sharing what was happening on the ground as I sat hundreds of miles away in the middle of what I thought was a shifting narrative.

Just a day earlier, I sat on stage across from AOL cofounder Steve Case, discussing what he termed the “Rise of the Rest”—an idea that business, technology, and the spread of venture capital dollars would have to trend toward expanding the distribution of wealth and access outside of big innovation cities and into the hands of more founders and talent of color and in cities across the heartland of America whose unique advantages were embedded in what they do best.

As I was developing my chops interviewing a bigwig in the tech industry, and feeling hopeful about ...