Originally published in Business Insider

By Tim Schigel

Steve Case’s new $150 million venture fund dedicated to the flyover states is great, tangible proof of the tech world’s interest in bringing the rest of the country along for the economic growth that comes from the innovation economy.

I support what Steve Case and J.D. Vance are doing and have had the pleasure of meeting with them during their visits to Cincinnati. It’s a great addition to have a fund like this to provide capital with connections for nascent startup economies in Middle America.

But there is a less obvious gap for us to leap here in places like Cincinnati or Kansas City that is just as critical: it’s a lack of startup experience in the general business culture.

We have lots of big company experience, we have lots of incredibly smart people, and we have experience in big complex industries such as healthcare and logistics. We have Ivy League degrees and Nobel Prize winners.

But not many Midwestern business people have had that rocketship growth experience; the visceral sense of the pressure and speed of g-forces when you take a $1 million startup and turn it into a $1 billion-plus business.

I think of it like a fighter pilot experiencing the pull of g-forces for the first time. They train for it, they prepare for it, but until they live it for real, fighting against the force of gravity as they struggle to control their airplane, they cannot truly understand what it means to work and succeed under those conditions.

Most entrepreneurs in the Midwest haven’t experienced what hyper growth looks and feels like. They haven’t worked at venture-backed businesses or had that experience modeled for them. They work at large, established corporations and, even though they might have a growth mindset, they’ve never felt the heavy g’s.

I’ve been there before, and it really is like riding on a rocket ship. You’re under tremendous pressure, you’re moving incredibly fast and even a small mistake could pull you off course or cause you to crash. Those that succeed know that they can’t lose their cool under pressure, and they know that as long as they can stay buckled in, they’ll eventually reach the escape velocity of exponential growth.

Experience — not talent

Let me be clear: We have plenty of high-level talent and intelligence here in the heartland, but what we are missing is that extra spark to help our startups reach their full potential.

Over the years, I have met with hundreds of startup founders in Cincinnati and I always ask them the same question: “What would it take for you to do $10 million in revenue next year?” Almost every time they look at me like I’m asking them to go out to their car and drive it to the moon.

At first, this was disappointing. Were these entrepreneurs all thinking too small? But what I’ve realized is that this attitude is not their fault. They just have never seen companies do things like grow 10x in a year before, so considering that as a possibility seems crazy to them.

It’s like Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile. Before he broke that barrier in 1954 it was widely believed to be impossible. The human body was simply not capable of running one mile in less than four minutes. But once Bannister did it, all of a sudden other runners started repeating the feat, and today the four-minute mile is considered a yardstick by which all distance runners are measured.

This wasn’t a change in physiology; it was a change in psychology.

Speed and connections matter

I see similar forces at work in our entrepreneurs. They simply don’t understand that hyper growth is possible because they just haven’t seen it in person.

On the other hand, those that have been exposed to the culture of Silicon Valley know:

• How to plan: They’re not focused on hiring one or two people over the next year. They’re hiring 200 people.
• How to raise capital: They have better access to capital and understand how to operate in that world.
• How to build a team: They know how to put together a team at the early stages that can scale from 20 members to 2,000 members without getting bogged down in logistics.
• How to develop products: They know that scalable products are built on code that is nimble and flexible. It’s about making hundreds of changes per week, not per year.”

It’s about speed. It’s about planning. It’s about making connections.

What the Midwest really needs just as much as capital is talented people who have moved out to the coasts — maybe after growing up somewhere like Ohio or Michigan — to bring their talents back home to Cleveland, or Detroit, or Louisville. And we need to create incentives and opportunities to encourage them to do that.

The message needs to be “welcome to the table” and we have much to learn from your hyper-growth experience.

Without a doubt, we have a funding gap in the Midwest. That much is certainly true, but we also have an experience gap that is proving much more difficult to fix.

It’s up to us as an ecosystem to bring this mindset back home to help our entrepreneurs, and our economies, succeed.

Tim Schigel is the founding partner of Refinery Ventures, an early stage venture capital investment firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio.