Tech companies drive our economy. For better or worse.

If we want more better and less worse then we need tech companies to effectively balance the pursuit of profit with the need to create stable, high-paying jobs that lift up communities.

Long thread coming...

If you were going to start a new fintech company tomorrow and you could start it in any U.S. city, you’d obviously be choosing between New York and San Francisco.

It’s logical. That’s where the talent, investors, and connections are in greatest abundance.

The problem is that once these concentrations of talent form in specific places, it becomes hard to move outside them.

A very natural bias forms towards starting companies and hiring employees from inside these networks. They become self-reinforcing.

There are two drawbacks to these self-reinforcing networks. One easy to quantify and one not so much.

I won’t linger on the easy one because a lot of ink has already been spilled about it; New York and San Francisco are expensive.

Now, to the harder-to-quantify one...

I got my start in fintech working as an intern at a small, private company in Bozeman, Montana called @ZootEnterprises.

Zoot is a fintech infrastructure company that was founded decades before the term ‘fintech infrastructure’ existed.

Zoot’s CEO and the original employees he hired were smart and creative, which was lucky because there was no roadmap back then for building cloud-based credit decisioning software. No shortcuts. No AWS. No VC partner you could call for advice.

They just had to figure it out.

And that’s a good thing! People build cool stuff when they don’t have a roadmap.

Compare that to today’s challenger banks, each new one only incrementally innovating on top of the existing blueprint.

I feel like we’ve lost something as the fintech industry has matured.

And communities outside New York and San Francisco are losing something too.

15 years ago, there were no colleges offering fintech majors. Certainly not Montana State University (Go Bobcats!)

So Zoot just hired the smartest and most open-minded MSU grads it could find.

Of course Zoot had to teach all those new hires literally everything about banking, credit decisioning, multi-tenant software, etc.

I remember taking tests on FCRA and ECOA at roughly the same time that I was taking the SAT.

It was a slower onboarding process for Zoot, but...

It yielded a big long-term benefit for Bozeman.

Suddenly there were a bunch of experts in software-as-a-service and financial services walking around town.

Other companies noticed. Today there are ex-Zooters working at @FICO, @Oracle, and many other tech companies in town.

What’s exciting to me is that, today, it should be even easier to start a fintech company in any community in the U.S.

Resources abound: newsletters, podcasts, events, degrees, accelerators, incubators, and, of course, fintech Twitter.

To say nothing of investment dollars.

AND we’ve all spent the last few months getting an impromptu crash course in working remotely!

There’s literally never been an easier time for fintech companies and/or employees to be based anywhere.

Fintech companies (and technology companies more broadly) can lift up communities and change people’s lives.

I know this from personal experience.

The question for founders, investors, and hiring managers is are you willing to take risks to make that happen?