The Rise of Small Cities

Investor (and former America Online CEO) Steve Case has a prediction: The next decade's most iconic startups won't come from Silicon Valley. So where will they come from? Everywhere.

- JASON FEIFER

Usually, founders travel to meet investors in coastal cities. But in 2014, Steve Case and his team of investors began an annual bus tour, traveling to meet founders where they lived. It was the next step in a longstanding goal of Case's; following his work as chairman and CEO of America Online, he'd founded an investment firm called Revolution, with an eye toward empowering entrepreneurs across the country-not just in clusters like Silicon Valley and New York. The bus tour, complete with a pitch competition, targeted places like Detroit, Chattanooga, and more.

"It was not clear what we'd find when we hit the road and rolled into town," Case writes in his new book The Rise of the Rest, which shares the same name as the bus tour. But after more than eight years, over 11,000 miles of travel, and 40-plus city visits, Case is passionate about what they encountered: He describes a country full of thriving (or on-the-cusp) entrepreneurial ecosystems, and a radical shift in how and where companies are grown. Here, he explains why he believes the greatest innovations will now come from all over.

You make a bold prediction in the book. You write, "Over the next decade, a majority of the iconic startup companies, the ones that create tens of thousands of jobs and end up being worth billions of dollars will not be in Silicon Valley, but all across the country." Why do you feel so confident about that?