What exists on Wednesday

IRoom for something to happen

I was born in Buffalo in 2003. Some of my earliest memories are of an Allentown that felt a little less finished than it does now. I remember old buildings, weird storefronts, artists, people making things, and a city that still seemed unsure of what it wanted to become. I was too young to understand economic development or why adults were always talking about Buffalo coming back. I just remember the feeling that there was room for something to happen.

I was around ten when 43North began. I did not know what venture capital was or why giving money to startups was supposed to matter to Buffalo. What I understood was much simpler: people suddenly seemed excited about the future of the city. There were startups, cranes, new buildings, people moving here, and this vague sense that Buffalo might become something different. For a city whose identity had been so tied to what it used to be, not knowing what came next was exciting.

I think that ambiguity was important. Maybe Buffalo would become a technology city. Maybe people would build serious companies here. Maybe you would not have to leave to do ambitious work. Maybe somebody in a warehouse or apartment a few blocks away was making something that mattered. None of it was guaranteed, and that was part of what made it feel alive.

IIThey played their part

Looking back, I don’t think it is particularly useful to say that the institutions behind that period failed. In many ways, they played their part. 43North brought attention, people, capital and permission to imagine Buffalo differently. The medical campus changed part of the city. Organizations formed. Networks formed. People who might never have considered Buffalo came here. A generation of people grew up hearing that building something ambitious in Buffalo was at least possible.

That mattered.

But an institution can only play its part.

Eventually the question changes from whether you can create excitement around the possibility of something happening to whether things are actually happening.

For a long time, Buffalo could reasonably celebrate inputs. A new program was meaningful. A new fund mattered. A new building meant something. Getting people into the same room was progress because the infrastructure barely existed before. There was real work involved in creating that foundation, and somebody had to do it.

IIIA different world

But we are entering a different world now.

The cost of making things is collapsing. A few people can build software in days that once required a team and a funding round. Research that took weeks can happen in an afternoon. Products can be designed, tested and rebuilt almost continuously. A student with a laptop has access to capabilities that recently belonged to entire companies. Small teams can operate with an amount of leverage that would have sounded absurd when 43North started.

That changes what results should look like.

In this world, it is harder to be satisfied by another announcement that something might happen. The distance between an idea and evidence is getting too short. If we think Buffalo needs a piece of software, we can build it. If a local business has a problem, we can try solving it. If students need something that does not exist, we can make the first version this week. If a room of twenty people gets together every Tuesday, eventually the measure should not be that twenty people attended. It should be what exists on Wednesday that did not exist on Monday.

That is the transition I think Buffalo has to make.

The people and institutions of the last decade helped create the conditions. They built the runway. I don’t think the answer is to tear it up because the plane did not take off fast enough.

IVTake off

But at some point you have to take off.

The next era should be measured much more aggressively by output. Companies started. Products shipped. Problems solved. Customers gained. Research turned into something useful. Physical things manufactured. New revenue entering the city. People becoming capable of doing things here that previously required leaving.

This is also why I keep thinking about the Buffalo I remember. The thing that made Allentown interesting was not that somebody had perfectly designed an ecosystem for it. People used what they had. They opened things. They fixed rooms themselves. They put on shows, started businesses, made art, built weird things and created reasons for other people to come around.

The top-down work created possibility. The bottom-up work made that possibility visible.

Maybe that is the job now.

Not another attempt to manufacture excitement about what Buffalo could become. We have had a decade of evidence that people here are willing to believe.

Give them somewhere to work. Connect the people who should know each other. Make tools available. Remove the stupid barriers. Then expect them to make something.

VOpening the doors

On October 13, we are opening the doors at 469 Franklin. I don’t want the interesting statistic a year from now to be how many people came through the door. I want to be able to point at things that exist because they did.

A company. A prototype. A piece of software. A new customer. An experiment that failed quickly enough for somebody to try again. Something manufactured in Buffalo that previously existed only as an idea. Somebody who came in thinking they weren’t a builder and left having built something.

43North and the generation around it helped make ambition credible here.

They played their part.

Now the tools have changed, the cost of trying has collapsed, and the standard should change with it.

It is time to build enough things that we no longer need to convince ourselves something is happening.