2 roads less traveled
Why Bay Area CEOs decided that visiting with red-state voters could broaden horizons
The restaurant was small, a non-descript-looking joint by the river in Little Rock, Ark. Inside, the walls were covered with fake fish mounted on faux-wood plaques. With the push of a button, some would turn and sing.
It was unlike anything Gusto CEO Josh Reeves had ever seen.
When he and his colleagues from San Francisco sat down to eat, they dug in to cuisine as foreign to him as the locale: fried catfish, pickles and frog legs.
“I’ve never had fried catfish before,” Reeves said, a childlike enthusiasm creeping into his voice. “It was delicious.”
It was the seventh stop on a two-week road trip Reeves was taking with several colleagues in an effort to meet customers where they live — in cities and towns far from the Bay Area bubble.
Since the presidential election, which for many working in Silicon Valley underscored just how divorced the tech capital has become from smalltown U.S.A., several executives have hit the open road to connect with folks in red-state America. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg in January was one of the first to announce a plan to tour the nation.
What they hope to find, and bring back, remains amorphous at best: common ground, connection, inspiration.
Reeves and Zuckerberg have described their trips as listening tours, in which they would engage with small-business owners and Americans from various parts of the country. Others, like the founders of Change Catalyst, a company seeking to foster a more diverse and inclusive tech sector, are flipping the script, hoping to bring the ethos and lessons of Silicon Valley to faraway cities.
It is, as the adage goes, about the journey. Not the destination. “I am amazed at how this ecosystem has a mind-set that it can solve the world’s problems, it knows the world’s problems, and because innovation happens here, we know what’s best for everybody,” said Wayne Sutton, co-founder of Change Catalyst and New America fellow. “With the election and all the situations happening in tech — lack of diversity, lack of empathy — there’s a clear disconnect between who’s building the products and who the products are for.”
Zuckerberg’s journey, which appears to be broken up into short, regional tours, has been intensely choreographed and documented on his own Facebook page. He has batted away questions about whether this could be a setup for a future political run.
As of the beginning of May, the Facebook founder had fed a calf at a small family farm in Blanchardville, Wis.; spoken to opioid addicts in Dayton, Ohio; helped assemble a car at a Ford plant in Detroit; and attended services at the oldest African Methodist Episcopal church in the South in Charleston, S.C.
Zuckerberg has completed about a third of his journey across America, with his initial stops concentrated along the Bible Belt. Every state he has visited thus far backed President Trump in the November election.
“It seems we are at a turning point in history,” Zuckerberg wrote in the January post announcing his year of travel. “For decades, technology and globalization have made us more productive and connected. This has contributed to a greater sense of division than I have felt in my lifetime. We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.”
Reeves, whose human resources software company serves more than 40,000 small businesses, grew up in Marin County. His father worked as a teacher in San Francisco. Before this journey, which took him and three colleagues more than 3,000 miles on a drive to Jacksonville, Fla., the longest road trip Reeves had ever been on was up the coast to Seattle.
“People can sometimes think about America as this uniform place, but when you get out there, you realize there’s so much nuance,” he said. “It’s been so amazing to experience firsthand how big America is and how many different nuances, even accents, you run into along the way.”
While Zuckerberg tours the country in short stints — by plane, car and other means of transit — Reeves and his three Gusto colleagues set out in a 28-foot RV to hit 10 states in two weeks.
The idea was simple: Meet customers and learn about their business, their goals and what matters to them. Along the way, he singled out companies that took novel approaches to rewarding their employees and doled out Publishers Clearing House-size checks to those businesses’ favorite charities.
“Silicon Valley gets very caught up in numbers” like company valuations, Reeves said. “But small businesses are all about people. That’s really been the recurring theme.”
He visited the kitchen of a catering company in Texas, the display room of a flower shop in Oklahoma, a pool-supply superstore in Alabama and a goth-inspired corset shop in Florida. For much of the journey, Reeves was the driver.
The RV, which the company rented for the trip, was hard to miss as it rolled into town. The bright turquoise Winnebago bore the company’s logo and cartoon people on one side and a giant map of the group’s route on the other.
Like Zuckerberg, Reeves updated his social media accounts with dispatches from the trip. On several occasions he received unsolicited invitations to swing by customers’ businesses to try their kombucha (in New Orleans) or talk to kids (in Little Rock).
“The tone we’re taking is one of humility,” Reeves said. “We’re driving a rented RV, staying in motels, really doing things responsibly. And we want to make sure (customers) understand that this really isn’t about us. It’s about celebrating them, about giving back. We’re here because we want to listen and learn.”
Sutton and Melinda Briana Epler, founders of Change Catalyst, arrived in Detroit on Wednesday for the second stop of 14 on a tour that will take them from San Francisco to San Juan, Puerto Rico, and across the Atlantic to London.
Rather than small towns in flyover states, Sutton and Epler are concentrating on cities with tech scenes of their own. They will be hosting workshops and conferences focused on diversity and inclusion and how to use local resources to learn from Silicon Valley’s mistakes, they said — so founders prioritize diversity before it becomes a problem.
They’ll present each city with an evaluation of its tech landscape and how diverse and inclusive the startup culture is.
After the election, Epler said, she noticed another problem affecting people in the Bay Area and beyond: Communities of color, immigrants and queer people felt less safe and less supported.
“Detroit was one of the cities most impacted by the Muslim ban. When we went to Austin, the conversation around the wall (along the U.S.-Mexico border) was a big deal, so we’re definitely seeing immigrant populations that are hurting and afraid,” Epler said. “What we can do, what we felt we had to do, was help facilitate safe spaces for these people and to help create an inclusive tech industry.”
She went on: “Tech companies in San Francisco have offices in other parts of the country, and we’re hearing from diversity and inclusion managers that it’s been a real struggle to deal with the polarization of the country. It’s tough. It’s a tough thing to unify, but we all have to try to do what we can.”
Reeves, now back in San Francisco, hopes to hang on to the feeling of common ground he gained in his travels, and look for ways to bring some of those small-business values to his own company, which now employs hundreds.
Despite differences in beliefs, politics or location, Reeves said, people are at the core of his customers’ businesses — and his own.
“I’ll be reminding myself that it’s not just about the numbers, it’s about people,” he said. “I think if tech embraced that idea more, we’d all build better products.”
“We need to find a way to change the game so it works for everyone.” CEO Mark Zuckerberg, in a post on Facebook