Talya Minsberg

The co-founder of AOL has joined forces with J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy,” to promote entrepreneurship across the United States and seed investments in cities often overlooked by venture capital funds. In doing so, the two men have recruited a list of who’s who in business, including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Charles and David Koch of Koch Industries, to be part of their investment fund.

The fund is part of a larger movement to reimagine company towns, and a challenge for venture capital funds to look beyond California, New York and Massachusetts — the three states that receive 75 percent of venture capital in the United States.

“It takes a set of ingredients, including a comfort with new ideas and diversity,” said Walter Isaacson, the authorized biographer of “Steve Jobs” and a history professor. “It takes a willingness to take risks and even to fail at times.”

That is the magic of her city, Mayor Jenny Durkan of Seattle said in conversation with Isaacson and Case at the Cities for Tomorrow conference. The city reimagined itself from the 1962 World’s Fair and is the home of Amazon, Nordstrom, Microsoft, Starbucks and Costco — what Durkan called “small mom-and-pop companies that stay below the radar until they’re not.”

But on the conference stage, the discussion shifted from the benefits of rising cities to the reality of one rising sector.

“Even in the successful cities, the success masks this other part of the city that hasn’t risen,” Durkan said. “And we’ve seen that in Seattle, with the huge growth of tech and the new economy, but it masks some real displacement, some real lack of opportunity.”

The elephant in the room was Amazon. Across North America, 238 cities applied to be home for the company’s next headquarters, and last month Amazon selected Long Island City, Queens, and Crystal City, Virginia, for HQ2.

Case pointed to the other 236 cities as ones with real opportunities also awaiting them. Those are the cities that can really rise, he said.

“My hope is that the 236 that lost, if they take half of the energy they put into rallying their community, driving collaboration, and half of the dollars they were putting on the table to lure them, and refocus that on their startup community, they might create the next Amazon,” he said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/us/reimagining-company-towns.html" id="915b9f6d-5783-36c7-af0b-3fff476d9279">The New York Times</a>.

NEW ORLEANS — Steve Case has been on a barnstorming tour of the United States in a red bus that reads “The Rise of the Rest.” You would be forgiven for thinking he was running for office.

Reimagining Company Towns

“How does it feel to be the wokest professional sports league?” asked Marc Lacey, the national editor at The New York Times.

“I didn’t know we were given that designation,” Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, said, laughing. “But I understand the sentiment and we’re proud of that.”

That feeling was front and center at the Cities of Tomorrow conference here, with politicians, educators, policymakers and others discussing their influence on their communities. In the past few years, the NBA has found itself in the spotlight for the way its players and teams have spoken out on social and political issues both locally and nationally.

“I think the NBA recognizes the intersectionality of race, culture and socioeconomic status of its players,” Malo André Hutson, associate professor of urban planning at Columbia University, said in a recent phone interview. “I think it comes all the way from the commissioners to coaches.”

Instead of asking players to fit a certain mold — to act a certain way, talk a certain way, wear their hair a certain way — the league has embraced players and their outspokenness, especially on local levels.

Those acts of protest have garnered attention that goes far beyond the game.

In 2012, LeBron James and the Miami Heat tweeted a photo of the team in black hoodies a month after Trayvon Martin was killed in Florida.

In December 2014, players across the league wore shirts that read, “I Can’t Breathe” during warmups, protesting a grand jury’s decision not to indict a New York police officer whose chokehold led to the death of Eric Garner, an unarmed black man. In New York, the Brooklyn Nets and the Cleveland Cavaliers wore the shirts while competing at the Barclays Center.

The Golden State Warriors — a team that boasts of their hometown, Oakland, California, by wearing gear that says “The City” and “The Town” — elected to skip a White House visit after they won the 2017 NBA championship — and instead took students in Washington to the National Museum of African American History &amp; Culture.

Earlier this year, after Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old unarmed black man, was shot to death by Sacramento, California, police in his grandmother’s backyard, the Sacramento Kings announced an alliance with Black Lives Matter Sacramento and a Sacramento-based coalition called Build Black. During a warmup, players wore black T-shirts that read “Accountability. We are one.” with #StephonClark on the back.

The history of protest in athletics can be seen across sports, too, from Billie Jean King’s 1973 advocacy for Title IX to the Ethiopian marathoner Feyisa Lilesa’s protest of his nation’s government at the 2016 Rio Olympics. Many of those protests fan the flames of societal change while simultaneously landing athletes in trouble.

What makes the NBA unique is that there is support for political activism from the top down. “Political speech is their absolute right within the league,” Silver said in New Orleans.

That is in stark contrast to the NFL, which has struggled to handle the reaction to its players kneeling during the national anthem. “In the NFL, I think it’s ‘catch the ball, run the ball, throw the ball and shut up,'” Hutson said. “In the NBA, it’s ‘we have players that come from challenging circumstances from around the world and we need to embrace that and build on that.'”

Which leads to a question: What if Colin Kaepernick were an NBA player?

Kaepernick, who led the San Francisco 49ers to the Super Bowl in 2012, has remained unsigned since the end of the 2016 season, when he took a knee during the national anthem to raise awareness of racism, social injustice and police brutality.

That wouldn’t be the case in the NBA, said Grant Hill, the co-owner of the Atlanta Hawks, who was also on the panel. “I believe if there was a Colin Kaepernick in the NBA, he’d be playing. I’ve talked to our managing partner about this plenty of times; we would be supportive of any of our athletes and their willingness to engage, to speak out on various issues.”

He pointed to Silver, who has been the NBA commissioner since 2014. “Adam takes the time to listen and understand the issues and what players are concerned about and where they are coming from,” Hill said.

Silver says he views free speech as a part of a core set of American values being shared with an international audience and teams full of international players.

“One thing that people may not realize, 25 percent of the players in our league now are born outside of the U.S., so it’s a core part of Americana that we’re even exporting,” he said. “So if that gets translated into being woke, that’s fine with me.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/us/letting-nba-players-have-their-voice.html" id="48be8bd2-f60b-3c7f-adfc-0dad4b602da3">The New York Times</a>.

NEW ORLEANS — The NBA has earned a term that its commissioner had not heard.

Letting NBA Players Have Their Voice

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Talya Minsberg

Articles written by the author

Reimagining Company Towns

Letting NBA Players Have Their Voice