tate other people’s creativity by building a technology
that brings a whole community into the design process.
If that sort of talk sounds a little elevated for a prod-
uct that is, as Reynolds also acknowledges, basically
“a focus group on your phone,” or if you’re not used to
metaphors that compare salvation to a software update,
welcome to the worlds of both Christian and startup
evangelism—worlds that, as recent trends in the Ameri-
can Midwest demonstrate, are increasingly intertwined.
on a South Carolina beach at midnight. He was there for a destina-
tion wedding, sitting on the sand with friends, when he decided to
wade into the ocean alone. As he floated in the dark water, he had
what he describes as his first real conversation with God. What
was he doing with his life? he asked. Why wasn’t he with some-
one? Why did he feel so empty?
Reynolds, a 36-year-old designer and startup founder from Cin-
cinnati, Ohio, had been fending off burnout, in fits and starts, for
years. He’d started a company designing websites for movies and
other products right out of college, and managed to land big clients
like Warner Bros. But he worked relentlessly, rarely taking vacations,
ignoring his health, and neglecting his family and friends.
In 2008, as he was contemplating leaving his first company, Rey-
nolds set aside a few months “to sit still.” During his hiatus, he went
with a friend to a Sunday service at Cincinnati’s Crossroads Church—
which was, at the time, a megachurch of about 9,000 members.
Sitting in the back row of the cavernous auditorium, Reynolds felt
something igniting inside him. “You could tell there was something
extremely creative and entrepreneurial happening in that church,”
he remembers. It occurred to him that if he could somehow incor-
porate his budding faith into his next venture, “it could be different.”
But after starting a second company, in 2009, he found himself
slipping back into a familiar pattern: maintaining a frenetic pace,
traveling to multiple cities per week, constantly doing more. By
the time he ended up on the beach at night in South Carolina, he
was feeling lost, unable to enjoy the quiet of the barrier island,
fretting about Wi-Fi signals and missed work appointments, and
wondering what was wrong with him.
As he bobbed in the dark Atlantic, Reynolds says, he heard a
message in reply: that God had given him talents and gifts so they
could be put to use helping other people, and that he needed to
be more aggressive about doing so—that, in effect, he had to take
a leap of faith. God’s side of that midnight conversation was half
encouragement, half dare: “Even though you can’t see the bot-
tom, I’ve got you; I’m going to protect you; I’m going to help you.”
When he got back to work, Reynolds recommitted himself to
his company. His second startup was called Batterii, a consumer
research firm that recruits civilians to provide personalized feed-
back to brands via smartphone videos. Reynolds, who describes his
midnight conversion as “getting an upgrade to [his] operating sys-
tem,” came to see the mission of his own company as a way of ful-
filling the charge God had given him. If he’d been burned out before
by trying to do too much on his own, his work now was to facili-
In 2012,
Chad
Reynolds
found
himself
Over
the past
decade
or so,
the amount of venture capital flowing into the Midwest
has expanded from a trickle into a fairly substantial,
multibillion-dollar tributary—enough for thousands
of tech startups to sprout up in the old-line cities of
the Rust Belt.
The story of this transformation, as told from the
coasts, tends to be one of down-and-out heartland
cities hustling to remake themselves in the image of
Silicon Valley, often with the help of missionary venture
capitalists like AOL cofounder Steve Case and Hillbilly
Elegy author J. D. Vance, who unveiled a $150 million
investment fund called Rise of the Rest in 2017. And
there’s some truth to that account. But as the demo-
graphics of tech have become incrementally more Mid-
western, those regional outposts have also set about
remaking the industry in their own likeness—partic-
ularly where matters of faith are concerned.
The Bay Area, which devours about 45 percent of all US
venture funding, is one of the least religious parts of the
country. Although this March will mark the 26th annual
Silicon Valley Prayer Breakfast (recently renamed Sili-
con Valley Connect), Big Tech is still considered, almost
axiomatically, allergic to expressions of faith. At a recent
conference in Nashville, one software developer said,
“I’m afraid that when people hear I’m a Christian, they’re
going to start questioning my competency as a devel-
oper.” A 2018 episode of the comedy series Silicon Valley
spoofed the travails of an LGBTQ dating app founder who
was terrified of being outed—as a believer.
For some Christians, accordingly, the industry’s
shift toward the heartland has been liberating. Jason
Henrichs, the founder of several Midwestern finance
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