and tech organizations, has worked in tech on both
coasts, including a stint in Boston. “When my wife and
I moved back to the Midwest, it was so much easier to
be a Christian than in all those other places,” he says. In
Chicago, he goes on, “if you were to casually mention
you’re going to church, there’s no set of assumptions
that you’re a Trump supporter, a gun toter, out protest-
ing on weekends.” (Though in fact, he corrected himself,
he and his wife would be out protesting that week-
end—against gun violence, at the March for Our Lives.)
The heartland’s tech boom has sparked the emer-
gence of a loose faith-and-tech movement, one that
has grown in pockets around the world but is based
indisputably in the American Midwest. The region
has hosted an explosion of conferences and meetups,
yoking together a host of different goals: evangelical
techies devising projects intended to spread the faith
(Bible “chat bots” and savvy Google ad campaigns
to connect desperate searchers with local pastors);
Christians driven by the social gospel discussing how
to create technological solutions to problems like sui-
cide and sex trafficking; religious thinkers pondering
the ethical implications of rapid technological change.
But perhaps the most interesting part of the Mid-
western convergence of faith and technology, the most
salient for believers and nonbelievers alike, is the way people there
have begun to question the culture of tech entrepreneurship—
and try to make it more humane. “Being an entrepreneur, you go
through some very dark moments,” says Kristi Zuhlke, the 37-year-
old cofounder of KnowledgeHound, a Chicago-based data visu-
alization startup. “Raising funding is very lonely. You’re basically
convincing everyone that your idea is amazing while they con-
stantly shoot you down.” It’s the sort of thing that can make people
question their faith, she continued, “or, if you don’t have a faith, you
start to clamor for hope that there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
Cincinnati, which has become one of the Midwest’s leading
tech cities, has also become a hub for people trying to find somerelief from the loneliness at the heart of an industry that prizes
unending drive and competition. That they had a place to con-
nect was thanks in part to Chad Reynolds. Not long after return-
ing from South Carolina, Reynolds banded together with a group
of entrepreneur friends—including Tim Brunk, cofounder of a
personal style app called Cladwell, and Tim Metzner, cofounder
of a software startup called Differential—to start an organization
that would eventually be called Ocean, named after Reynolds’
dark night of the soul. They were, in large part, responding to
a hunger among their fellow entrepreneurs to redefine what it
means to be successful in tech. But in an area of the country
that increasingly sees tech as its salvation, that can be easier
said than done.Tim Metzner,
Chad Reynolds,
and Tim Brunk,
the cofounders
of Ocean.