of Preaching.” (A tenet of the church’s manifesto holds
that “beer = authenticity” and that the church should
“do anything short of sin” to bring people to God.)
Then, in the mid-2000s, came what the city’s
current mayor describes as “the Cincinnati Mira-
cle.” A nonprofit development corporation created
by some of the city’s anchor businesses, including
Procter& Gamble, invested more than half a billion
dollars in Over-the-Rhine, buying hundreds of prop-
erties and presiding over an intensely microman-
aged revitalization plan. Tech companies began to
trickle in, buttressed by the Fortune 500 old guard,
and they in turn gave birth to startup accelerators,
seed-investment firms, and venture capital funds. By
the mid-teens, when Cincinnati was declared one of
the fastest-growing startup economies in the country,
the media was more likely to compare it to Greenwich
Village than down-and-out Baltimore.
With the transformation came a predictable list of
collateral consequences: the displacement of roughly
65 percent of the neighborhood’s black population, the
loss of 73 percent of its affordable housing, and some
of the highest income inequality in the nation. Some
neighborhood advocates spoke about the development
corporation as if it were an occupying colonial force.
But to the outside world it became a shining exam-
ple of a general Midwest flourishing of the tech-and-
startup industry, or at least the promise of it.
Around 2013, says Tome, a young entrepreneur
who was planning his child’s baptism at Crossroads
came up to him and asked if he realized what was
happening right under his nose. “I don’t know if you
know,” the visitor said, “but there’s startup CEOs all
over this place.” For many months, the atrium of
Tome’s industrial-chic church had been used as an
informal workspace by a couple dozen young congre-
gants, including Reynolds, Brunk, and Metzner—most
of them twenty- or thirtysomething tech or startup
workers drawn to the church’s free Wi-Fi, free coffee
and soda bar, and seven-day-a-week access.
Tome invited a group of the young founders working
in his church lobby to a group entrepreneurs’ breakfast.
“I just started getting a real education on angel fund-
ing, seed funding, series A, series B, series C, scalability,
pivoting, and on and on and on,” he says.
At the time, recalls Brunk, there was little in the way
of a support system for the young tech entrepreneurs
who were starting to proliferate in Cincinnati. Tome
encouraged the folks at the breakfast gathering to con-
tinue meeting on a weekly basis and become one of
Crossroads’ numerous interest-oriented small groups.
Right away, Brunk says, the meetings took on an inti-
mate tone. “All of us were a few years into our ven-
tures,” he says—long enough to have seen “vision and
optimism turn to disappointment and betrayal.” Brunk
himself was haunted by the fictional depiction of Mark
Zuckerberg at the end of The Social Network—a lonely
tycoon who’d ruthlessly alienated everyone—and other stereo-
types about the worst excesses of tech. “You really hit that trough
of sorrow and ask yourself, why keep doing this? Asking existen-
tial questions: What’s a satisfying life?”
The things people shared in those early meetings were a refresh-
ing break from the usual ways entrepreneurs talked about their
ventures. They were “very vulnerable stories of failure,” Reynolds
says. Tales of people struggling to find funding, or scaling their
company, or breaking up with their cofounders; anxieties about
making payroll and taking out family loans.
“Everyone’s guard was down; nobody was pitching,” agrees
Brunk. The group seemed to converge on the same general ques-
tion: “How do you get to this healthy, sustainable place” in an indus-
try where many people eventually burn out? And they all seemed
hungry for a definition of success that went beyond raising large
rounds of capital and netting more users for their products.
In time, the organizers decided to expand. They launched a pub-
lic “story-sharing” event series where, every six to eight weeks,
local entrepreneurs could come in and talk openly about their
struggles and aspirations. They called the series Unpolished, for
the real talk they wanted to encourage, “warts and all, no pitch-
ing,” Brunk says. The three organizers assumed a few dozen peo-
ple would come, but at their first event close to 400 showed up;
they ran out of both chairs and beer.
They realized they had tapped into something, so they kept going.
They called upon business owners from outside the tech realm, like
Chris Sutton, cofounder of Noble Denim, a jeans business that used
US-made, organic materials. Sutton was a former missionary kid
who’d come to believe he could live out his faith just as well by inte-
grating his values into his business. In a video promo for his company
that screened at an Unpolished event, Sutton speaks to the kind of
consciousness Unpolished hoped to raise: “If we die with empty pock-
ets but a full life, I think we’ll have succeeded, or come damn close.”Unpolishedstarted holding
what it calledoffice hours
at Crossroads, advising would-be entrepreneurs on “starting
lean” and then expanding those lessons into workshops. A team
at Metzner’s company developed an online message board called
Supporter where members of the Unpolished community could
recruit for jobs or services. And Unpolished’s founders watched
as people came together to form businesses.