By mid-2014, Brunk, Reynolds, and Metzner decided to trans-
form the community into something more formal: a nonprofit
business accelerator that could help launch companies and build
into their DNA a healthier sense of balance. The sort of acceler-
ator they say they wished they’d found when they were setting
out. Officially, the organization’s goal was to cement Cincinna-
ti’s status as a startup-friendly city and “to increase God’s pres-
ence in the marketplace” by cultivating founders “who will be
good stewards of their success.” The group decided to call their
accelerator Ocean.
Housed in a former car dealership building owned by Cross-
roads, Ocean received its first operations budget through a siz-
able grant from the church—the bounty of Crossroads’ annual
Beans and Rice Week, when members eat frugally and pool
their savings into several major church donations. The support
enabled Ocean to start working with its first class of 10 startups.
By 2015 Brunk and Metzner had recruited a friend of theirs to
launch a for-profit venture called Ocean Capital, which would
pool money for seed investments in each startup going for-
ward. If the companies do well, Ocean Capital and its investors
receive a return in the form of either cash or discounted stock.
Under the Ocean Accelerator program—which is open to
entrepreneurs of any or no faith—founders are given seed
investments of $50,000 each, along with access to a network
of business mentors affiliated with Crossroads or the broader
Cincinnati community, plus personal and spiritual mentoring.
The curriculum builds up to a public Demo Day, where partici-
pants present their products to an audience of potential inves-
tors from the stage of one of Crossroads’ churches.
Unlike more typical sources of early startup capital, Ocean
seeks to instill the notion of “Christ leadership” in its partici-
pants, and its dual business and spiritual mentorship program
straddles a somewhat sinuous line between product planning,
life coaching, and evangelism. Scott Weiss, a retired Fortune
500 veteran who was tapped to become Ocean’s founding CEO,
is eager to ward off the impression that Ocean’s counseling is
just for believers, or that it preaches an old-fashioned prosperity
gospel. “We in no way teach that because you came here, God
ordains your business for success,” he says. What’s more import-
ant, he says, is that “we don’t want you to be one of those high
tech founders who have gotten a divorce, suffered depression,
or tried to commit suicide.”
Ocean’s is not the first spiritual mentorship program that’s
sprung up in Midwest tech. In Indianapolis in 2009, senior staff
at the marketing software firm ExactTarget—which was later
acquired by Salesforce for $2.5 billion, in one of the Midwest’s
most fabled success stories—helped spawn Edge Mentoring,
which pairs young entrepreneurs with more experienced men-
tors who guide them in business and spirituality. What that can
look like in practice, one Indianapolis tech worker told me,
is going to pitch meetings looking for investment and being
offered spiritual mentorship instead. And indeed, Weiss’ dis-
cussion of the broader potential impact of Ocean’s work carries
a certain missionary edge. “A new business, on average, will
hire three people in its first 12 months, 10 people by the end of
year two,” he says. “That’s 13 souls. Thirteen souls a business
owner can influence.”
But the program is also intent on changing the cul-
ture of the tech industry in ways that are not exclu-
sively Christian. Ocean says it selects business mentors
who can not only help draw up a marketing plan but
also model decent work-life balance. And according
to Brunk, the accelerator’s idea of “stewardship”—
an evangelical watchword for responsible manage-
ment—includes notions about being a good boss, giving
employees decent benefits, and reinvesting profits
locally. In part, Brunk says, that’s just holding up Mid-
western norms of community-mindedness against the
perceived ruthlessness of tech’s origins. While Silicon
Valley’s leaders have sometimes reinforced a culture
of fear and greed, Brunk says, “there’s more consid-
eration for things other than power and success here.”
While
Ocean
was
trying to
convert
startup values into something more recognizably
Christian—and, perhaps, human—Crossroads was
going through a conversion experience of its own. The
church was leaning hard into the idea that entrepre-
neurs were the key to remaking Cincinnati, as Tome
would explain to Christianity Today. While Crossroads
had long been active in ministering to Cincinnati’s
poor—including its support for a controversial social
services center that sparked substantial NIMBYish
protest in the mid-2000s—Tome had come to believe
that “downstream problems in the kingdom of God”
occurred because of things that happened “upstream.”
As Christianity Today summarized it, “Tome wanted
to shift tactics to also encourage the people making
money” while still keeping up support for the working-
class poor. Ocean and Unpolished, as the church lead-
ership saw them, were a big part of that shift.
In a sleek promotional video for Unpolished, pro-
duced in 2014 by the church’s creative team, a child’s
voice narrates a vision of Cincinnati’s rebirth. “A long
time ago, pioneers went west into the wilderness. They
saw a river and imagined a great city,” the child says,
as the video cycles through a montage of shots of Cin-
cinnati at dawn. “Somewhere along the way, people
settled, and dreams vanished. Things got broken. We
forgot who we were,” the narration continues, as the
0 9 2
