“How would you feel if you had given twenty years to something and then been treated this way?” lamented Carl Storck, president of the National Football League, on the eve of his ousting in April 1941. In a matter of days, team owners installed Elmer Layden as the NFL’s first commissioner. Layden wasted little time moving the NFL headquarters from Columbus, Ohio, to Chicago. (NFL HQ moved to New York in 1960.) Football had its origins in Canton, Ohio—which today is, of course, home to the NFL Hall of Fame.
We build amazing companies in Ohio. And have for years. See Procter & Gamble (est. 1837), Sherwin-Williams (est. 1866), and Goodyear (est. 1898). Every so often, though, a company rises from humble origins, but its leaders decide they can’t make a real go of it here. So we wish them well, say our goodbyes, and watch their commercial growth take shape elsewhere. A few decades later, we commemorate what they built in a box. To be clear: we have fantastic museums dedicated to Ohio industries. Still, I wonder: can we take measures in the present to ensure the museum stories of the future—and companies’ second acts, in particular—are considerably more Ohioan?
In “Build Like We Own the Place,” I make the case for Ohio’s infrastructure and capacity to build. Here’s today’s question:
How can Ohio build the capital, companies, and institutions that inspire more start-up ventures to establish durable roots here, rather than take flight?
In the spirit of Halloween, let’s walk among the ghosts on the boulevard of broken Buckeye dreams and ask a more ghoulish question: Are we putting the next flywheel in motion, or are we planning another museum?
Flying the Coop: The Wright Siblings
Wilbur and Orville Wright made history on the rolling hills of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903. The real work, though, on lift, drag, and wing shapes took place in their bicycle shop in Dayton. Their sister Katharine Wright took on multiple roles in the family's venture, from business manager to publicist, and did tandem flights with Wilbur in Europe. Today, at Wright-Patterson and multiple NASA sites, Ohio maintains substantial aerospace research and defense capacity.
Other states, though, dominate commercial aircraft production. Boeing builds its 737, 767 and 777 programs in Washington. California and Texas, too, rank among the largest states for aircraft and parts manufacturing employment. In 2025, Ohio’s aerospace and defense industry contributed $18.98BN to state GDP: roughly 2% of Ohio’s economy. Not bad. But, let’s compare WA and OH in terms of each state’s aeronautics and defense GDP contribution per capita:
WA tallies $6,760 per resident.
OH: $1,595.
That’s a four-to-one ratio. But they don’t have nearly the quality of aerospace museums that we do.
Or do they?
The Big Business of the Big Beat
One thing’s for certain. We have the best rock’n’roll hall of fame in the country. Not because a Clevelander invented rock’n’roll.
For my money, that was Chuck Berry.
Or Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Or, most days, Louis Jordan.
In 1950, Leo Mintz watched in awe as white adolescents danced in the aisles of his store, Record Rendezvous, at Cleveland’s Prospect and E. 3rd St., to the latest race records. As legend has it, his paler patrons rarely bought these apparently stigma-laden 45s. Or didn’t until Mintz and his pal Alan Freed re-branded the sound as rock’n’roll. Mintz, too, in 1951, persuaded Freed to take a late-night slot at WJW-AM. Freed called the program the Moondog Show.
On March 21, 1952, Mintz, Freed and promoter Lew Platt took the music into Cleveland Arena: capacity ~10,000. Twenty thousand “kids” showed up for the Moondog Coronation Ball. It was a rousing success. The police stopped the show after the first number.
“If anyone . . . had told us that some 20 or 25,000 people would try to get into a dance,” Freed said the next day, “I suppose you would have been just like me. You would have laughed and said they were crazy.”
The top brass at WINS in New York City took note. In 1954, they offered Freed $15,000 a year, a share of syndication, and the chance to own the airwaves of the capital of American capitalism. While Freed considered the move, Platt contacted George Gund II, who assembled a group of investors that bettered the offer: $18K, national syndication via WJW, multiple touring shows under the Moondog brand, and a majority share of Guardian Records. Freed to New York City: drop dead.
This account entails, of course, a bit of Halloween trickery.
What actually happened: in July 1954, Freed moved to New York City, appeared in motion pictures, and hosted multiple television shows. In December 1962, he pleaded guilty to payola charges. In 1965, Freed died from alcohol-related maladies. He was 43. His remains had a brief residency at the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame. They were eventually interred at Cleveland’s Lake View Cemetery.
Setting the Stage for Rosier Stories
The future is unwritten, so stories to come may have room for rosier second acts. At present, select enterprises from elsewhere appear determined to stage more uplifting productions here in Ohio.
Cases in point: Honda (Tokyo, est. 1946) and Anduril (Costa Mesa, CA, est. 2017). Honda started building vehicles in Ohio in 1982, and construction for a battery plant commenced earlier this year. Anduril now produces autonomous aircraft in Pickaway County. With its infrastructure investment of $910M, they appear to be here for the long haul. And let’s hope so. The state delivered a $310M JobsOhio grant and $452M in tax breaks over 30 years to get them here.
There’s real peril, of course, in picking winners. In 2010, the state bet big on the data-center sector. In 2026, its citizen activists are leading a revolt against the tax giveaways and cloak-and-dagger deals. To his credit, Gov. Mike DeWine followed—and paused new data-center tax exemption requests. Maybe this pause will give the economic wonks time to determine whether data centers can actually generate flywheel-like economic growth.
Build Momentum
In Good to Great, Jim Collins proposed using the flywheel metaphor to understand how growth happens for individual companies:
"The flywheel effect … resembles relentlessly pushing a giant, heavy flywheel, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond."
I’m thinking about a collective flywheel driven by growth-stage companies, plural.
Companies that have found—and will find—the capital, ownership, talent, and commercial opportunities that make staying in Ohio an easy decision. Here, each success gives rise to more folks capable of investing in the next generation of great ideas, which builds momentum for the next generation of successful companies.
That’s the dream. Build it and they just might stay.
Jace Martin is a Columbus native and the CEO of employee-owned dSaaS. He has spent more than 30 years working across technology, infrastructure, media, and startups. Jace writes about the history, economics, and occasionally strange decisions that shape how technology gets built in the Midwest.
