“You aren’t welcome here.”
“The more the merrier.”
Midwest startup communities tend to fall into two camps.
Some are open to everyone. Others are difficult to get into unless you already know someone inside. I think of these as open-door communities versus closed-door communities.
I’ve spent enough time participating in and helping build communities to recognize that the two models represent a false choice. Some of the most useful professional communities I’ve been part of were wide open. Others were highly selective. What made each room valuable wasn’t where they landed on an open-to-closed spectrum. The value came from whether the room had a clear reason to exist and whether the people inside were useful to one another.
That’s why I think the Midwest needs a third model: “clear-door” communities.
A clear-door community isn’t open to everyone, but isn’t closed to relevant folks by default either. They’re simply clear about who the room is for, why those people belong together, and what they should be able to get from being there. The criteria for inclusion are visible and tied to a specific need, problem, stage, customer, or experience.
Current State of Events
The Midwest doesn’t have a shortage of startup events. Most major metros across the region have founder happy hours, pitch competitions, university programs, demo days, investor gatherings, and other versions of “bringing the ecosystem together.” All of that is useful. Open communities create serendipity. I’ve met close friends, mentors, and collaborators in spaces where the only real requirement was showing up.
However, access and usefulness aren’t the same thing. Anyone who attends enough tech events eventually learns the difference between a room where you might meet someone interesting and a room where you’re likely to leave with something that helps you do your job better tomorrow.
The opposite model bears its own advantages and shortcomings. Private dinners, closed networks, alumni circles, former coworkers, and invitation-only gatherings can be incredibly useful because the people inside often share context before the conversation even begins. But being hard to access doesn't make a room valuable by itself. Closed networks also predictably miss people outside the circle who may know something the room needs.
For clear-door communities, the important thing is that a filter creates relevance, not status. I see versions of this starting to take shape across the region. Founder Farm in Columbus. Ferris & Co in Chicago. Black Men in Venture in Chicago. Very different communities, built for different people. But each starts with a much clearer answer to “who is this for?” than the generic “anyone interested in x startups in y industry.”
Making a Room Useful
A first-time founder trying to get from a prototype to ten paying customers is dealing with a fundamentally different set of problems than a CEO professionalizing a company after a Series B. Put several founders at roughly the same operating stage together, and the conversation gets specific quickly.
Operators selling into regional banks, manufacturers, hospital systems, or local governments tend to understand procurement, sales cycles, trust, compliance, and organizational behavior in ways that are difficult to learn from the outside. A room organized around that shared customer can get useful faster than a room organized around “fintech” or “industrial innovation.”
People with shared lived or professional experiences can often skip ten minutes of explanation and get to the real conversation faster. That matters in industries and networks where some people spend a meaningful amount of time explaining why a problem exists before they can discuss how to solve it.
A good community doesn’t need everyone to have the same résumé or level of achievement. But it helps when everyone comes in with the expectation that they’ll contribute instead of simply collecting contacts.
And then there’s trust. I don’t think trust is something you can screen for very well at the door. However, it’s something great communities produce over time.
Eventually, people start saying things they would never say onstage or at a large networking event:
“I’m losing confidence in our strategy.”
“I hired the wrong person.”
“Our customers love the product, but won’t pay enough for it.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to raise the next round.”
Those conversations only happen when the people involved understand enough of the context to be useful and enough of the stakes to responsibly handle the honesty. That kind of trust is tough to manufacture at scale.
Access ≠ Usefulness
For years, Midwest ecosystem-building has understandably focused on expanding access: getting more people into entrepreneurship, connecting founders with investors, bringing universities closer to startups, and making it easier for someone outside traditional networks to find an entry point. That work is still necessary, because plenty of talented people across the region remain disconnected or left out.
That said, most Midwest founders I meet need help with something. But very few need more access to “the ecosystem.” They need someone who understands the customer they’re trying to sell to, the system that keeps breaking, the hiring problem they haven’t solved, the regulatory constraint slowing them down, or the stage of the company they’re trying to build. In other words, they usually don’t need more people in the room. They need relevant people in the room.
I came to appreciate that distinction more clearly while living in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Bay Area’s advantage can’t be reduced to one lone factor. Its concentration of talent, capital, experience, and ambition is genuinely unusual. But what stood out to me wasn’t just how many people interested in technology live near one another. It was how quickly relevant knowledge could move between relevant people.
Someone working through an obscure infrastructure problem could often find another person who had encountered it before. A founder entering a particular market could find an operator who understood the customer. What people often shared was enough proximity to the same problem to make the conversation useful.
The Midwest already has enormous amounts of that kind of knowledge. It sits inside agriculture, manufacturing, logistics, financial services, healthcare, insurance, industrial operations, universities, large employers, family businesses, and local institutions. Much of it has been earned over years of actually doing the work.
Maturing Ecosystems Need Clear Doors
As Midwest startup ecosystems continue to mature, the next challenge is making more of that knowledge reachable.
That probably means building smaller, more specific communities. It likely also means the questions around inclusion should get more precise.
Who needs to know whom? Which founders are solving adjacent problems and don’t know each other yet? Which operators have knowledge that could help someone else without compromising their own company? Where is important experience trapped inside institutions?
We still need open rooms. They create the initial relationships that make ecosystems bigger, more welcoming, and more connected.
And it’d be naive to think closed rooms are going anywhere any time soon. Some conversations genuinely require trust, history, or a level of discretion that can’t be recreated in a public setting.
But there is a lot of space between those two models. That’s where I think the Midwest can get better.
More rooms where people can understand why they exist, whether the conversation is relevant to them right now, and what they’re expected to bring once they walk in.
The right room can change the trajectory of a company, a career, or an idea.
We need more rooms with clear doors.
Holden Price is the Founder and General Partner of Civic Capital, an early-stage venture firm focused on backing founders modernizing the Midwest economy. Previously, Holden spent nearly five years at M1 Finance, where he helped build the company’s analytics capabilities as it scaled into a fintech unicorn. He later supported mission-driven investing at the Kapor Center. A Midwest native, Holden studied at Miami University (BS), Loyola University Chicago (MS), and the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business (MBA).
