This campus is not ostentatious. Engineers are not transported between glass towers by shuttle buses. For a while, it seemed like a problem that Kansas City’s tech scene didn’t make as much of an announcement as San Francisco’s. It’s beginning to resemble a feature.
Kansas City remained comparatively stable during 2022 and 2023, while coastal tech markets experienced widespread layoffs, valuation collapses, and the unique kind of panic that follows years of easy money. The area did not crater during the pandemic tech boom, but it also did not spike like Seattle or San Francisco did. That kind of stability is unusual and deserving of attention for economists observing from the outside.
In short, the U.S. tech workforce expanded more quickly than Kansas City’s during this time, but the region’s concentration of tech workers remained about 1.1 times higher than the national average, according to Jeremy Hill, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. That’s not a number that makes headlines. It’s not catnip for venture capital. However, it points to a labor market that isn’t fueled by speculation.
This building is not what most people think of when they think of a tech hub. In addition to traditional software positions, Kansas City has been quietly accumulating what some analysts refer to as “mid-tech” jobs, which are skilled technical positions that don’t necessarily require a four-year degree but are instead based on hands-on specialization, trade-adjacent programs, and focused training. It’s not the glamorous side of the business. However, it is more resilient than pure software booms.
Walking through some of the older industrial areas that have been turned into startup spaces gives the impression that this city is taking its time. Businesses here appear to be more concerned with avoiding failure than they are with quickly expanding. It is genuinely difficult to determine whether that caution is a sign of wisdom or timidity. Most likely a combination of the two.
It’s instructive to compare this to Pittsburgh. Thanks in part to Carnegie Mellon’s influence, that city has garnered considerable national attention for robotics and artificial intelligence research. There isn’t a research engine that propels startups into orbit in Kansas City. Instead, it has a local workforce culture that emphasizes dependability, which draws one type of business and turns off another. It is common for founders who wish to proceed at a San Francisco pace to depart. Sometimes people stay because they want to create something that will function in five years.
That is not a criticism of ambition. It’s more of a fit observation. Neelima Parasker, the founder of SnapIT Solutions and a prominent member of the local startup scene, has publicly discussed the potential in this area for companies that are prepared to think beyond the short term. When discussing Kansas City’s tech trajectory, this framing—patient capital, incremental growth, and workforce depth over workforce glamour—comes up repeatedly.
Whether stability can produce the kind of compounding growth that transforms a regional corridor into something with national gravity is still an open question. It is beneficial to remain stable during a downturn. However, the city will likely need to work harder in the next chapter to draw in talent that might otherwise go to Denver or Austin and develop enough early-stage infrastructure to prevent local startups from having to relocate in order to grow. The work is being done. It’s still genuinely unclear how far it will go.
It’s difficult to ignore the fact that Austin, Miami, Pittsburgh, and other cities have made the most compelling arguments against Silicon Valley’s hegemony. It’s been quieter in Kansas City. That could alter.
