Twenty people sat in a circle of Adirondack chairs at Bay Pond Park this August, as an initial gathering to explore how Upstate Venture Connect might assist in growing entrepreneurial community across the Adirondack Park. Looking out at the water, and I kept thinking: this is either going to work, or it’s going to show us exactly why nobody’s tried it here before.

Building community in the Adirondacks isn’t like building it in Austin, or Boulder, or even Syracuse. The distances are real, the population is thin, and people are spread across small towns, not blocks of a downtown grid. If the Innovation Economy depends on creative collisions – the right people bumping into each other often enough that relationships take root – this is about as hard a test as UVC has ever set for itself.

It’s not our first time testing that idea without city blocks to lean on. In the Hudson Valley, we helped entrepreneur Kale Kaposhilin launch a tech meetup, and hundreds of neighboring entrepreneurs he’d never met showed up. In the Mohawk Valley, MVCC President Randy VanWagoner’s network in Utica became the foundation for thINCubator, a hub built not because there was foot traffic to support it, but because he led engaging the right people to build one anyway.

Neither place had density working in its favor – just people willing to organize around something worth showing up for. The Adirondacks are a harder version of this same test.

The Park is literally my backyard. My hometown of Little Falls is in foothills, so boomeranging back here 20+ years ago rekindled lots of memories and appreciation for both the beauty and vastness of the largest parkland in the continental U.S.  I’ve felt the pull for the Dacks, but not done enough yet to act on that outside of recreation with family.

I’ll admit something else. I haven’t been as hands-on with UVC day-to-day as I once was. The team we’ve built is strong enough that it doesn’t need me the way it used to, and that’s exactly how it should work. But watching twenty people drive in from as far as Buffalo and the Hudson Valley to sit around that pond interacting with a group of committed supporters re-engaged something in me. I’m back in the game.

The best moment of the day was graciousness and leadership of our host Craig Weatherup. Craig came to the Adirondacks the way a lot of people do – as a second-homer, someone drawn here for the quiet and didn’t arrive with a clear intention to build an organization or community. He ran PepsiCo North America for years, and today he’s the founder of A2I, working the same premise from a different direction – building real community for remote tech workers and entrepreneurs who never share an office, let alone a city block. Whether it’s a founder in the Mohawk Valley or a developer three states from their team, the core problem is identical: no density, no hallway conversations, no accidental collisions to build on.

Craig’s own story is the one I keep coming back to. A lot of people come to the Adirondacks the way he did – for a retreat, a second home, a break from wherever they’re actually building their careers. Most leave it at that. The question we kept circling back to was how you turn more of those visits into something invested – time, money, or just serious thought about growing the Innovation Economy here instead of somewhere else. Craig didn’t stop at owning a place in the mountains, then choosing to live in the Dacks full time. He built something. That’s the model worth spreading.

Low density doesn’t mean low potential – it just means the model has to work harder to prove itself. And it did. Nobody drove out to Bay Pond because it was convenient; they came because they wanted to be part of something.

I don’t think we’ve solved the geographic dispersion problem in one afternoon by a pond. But between what we’ve already proven in the Hudson and Mohawk Valleys, and now doing it alongside Craig’s growing community from the tech side, I saw enough that day to believe this is going to work. You don’t need city blocks. You need the right people and a reason to show up.

The Adirondacks are a new frontier for UVC, and I’m convinced it’s one worth pushing into.