The Woman Trying to Give Upstate New York a Second Act

In an Uber recently in Albany, I kind of fell in love.

I love old American industrial towns, with houses buckling and yearning to tell their stories. In Upstate New York, there’s a kind of grandeur that hints at what the place once was.

Buffalo boomed because of the Erie Canal. Rochester gave us Kodak. Syracuse had Carrier. Manufacturing created generations of jobs and enormous wealth.

Then much of it went away.

Factories closed, jobs moved overseas (or were automated) and young people fled. Upstate became very good at producing talented people and then watched them take off.

Which brings me to Olivia Goldstein. I met Olivia at a Journey to Lead gathering and was immediately taken by her unmistakable Buffalo accent, enormous brown eyes and slightly manic level of enthusiasm. When I told her I was training for a bodybuilding competition in Las Vegas, her face lit up.

“I’m coming,” she said.

Sure you are, I thought.

She came.

That tells you something about Olivia.

She’s 37, grew up in Buffalo and is CEO of Upstate Venture Connect, or UVC, an organization trying to create something the region has lost: a reason for ambitious people to stay.

Olivia talks fast. She travels constantly. She seems to know everybody. Tell her about something you’re building and within minutes she’s mentally rifling through the people she could introduce you to.

Underneath all that energy is a compelling idea about how you give a place a second chance: Stop exporting the people.

Upstate New York isn’t short on brains. Cornell. RIT. RPI. Syracuse. Clarkson. University of Rochester. The SUNY system. The problem, she says, isn’t producing talent. It’s building the ecosystem around it. A founder in Silicon Valley is surrounded by investors, engineers, customers and various technicians. A founder in a small Upstate town may have an extraordinary idea . . . and no network to reach out to.

UVC tries to bring the network to the founder instead of requiring the founder to leave, connecting entrepreneurs with investors, mentors, customers and various levels of expertise.

Olivia knows something about leaving. She grew up one of five kids in Buffalo, went to Pitt, studied Russian and economics, worked at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow and initially imagined a career in government.

Instead, she found technology, eventually moving to India to work for a startup. Then she and two colleagues started an influencer-marketing software company. When the three broke founders needed somewhere inexpensive to build it, Olivia returned to Buffalo — with all three moving into her mother’s house.

They built the company there, raised money and sold it in 2019. One early investor was StartFast Ventures. (Years later, Olivia became a general partner in that same fund.)

Now she runs UVC. The woman who left Buffalo looking for opportunity is trying to make it possible for the next Olivia to find it at home.

Olivia is skeptical of the traditional economic-development playbook: offer giant corporations tax breaks to put a facility in your town.

“We don’t need an Amazon warehouse here,” she told me.

What interests her is ownership. Build a company in Buffalo. Let founders and employees own pieces of it. If it succeeds, you’ve created wealth inside Buffalo. Then those people can invest in the next generation.

She points to Buffalo-based ACV Auctions, which went public in 2021. Its success didn’t just create jobs. It created a new class of people with money who could put some of that capital back into the region.

Build companies. Create owners. Keep some of the wealth home. Do it again.

Olivia’s latest obsession may be my favorite.

Across Upstate are profitable small businesses—laundromats, auto shops, service companies—owned by aging entrepreneurs with nobody to take them over.

They’re too small for private equity. Younger people may not realize buying one is even an option.

Instead of telling every ambitious 25-year-old to invent the next Facebook, Olivia asks: Why not help her buy a profitable business from a 68-year-old ready to retire?

“You have a salary from day one,” she told me. “You don’t have to build something from zero.”

Give an old business a young owner. Let her modernize it, grow it and build equity of her own.

It’s entrepreneurship without the mythology . . . that entrepreneurship has to mean venture capital, hoodies and billion-dollar valuations.

And that is what makes Olivia a LIFT story to me.

She’s 37. She has already left home, built a company, sold it and become an investor. Now she’s taking all that energy and turning it back toward the place she came from.

Upstate New York isn’t going back to Kodak and the Erie Canal. Its second act will have to look different from its first.

Maybe it looks like Olivia, connecting one ambitious person to another and asking a simple question:

How do we create owners here again?