More Good Jobs
Beyond the coastal bubble
Description
In the late 1990s, a software entrepreneur named Martin Babinec was running a company called TriNet out of the San Francisco Bay Area, deep inside the machine that turns ideas into payrolls. He had spent years there for the obvious reason: that is where the money, the talent, and the deals lived. But Babinec had grown up in Little Falls, a small city in upstate New York, in the Mohawk Valley — the kind of place where the good factory jobs had been leaving for a generation, and where the smartest young people left with them. He kept noticing something that didn't sit right. The prosperity he was helping build had an address, and it was nowhere near the towns that had raised people like him.
So he did something most successful founders never do. Instead of treating his hometown as a place to visit at holidays, he started treating it as a place that could grow companies too. He moved capital, attention, and eventually himself back toward the Mohawk Valley, and began asking a stubborn question: if a region can't wait for a coastal hub to sprinkle jobs on it, what would it take to grow those jobs from the inside? More Good Jobs is the book that came out of years of trying to answer that in practice, not in theory.
Babinec's wager is that the map of American opportunity isn't fixed. The clustering of good work in a handful of metros feels like gravity, but he treats it as something closer to a habit — one that founders, investors, and civic leaders can push back against if they understand how the machine actually works. The book is less a manifesto than a builder's account of what does and doesn't move the needle far from the coast.
The question we’re asking : If good jobs keep concentrating in a few expensive cities, can a community outside them grow its own — and what would it actually have to do?What we’ll see : A founder's argument, drawn from his own return home, for why economic opportunity can be built where people already live rather than imported from a hub.
Table of contents
01Chapter 1 — The founder who moved back home
Babinec's credibility on regional growth rests on the fact that he lived the extraction before he tried to reverse it. He left the Mohawk Valley young, built a career in the technology economy, and founded TriNet in 1988 — a company that handled human resources, payroll, and benefits for other businesses and eventually grew into a large public firm. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of person the coasts absorb and small towns lose. That pattern is the quiet story of much of the American interior over the past half-century: the ambitious leave, the tax base thins, and the places that remain are told to compete for a factory relocation or a call center as if that were the only lever available.
What made Babinec unusual is that he refused the framing. He didn't accept that his hometown's role was to wait for a large employer to arrive, or to lure one with tax breaks it could ill afford. Having watched how the Bay Area actually produced jobs — through new companies, funded early and grown locally — he suspected the same logic could work in a place like Utica or Little Falls, just at a different scale and speed. The problem wasn't that upstate New York lacked smart, hard-working people. The problem was that it lacked the surrounding apparatus that turns a good idea into a growing company with a payroll.
02Chapter 2 — What a good job actually is
The title of the book carries more weight than it first appears. Babinec is careful about the word good, because a lot of the economic development aimed at struggling regions has quietly settled for jobs that aren't. A warehouse shift or a seasonal retail post fills an unemployment statistic without doing much for the person filling it — no path upward, wages that don't cover a stable life, and no reason to stay in town once something better appears elsewhere. Counting jobs, he argues, is not the same as counting opportunity.
A good job, in his account, is one that pays enough to build a life around, offers a plausible ladder to something better, and is anchored to a company with a stake in the community rather than a distant headquarters that can close the site on a spreadsheet. This is where startups matter to his thesis in a specific way. Young, growing companies don't just add positions; they create the kind that expand as the company does, and they tend to be rooted where the founder lives. A firm born in the Mohawk Valley is far likelier to keep its best jobs there than a branch plant that arrived chasing incentives.
03Chapter 3 — The flywheel a region can build for itself
Having defined the prize, Babinec spends much of the book on the mechanics of how a place actually starts producing it. His answer is not a single program but an ecosystem — a set of interlocking parts that reinforce one another once they get spinning. The parts are familiar from any startup hub: founders with ideas, early capital willing to take a risk, mentors who've done it before, talent that can be hired or grown, and institutions that connect them. The insight is that these don't have to be imported from the coast. They can be assembled locally, deliberately, by people who decide to.
Capital is the piece he treats most concretely, because it's usually the missing one. Interior regions rarely lack ideas or workers; they lack investors who will put money into a company down the road rather than into a coastal fund they'll never see the inside of. Babinec's argument to local wealth — the business owners, the successful families, the community foundations — is that keeping some of their capital at work in their own region isn't charity. It's an investment in the asset they can't move: the place itself. Get a few of them to back local founders, and the flywheel starts to turn.
04Chapter 4 — The country that stops sorting itself by zip code
Step back from the Mohawk Valley and Babinec's project points at a larger unease about where prosperity is allowed to live. Over the past few decades, the American economy has sorted itself with startling force: a handful of metros have captured a wildly disproportionate share of the high-growth companies, the venture funding, and the good jobs, while vast stretches of the interior have watched their young people board one-way trains. The standard reading treats this as the natural result of clustering — talent attracts talent, capital follows capital, and the winners compound. Babinec's whole enterprise is a refusal to accept that as destiny.
His wager is that the concentration is at least partly a habit of capital and attention, not an iron law. Investors fund what's near them and what looks like what already worked; founders move to where the funders are; the loop tightens until the map looks inevitable. But every input in that loop is a decision someone makes. If enough capital chose to stay home, if enough founders chose to build where they were from, if enough communities chose to organize themselves as ecosystems rather than as supplicants, the sorting could soften. The coastal bubble, in this reading, is less a fortress than an arrangement — and arrangements can change.
05Conclusion
Babinec's story ends where it started, in a region most economic maps treat as a footnote. He went back not with a rescue plan handed down from a coast, but with the working knowledge of how companies actually get built, and a bet that the same knowledge could take root in the place that raised him. The experiment is unfinished and he says so — some of the companies grew, some folded, the flywheel turns slowly in a small market. But the ledger he keeps is meant less as a victory lap than as a set of instructions for whoever wants to try it in their own valley.
