JD Vance, Steve Case want the heartland's start-up pitches

SAN FRANCISCO — Best-selling author JD Vance and AOL co-founder Steve Case are taking a road trip through America's heartland this fall.

This isn't a buddy picture conjured by Hollywood screenwriters, but a serious campaign to drum up interest in tech start-ups not based in Silicon Valley, New York, Boston, Seattle and other coastal tech hubs.

Case, co-founder of the Washington, D.C.-based venture capital firm Revolution LLC, started the crusade with Rise of the Rest, a 3-year-old nationwide initiative to support and promote entrepreneurs in emerging start-up ecosystems.

Vance, a technology investor who signed on to Rise of the Rest in March, reached an even larger audience with Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. His reflections on the struggling white working class in eastern Kentucky and an Ohio town pummeled by the decline of a steel-making company provided insights into President Trump's appeal with those who live in so-called flyover country.

Both Case and Vance believe in the power of the technology industry to breathe new life into the American Dream in places where it has been slipping away for decades.

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