They may seem like worlds apart: the glossy, high-tech environs of California’s Silicon Valley and the economically struggling mountain towns of Eastern Kentucky. But when he visited Paintsville’s Big Sandy Community and Technical College for the “Connecting Silicon Valley with Silicon Holler” conference in March, California Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA-17) noted a set of values that are shared by people in his home district and in central Appalachia. “One of the things that I’ve seen in this region which is similar to the [Silicon] Valley is collaboration, and a willingness to take risks and to dream big,” Khanna said.

Khanna joined a panel of state and federal officials, representatives from national tech firms, and local business leaders and entrepreneurs who appear in KET’s Connecting Silicon Valley with Silicon Holler highlights coverage, airing Monday, May 29 at 8/7 pm on KET.

Organized by Kentucky 5th district Rep. Hal Rogers and Gov. Matt Bevin, co-chairs of the non-partisan economic development agency SOAR: Shaping Our Appalachian Region; the Appalachian Regional Commission; and Kentucky-based technology company Interapt, the conference focused on revitalizing the economy of Eastern Kentucky through high-tech development. KET’s Renee Shaw moderated the discussion.

With the coming of high-speed, broadband Internet to the region, Rogers said the raw goods and finished products of the digital age can flow as easily through mountain communities as they can through Silicon Valley, opening the potential for a new economy in Eastern Kentucky. “We’ve exported our talent all these years simply because we had nothing here to employ them,” Rogers said at the conference. “That’s going to change.”

By focusing on training and entrepreneurship, Gov. Matt Bevin said the region can work its way out of the poverty that has plagued Eastern Kentuckians for generations.

“The answer isn’t another government program,” Bevin said. “The answer is workforce development, the answer is training, the answer is harnessing these innate abilities that we have.”

Owensboro native Ankur Gopal worked in Silicon Valley, Chicago and Washington, D.C., before starting his Louisville-based tech company Interapt six years ago. The company has launched an initiative called TechHire Eastern Kentucky, which is training Eastern Kentucky residents to code. “When I started this I said, ‘If this works, this could be transformative for the region,’” Gopal said at the conference.

Connecting Silicon Valley with Silicon Holler is a KET production.

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Contact:

Todd Piccirilli
Senior Director, Marketing and Communications
859-258-7242
tpiccirilli@ket.org