Missing Middle Scorecard
How Does Your Community Stack Up?
My last article made the case that most startups in most communities fall into the gap between two capital extremes. VC optimizes for outliers. Banks require collateral. Most growing companies fall straight through.
The capital gap facing these founders isn’t a bug. It’s a feature of how most ecosystems were designed and operate.
The response to that post was overwhelming. Community leaders, ecosystem builders, funders, and founders from across the country wrote back with some version of “Yes, exactly!” and many posed the same question: “OK, so what do we actually do about it?”
That’s what this issue is about.
The System Isn’t Broken. It’s Misaligned.
The missing middle exists in every community. It’s not a fringe problem or a handful of edge cases. It’s the majority of real economic opportunity—companies with traction, real customers, and genuine growth potential that don’t fit the narrow criteria VC requires and can’t clear the collateral bar banks demand (and yes, even top VC firm a16z agrees!).
What makes this urgent is that the problem is getting bigger, not smaller. AI is lowering the cost to start. More founders are building non-VC-shaped companies. We’re increasing the supply of exactly the companies our current system is least equipped to support.
A better system requires a different starting point. Not “how do we get more founders VC-ready?” but “what does a funding ecosystem actually need to look like for most founders to have a real shot?”
Where Does Your Community Stand?
We built a diagnostic tool, called the Missing Middle Scorecard, for community leaders: 7 categories, 14 questions, about 15 minutes. It shows you how well you actually serve the founders who sit between bank-ready and VC-shaped—and where you’re leaving the most opportunity on the table.
Three Legs of the Stool
So what does a “better system” actually look like?
1. Early discovery and development
Most ecosystems wait for founders to show up—at the hub, the pitch night, the accelerator application. But most would-be founders (and a lot of missing middle ones) won’t show up there. They’re running a business, not looking for a program. Or they’re trying to build a different kind of company than your current programming seems designed to support.
Reaching them requires proactive, community-wide activation strategies that meet people where they are. And once you find them, the support has to match what they actually need—not a one-size-fits-all set of events or programs built around the VC path. Every founder is at a different stage, building a different kind of company, with different gaps. The support has to flex accordingly. This is core to what we do with our AI platform at Builders + Backers, and what we help our partner communities build the capacity to do.
2. Better signals
The traditional filters—pitch decks, competition wins, warm intros—select for charisma and access, not traction. A better system finds founders with real customer evidence, real revenue momentum, and real problem-solution fit before capital enters the picture. That means earlier engagement, better data, and different questions. Our Builders Studio is designed to generate exactly these signals: to better enable entrepreneurs to know what to do and how to do it, and to help ecosystems and funders pinpoint who is truly ready for support, funding and scale.
3. Locally aligned capital
Revenue-based financing, community investment funds, CDFIs, patient capital, recoverable grants—the tools exist. Most communities just haven’t built the infrastructure to deploy them at the scale or speed the missing middle needs. Blended capital models that match the actual shape of these companies aren’t exotic. They’re just under-built. A growing number of organizations are demonstrating that this is solvable. And we’re especially excited about what our partners at National Coalition for Community Capital and Homefield Fund are building: locally-rooted funds that invest in real companies, with capital structures that actually fit.
Ultimately, these three legs of the stool work together. Discovery without capital leaves founders stranded. Capital without better signals funds the wrong companies. And none of it works if you’re only reaching the founders who already know to find you.
The scorecard is a starting point. Take it, share it with your team, and use the results to have an honest conversation about where your community is actually leaving opportunity on the table.
If you want to see what AI-powered entrepreneurship support actually looks like, check out Builders Studio. Our AI platform can help anyone, anywhere, bring their entrepreneurial idea to life.
If you’re an economic developer, ecosystem builder or organization supporting entrepreneurs and want to explore partnership, let’s talk.