Three years ago, I moved to Bentonville not knowing anyone. I could count the local founders I knew on one hand. I was looking for my startup tribe and hadn't yet figured out how to find it.
Opening Onward HQ in downtown Bentonville was, in part, a selfish act. I needed a home base. Somewhere other builders, people genuinely obsessed with a problem and doing something about it, would actually walk through the door.
What I didn't expect was what I'd discover along the way.
Startups attract ambitious people and create gravity. The best ones shape the identity of a place. I've watched that happen here in ways I didn't anticipate when I first moved. You can feel it in Northwest Arkansas and the greater Heartland. I feel it more every week.
Lately I keep noticing something. New builders, working on what look like category-defining companies, keep showing up in my calendar. People who have been here for years, building carefully, and are now finding each other in ways they couldn't before. The connective tissue is getting stronger. You can feel the difference between a community that's growing and one that's starting to compound.
It has me sitting with a question I find harder to dismiss each time I ask it. What if the most interesting startup experiment in the country right now isn't happening in San Francisco or New York, but here, in the middle of it all? A lot of people building in this region made a deliberate choice to build something different. More capital efficient, closer to the customer, solving problems that connect directly to the world's largest industrial bases. There's something clarifying about building where the industries actually are.
If you've been looking for your people, come by. Weekly Grind is every Friday morning at Onward HQ, or just reply to this email, and we'll find ways to get you plugged in.
