On today's show, you'll get to know one of our founding members here at Startup High Country, Jeffrey Scott.
For someone who dropped out of college five times, it is amazing to see how much Jeffrey Scott has accomplished in his career and in our community.
From a very early age, Jeffrey pushed back against what he called the "Societal Treadmill." His dissatisfaction for what he saw as society’s constraints and expectations eventually led him into becoming an entrepreneur. Because, it was through the entrepreneurial world that he felt empowered to sink his teeth into actually SOLVING the big problems that he saw with the world.
You’ll hear how his passion for the environment and outdoor resources we all love so much in the mountains of North Carolina, led him to take on leadership roles with huge impacts at quite a young age.
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Note - Transcripts are created using AI technology and may not read 100% accurately. We apologize for any misspellings or mistakes.
0 (1s):
Mark Salzmen jumped in front of the bulldozers that came down, stood in front of it, waved his hands and told, told him to stop. And the gentleman driving it was an older man and he said, What, what are you doing? And he said, My friend up here's climbed up this tree. They don't want it developed. And he just laughed. He said, Oh, I've never seen this before, but I'm not gonna run that tree over or that boy, I'll stop. And he turned off his bulldozer and he said, I'm getting paid the rest of the day Anyway.
2 (40s):
Welcome to Made In The High Country, a podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the high country's entrepreneurial ecosystem and the people within it from Startup High Country. I'm Samantha Wright. And this show is here to shine a light for aspiring or struggling entrepreneurs in our area to the resources available to support them as well as highlight the amazing opportunities, massive talent and unique success stories that exist here in the mountains of Western North Carolina. Whether you call the high country your home or not, this show will leave you with interesting insights, actionable tips, and fascinating stories aimed to inspire and entertain.
2 (1m 20s):
Today on our show, you'll get to know one of our founding members here at Startup High Country, Jeffrey Scott. Stay tuned for his fascinating stories around social entrepreneurship and his insightful thoughts about the choices we make in our lifetime. Currently, Jeffrey Scott is a growth coach for founders of Mission Driven Startups. He works as a fractional chief financial officer or chief revenue Officer for early stage startups through his business, Metamorphic Consulting. And he's held hugely impactful roles for large mission first companies such as Heifer International, the High Country Conservancy, stepping stone and more. For someone who dropped out of college five times, it's fun to see how much he's accomplished in his career and in our community.
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From a very early age, Jeffrey pushed back against what he called the societal treadmill,
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Graduate high school, go to college, get a job, get married. You know, the whole domestication cycle. Didn't like it. I never worked well with it. Just do everything you're supposed to do. And it was more about what others thought of you, not what you wanted to do. That was, what was that generation from the south, at least my mom and dad. It was all about what others thought about you and your family. And I, I just bucked that, I hated it.
2 (2m 41s):
We, lovers of the outdoors here can direct a lot of our gratitude towards Jeffrey Scoffer, his role in helping to preserve over 15,000 acres of land in our region and protecting so many of the natural spaces beloved by locals and outsiders alike in the high country. What I love about this chat with Jeffrey is how clearly it shows his passion for social entrepreneurship. He's the kind of person who makes you want to fight for what you believe in and live your life in alignment with what makes you excited. And if you're thinking to yourself, I'm not even sure what gets me fired up anymore, but I sure know that I don't love this. Well, you likely have a lot in common with the young Jeffrey Scott who found himself leaving his hometown of Spartanburg, South Carolina and coming to Boone for college at Appalachian State University, not really knowing what to make of himself, but knowing that he needed a change.
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I was so ready to get out and I had a, a mentor counselor, Jim Mankey in high school, and he just took me under his wing and said, If you want to get outta here, you need to get into college. And I was not on a track to get into college, I was not. I went to school when I, but I didn't really pay attention. I was more of a B, c D student. He encouraged me and I turned my grades around and took like the s a t 10 times to combine scores and somehow got into half state the only place I wanted to go because I'd been backpacking in the mountains quite a bit in the summers and just loved that the thunderstorms, the late afternoon smell of a thunderstorm.
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And I don't know, it just stayed in my mind. And so that's the only place I applied and I got in and yeah,
2 (4m 22s):
I bet it was probably an easier school to get
0 (4m 24s):
Into. Oh it was. Oh my gosh, there's no way I would've gotten in now. So yeah, I was blessed by getting in and then finding a guidance counselor that told me I should quit and hiked Appalachian Trail.
2 (4m 36s):
Once you got to, once you got to app you, so, so one mentor from your high school said, I see you and think you need to go to college. This is, this is what you know would be good for you. And then you get to college and a different mentor says, Jeffrey, you gotta get outta
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Here. Yeah. And, and I think she knew that it wasn't a question of my curiosity to learn, it was just not right Now, go see some of the world, go do some things you wanna do while you still can, while you're able, you don't, you're not tied down into a job in a family and your legs are strong and your spirit's wild go. You'd have your adventure and then you could see what's next. And she put a bet on me and I said, Well, would you write that down and send a letter to my dad? And she did. So my dad was pissed. He was like, Well, dad, look, guidance counselor says I gotta quit and hiked at, that's what I gotta do. And we stayed in touch and I'd say about halfway through, we were on a phone call.
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I mean we had public payphones back then, no cell phones. And, and he said, You know, Jeffrey, I really wish I was out there with you. And I thought that was the coolest thing. So he came around to it, he knew I was, I was gonna, you know, march to a different tune.
2 (5m 49s):
Yeah. And I, I've seen so many parents very quickly kind of change their mind, right? When they originally think something was a, a terrible idea. And then, but they just see, they see how good that decision was for the person, even if it ended up, you know, a failure. You gotta like, let your kids make their own mistakes sometimes and let them just carve out their
0 (6m 8s):
Own power. That's right. That's right. And you know, for me, my big, one of my big principles that I learned on the trail, and I I try to stay true to it, but it's expect nothing and accept everything. And that's really helped me on my entrepreneurial journey is just don't get attached to the outcomes. Cuz they're probably not gonna look like you thought they would when you stepped into that journey. I know the at did not and I know every one of my adventures have not. And learning to just roll with it, count on your support, count on your team, count on your, your abilities that you have with you, and then count on trail magic to happen.
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Cuz it always does. I mean, think doors open and people show up in your life. I mean, mentors show up. That's never not happened, but it usually, if I'm holding the wheel too tight or my expectations are too strong, I get crushed by 'em and that's just self-inflicted damage and it's just, it's pointless. So that was a principle I learned a long time ago and so I, it, it served me well.
2 (7m 14s):
Jeffrey finished hiking the at and then returned to Appalachian State where he joined the recreation program. But he soon grew frustrated over the school's, focus on theory over action. In 1993, a developer bought Howard's Knob, one of Boone's most cherished local hangouts and bouldering destinations. At the time, this iconic mountain was the hangout destination. It overlooks ASU and historic downtown Boone. And when Jeffrey found out that a developer was planning to build 44 home sites on this beloved natural resource, he wanted to do something about it,
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I tried to get the school involved. That's why don't we buy this, make a park out of it. This is what we're studying. And they just, we can't do that. That's not what we do. We, we taught, we, we look at theory and we look at what's happened in the past, but we don't really do anything. I was like, Are you kidding me? This is really, And that was frustrating. So I quit again. I gave all my possessions away and I moved into the woods and built the shack in the woods. I did the true tho was reading a lot of Tom Brown and built a, built a shack on Joey Henson's land who was a dear friend and climber. And, and through that we started the, the high country, what was the Watauga High Country Land Trust at the time.
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Then it became the High Country Conservancy and now it's the Blue Ridge Conservancy. But that was my first sort of step into organizing people and leading with a purpose in mind, you know, to save them mountain and not knowing how that wasn't really the point. There was a hundred different house, we tried a lot of them.
2 (8m 59s):
Right. Is that why it went through so many iterations and so many names
0 (9m 2s):
That, and the Land trust movement was young. So the land trusts are, you know, nonprofits that receive and purchase ecologically significant or recreationally significant lands and hold it for perpetuity. It's actually written in the contracts forever, which Mark Twain had a great quote, forever's a long time, especially when you get towards the end. And so there's a lot of stewardship and liability that goes on with protecting land cuz it's, you're signing, you know, your, your management and, and if you had to defend a piece of land, it's forever. And so these land trusts was a very young movement at the time.
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There were four land trusts in the state and when I finished there was 24 when I finished doing my land trust work. So I got to kinda watch it grow up and I was a young executive director without a lot of, you know, real mentorship, but a small group of land trust around the state working together to try to build the movement. And so it was a kind of exciting social entrepreneurship journey for me.
2 (10m 7s):
And tell us about the moment this kind of came to an exciting head with, you know, people jumping in front of bulldozers and you sitting on the, at the top of a tree for, for a long time. Tell us that
0 (10m 17s):
Story. Sure. So Howard's Knob was for sale. We were trying to reach a deal with the owner to purchase the property. We came, got really close to a deal. We thought that we had a deal, we had a price, we had a contract, but it wasn't signed and it was supposed to be signed that week. It didn't get signed. And then bulldozer showed up and started pushing in driveways. So we had to move quick. And so it was a strategic decision to try to shine a light on the, on the subject and try to get people to pay attention to, you know, the loss of a really incredible resource that you can't put back again. And so we went up there early one morning gentleman named Mark Saltman and myself and the, I went and climbed up a little shaggy bark hickory with a harness, climbed about 40 feet up, and then Mark Saltman jumped in front of the bulldozers that came down and told him to start stood in front of it.
0 (11m 18s):
Mark's a big man, probably six four, and waved his hands and told, told him to stop. And the gentleman driving it was an older man and he said, What, what are you doing? And he said, My friend up here's climbed up this tree, they don't want it developed. And he just laughed. He said, Oh, I've never seen this before, but I'm not gonna run that tree over or that boy, I'll stop. And he turned off his bulldozer and he said, I'm getting paid the rest of the day. Anyway, so eight hours later there was probably 30 of my supporters on the cliff beside the tree. And then there was all the fire and rescue, all the police, the town sheriff, everybody was up there and they were all trying to figure out how to get me out the tree.
0 (12m 6s):
And in the end, which was really funny, I had long hair at the time. They, they sent a long-haired fire and rescue guy that could try to talk me out, which I thought was great. They're like, you look like him, Like
2 (12m 16s):
The negotiator comes in.
0 (12m 17s):
Yeah, exactly. And ultimately a gentleman, Kelly Redman, who's with the sheriff's department now, came and spoke to me and about that time the storm was coming in and the tree was blowing back and forth. I'd been up there a long time and I could see, he could see the worry in my face and I saw a worry in his face. He was on the top of the cliff and I, and he said, Why don't you come on down? I said, If you'll stop the bulldozers for the weekend, if you can work that out, you know, and I'm happy to, to come down. I've, I've made my point, you know, and we had newspapers from Raleigh and Winston-Salem and Greenboro and all across the state come up. So there was a lot of media push and splash.
0 (12m 58s):
And we raised, I don't know, about $10,000 that weekend, which was a lot of fun. And the sheriff's department was nothing but supportive. And I don't know, it ended up being a, a friendly civil disobedience and, and we stopped the bulldozers for the weekend. So yeah,
2 (13m 18s):
In the end, the new owner of Howard's Knb only built one house, not 44. And even though the county or conservancy doesn't own the land yet, Jeffrey holds on to the hope that one day Howard's knob will be protected for good. That experience taught Jeffrey the art of the long game and how to more effectively do conservation work. From there, he traveled to South America on an internship and then to Ecuador, where he was hired to map out 2000 acres of cloud forest. And he fell even deeper in love with the natural world and ecosystems. He went back to school to learn how to map on a larger scale to help with bigger deforestation issues and protective land efforts.
2 (14m 0s):
Three years into that geography program, he was offered and accepted a position for the director of the National Committee for the New River, which is now called the New River Conservancy. As the director, he worked to protect the three large state rivers and watershed areas there he got really good at leveraging resources, telling stories and raising money.
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We did a 14 million raise in two years, which was amazing. I sold an idea of a fishable swimmable, drinkable river to people that hadn't even, didn't even know the river, but we raised 14 million and pretty amazing to see the ability to tell a story and compel others.
2 (14m 42s):
One thing he learned as the director for the New River Conservancy was that you can move a lot faster with private money versus writing grants. So from there he started his own business called Frontline Conservation Real Estate. And sometime after that, held a prominent position for Heifer International, an organization that helps families move from poverty to power by supporting and investing alongside local farmers and their communities. Jeffrey, do you have any advice for young entrepreneurs who are listening and feel really inspired and, and drawn towards a cause but are also feeling really intimidated by the idea of being a director or a leader or raising $14 million or any of those things?
0 (15m 31s):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, for me I was pissed off, right? I mean, I used my anger and I focused it. I I was upset with what was happening and I wanted to do something about it. And so, I mean, there's nothing better than for you to see something that pisses you off and realize it's a much bigger problem and it's probably being played out all over. Can you solve it from an entrepreneurial lens? But I think it starts with passion. You'd be passionate about. So that curiosity led into something that turned more passionate over time as I understood the bigger picture. So from curiosity and passion by then to found purpose and those three really became sort of a motivation for me.
0 (16m 13s):
That's how it got started. And then I always used the, the trick of, of sort of the curiosity, the passion and the purpose.
2 (16m 21s):
Yeah. If you don't have those things as an entrepreneur, then you're not gonna last long. You've done a lot of teaching and coaching for entrepreneurs and you do that alongside your own mentor Annie Price. You're now currently running 10 entrepreneurs through a year long program called Emergent. What are some of your favorite things about leading those entrepreneurs through this program where you're teaching things like leadership, self-reflection, goal setting?
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What's amazing working with a group of entrepreneurs for a year is everybody goes through their shit. Like life goes on, right? People die, people are born,
2 (16m 60s):
Right?
0 (17m 1s):
Businesses go up, businesses go down, people burn out, people thrive, right? It's just crazy to watch this emergence of, of characters and soul and spirit and, and fight for whatever they're trying to fight for. And just to watch it in a group setting and support each other with vulnerability and shared capacity. And you know, watching Declan go work with two of the comp companies that are also in the course that need his help. And so watching this, this interplay of, of of, of a true tribe of entrepreneurs working together to solve wicked problems in the world is remarkable to me.
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And I think Western North Carolina is where we should make our mark. It's not just Boone, it's the high country and it's not just the high country, it's Western North Carolina. You know, we have a lot of our responsibility in the Blue Ridge Mountains here and it's a beautiful, beautiful place. But my concern is in 20 years, when it's 120 degrees down in Raleigh and Durham, in Charlotte, everybody's gonna want to be up here. The biggest future trend we're gonna see is mass migration of people. We're already seeing it. And so those folks are gonna come up the mountain where it's cooler. We need to be in front of that. Yes, there's entrepreneurial opportunities, but we should be building companies that are solving problems.
0 (18m 26s):
And I wanna see more of us talking about that and trying to figure out how do we make Western North Carolina an entrepreneurial, you know, hub or mecca where we support each other, but we're also building companies that are going to withstand this pressure that we're gonna see as well as build more climate resilient startup enabled communities. Because I think entrepreneurs solve problems that the government will never solve. That's always on my mind from a bigger picture perspective. And that emergent group was just a little test piece of wow that was just 10 entrepreneurs. What if we had a thousand entrepreneurs? Yeah. And we probably do.
2 (19m 5s):
What something I've heard you kind of say over and over again is that, that coming back to purpose and something you say a lot as well as entrepreneurs solve problems. And I think that's a question that you're, you're always kind of throwing out there that makes a lot of people stop and reflect and say, Okay, yeah, what is the purpose of this? Because I think a lot of people, especially young people that are maybe coming outta business school or you know, listening to all the, the podcast about business and stuff is they can get a little bit swept away in the that achievement side of it for themselves, right? How much money can I achieve? How much status or power can I achieve? And they don't always stop and ask themselves, you know, for what purpose or what problem am I really solving?
2 (19m 51s):
Do you, do you find that some people might, you might get involved with the business and, and you sort of get in there and realize, oh this person's just, they really just want the money. They don't really, they're not really focusing on a problem or purpose.
0 (20m 5s):
Definitely. I see that and I mean I think it's more of how sustainable is that, right? I mean, and you can look at the problem as the problem we're solving from a larger context, a purpose perspective, a wicked problem. Is it like a really big problem? That's what I tend to find myself wrapped up in spending, you know, decades of my life and big wicked problem. Some people may say no, I'm trying to solve a problem for a certain set of, of, of customers and it's still important that they're solving a problem where they wouldn't have customers. So there's some really early work on sort of product market fit that you have to do and play with.
0 (20m 46s):
But if there's no market for it, it, there's no reason to spend $50,000 building a product that nobody wants. And I think that's an easy place to be for builders. Creators. Let me build it, let me build it. Exactly. Invent, especially keep
2 (20m 60s):
Out on it, you know, it's like oh this is a cool idea but does do people actually want it? So you know, I think you might be offering a workshop on this very thing soon, but by the time this podcast goes out it that will have have passed most likely. Well we'll do more for those that, yeah, we'll do more of 'em. So just, yeah, make sure you're on the newsletter, the startup high country newsletter and you'll get word of when when Jeffrey's teaching another customer discovery workshop because that really that, you know, I love the phrase quit early, right? If you've got a great idea, great, you know, but don't spend months and months and money and money and buckets of energy in building a whole business before you actually take the time to ask and prove, is this a problem we're solving?
2 (21m 42s):
Are there actually customers who are gonna be willing to pay me money for this thing or this service,
0 (21m 46s):
Right? And is that market growing? Is it shrinking? Am I gonna invest in public telephones, right? I mean what you, you want to be careful about what you're stepping into from a number of reasons. And back to the personal side, I like to think, wow, I might spend a decade and hundreds of thousands of dollars and blood, sweat and tears doing this right? And there's a trade off, there's a trade off. If I do this, I can't do something else. Is this really worth me spending the next decade on when we only really probably have eight decades in our life? And you know, the first decades probably a wash. I mean I was learning some entrepreneurial things at around 10 I had to rent a pin business, which was really trying to rent number two pencils cuz nobody had 'em for their tests.
0 (22m 34s):
And the name rent a pencil didn't sound right. So had rent a pen and then nobody ever gave the pencils back anyway, it was a total wash. I love that. But yeah, so I mean the first decade would this, were kind of thrown into what we're thrown into, right? But the next decade in the next proceeding, probably five decades is your chance to do an entrepreneur pursuit. When I'm 70, I hope I'm still engaged in a fight for something worth fighting for a problem we're solving. But do I need to be running that company then? No, probably not. And so I like to think about decades and there's only few of them and these endeavors take that much time.
0 (23m 17s):
Yeah, you might spin up a company and sell it in three years for 500 million, but that's all the heroics that we read in fast, you know, Company and Ink Magazine and it's just, it's very, very, very, very rare. So yeah, I don't think life's worth that. I think it's more important to be engaged and involved and connected to a bigger purpose that's truly worth fighting for a problem we're solving.
2 (23m 43s):
Absolutely. And speaking of problems we're solving, it was what about four years ago that you sat down with Sam Glover and James Pants and essentially gave birth to startup high country. You were all these entrepreneurial guys living in the high country and wanted to see just more of a sort of startup incubator kind of culture happening here, more high paying jobs here. And it was partly thanks to your incredible grant writing skills, right? Something you'd learned to do very well in your former conservation work. That startup high country received a very generous grant from n c idea to do what we do now, which is to foster entrepreneurship in the high country.
2 (24m 26s):
And, and so one question I get asked a lot is like, why, you know, why would someone an organization give money to people like us to do things like get entrepreneurs together, teach workshops to them, celebrate their successes and and throw events for entrepreneurs? What's so important about supporting entrepreneurship for community?
0 (24m 48s):
Well, fir first, first of all because they, it's been proven out. I mean this is not a, it's a very large organization run by a very smart man. Tom Ro worked for the Kaufman Foundation studying entrepreneurship and it's impacts across the planet. I mean they're connected to a global network of building entrepreneurs. And so I think because of the environment in which we live and because of technology, we have a chance to do and build this a different way. And entrepreneurship to me is the answer. Traveling, spent some time in Southeast Asia traveling a few years ago, yank the kids outta school and we, we traveled and it was really interesting in Vietnam, in Cambodia and Lao and Thailand where I was all different, each had their own approach towards getting outta poverty.
0 (25m 38s):
And it was entrepreneurship, all their newspapers, their investment, but they talked about it over and over again. They all had co-working spaces, but they were working hard to make entrepreneurship happen, to get them out of poverty. And in rural America, disenfranchised communities, communities of color, they're typically left out. And so people like NCA idea see this as a critical way to bring people permanently up, you know, into the middle class or or beyond to get them the economic development and the access to the resources. That's what they're paying for. They see it as an equality issue and I, I love it. It's, it's, it's, it's the right approach.
2 (26m 19s):
And how is Startup high country working to enact on those ideas?
0 (26m 24s):
Well, I mean we, we have several programs I would say they're also nascent, but one of our probably most popular cuz it's where we see each other, you know, is our networking events. The Covid didn't help, right? We had to shut that down for a while, but we're back and it's exciting. I think people getting together, rubbing shoulders, sharing ideas, making happy collisions happen. We don't have a big population here, so we're gonna have a smaller entrepreneurial community, but that doesn't mean we can't be strong. And so to do that we need to run into each other more. And so that's one way of doing that. And then we're trying to step into more of these courses, workshops that people need. Again, you can connect that way, get closer, but you can also apply some of the theories that we're learning around entrepreneurship to your own businesses and share basically your scars, what's working, what's not.
0 (27m 14s):
And so that's a lot of fun and again, a way to build social capital and build, build our community.
2 (27m 20s):
Jeffrey, is there an official link between startup high country and the high country impact fund?
0 (27m 25s):
There was in the beginning. We knew that we needed access to capital to invest in companies that didn't exist up here. Couldn't go to a bank and borrow money. So we did two things. One, we got Mountain Biz Works to move an office up here, which Chrisinger runs. He was a original supporter and, and founder of co-founder of Startup High Country as well. And so we needed access to capital. So one was getting the lending from Mountain Biz Works, which is a cdfi which can lend a lot differently than a bank and more freely. And then the, the capital side of fundraising for startups, equity capital per se, investments we needed.
0 (28m 9s):
And so we want to build an angel fund and we're moving into fund too right now for fund, actively fundraising for it right now and it'll be a larger fund.
2 (28m 19s):
And what are the kind of businesses or what are the kind of ideas or businesses that the high Country impact fund is looking to give money to?
0 (28m 28s):
I mean, we're pretty agnostic on the industry itself. Early stage companies or where we typically invest our money, but they've been involved in, you know, product development to healthcare, to, we've had some really interesting innovators and in the health space with products. One out of Asheville called Elite HRV doing heart rate variability, Super fa, fascinating technology. They recently hired somebody from Pixar. I mean, you know, somebody's doing well when they hired somebody from Pixar. Pretty exciting stuff. But yeah, Jason, the founder there was great. And we were there, we were the early money in to help him get there. And we still support each other.
0 (29m 8s):
And I, it's just great to watch because we wanna see more entrepreneurs here deal ready, you know, they've built a good business, they're growing, they got a problem we're solving, they're, they're able to execute, they're building a team, they know their weaknesses, they're humble, they're smart, they're hungry. Those things are really important. And then we're investing in the people, not so much the, the plan cuz you know, the plan's gonna go to shit, it always does, but can the team execute? Can they tack the sales when they need to? And so that's what we're looking for. So encourage any entrepreneurs that are interested in building a company that's gonna solve a problem we're solving and needs to raise money to come talk to us.
0 (29m 49s):
We can do pract practice pitches, you know, we should do some more pitch practice for, you know, in front of a live audience. But, but if people are interested in those things, startup high country can certainly help put those together because it's, it's nerve-wracking to get in front of somebody and pitch for money. And so you want to practice and practice and practice. But yeah.
2 (30m 11s):
Jeffrey, this has been so much fun and thank you for sharing all of the, the story and thank you for all that you do today. Before you go, I always like to ask, what's the the most high country thing you've done lately?
0 (30m 26s):
The most high? Well, I went and stood in the river. I like to fish, I like to trout fish. I like small mouth too. I do both. But this past weekend I went and stood in the river and I didn't catch a single fish. And it's funny, I normally would work up and down the stream, you know, I get pretty excited about fishing and want to catch fish, but in this case I, I just stood there and I just, I just, I just sat there and sat on lean back on a boulder and, and just watched and observed and it was the coolest thing ever. I mean, you get next to running water in the high country, which is totally accessible to us up here. These river systems is very unique.
0 (31m 7s):
Most times you have to drive and travel to get somewhere here. We have 'em right here in high country. And so to sit there in the river, I forgot everything. I mean, I was just in a whole nother world and time disappeared and it was a beautiful thing. High country's a special place. It,
2 (31m 30s):
Thanks so much for listening to today's show. This episode was produced and edited by me, Samantha Wright, community director at Startup High Country. Learn more about our events, workshops, and ways to get involved with Startup High country@startuphc.com. A special thank you to Matt Wason for the creation of some of our music startup High Country is supported by NC idea, a private foundation that supports entrepreneurship in North Carolina through grants and innovative programs. Thank you to the Wataga EDC for their support and for helping build the entrepreneurial landscape of Western North Carolina. I'm Samantha Wright and you've been listening to Made in the High Country.