Most founder profiles are about a single company. David Nelson’s is really about an entire regional economy that didn’t have the infrastructure to support founders like him — so he built it.
Nelson had already started six companies by the time he launched FoundersForge in 2020, a nonprofit entrepreneur center serving Johnson City, Kingsport, Bristol, and the surrounding Appalachian Highlands. He’d moved through multiple accelerators and startup ecosystems over the course of his career, and what he noticed in his own backyard was a familiar problem: promising founders with nowhere structured to go for mentorship, funding connections, or peer community, in a region investors and accelerator networks routinely overlook.
The timing — launching a physical-community nonprofit in the middle of a pandemic — was about as difficult as startup timing gets. Four years on, the numbers suggest it worked anyway. The number of high-growth startups in the region grew from 16 in 2016 to more than 76 by 2024. FoundersForge now accounts for 88% of dedicated entrepreneurship programming in the Appalachian Highlands, and 57% of small-business support activity when the scope widens beyond high-growth startups specifically. In 2023 alone, the organization raised $384,000 in grant funding to keep that programming running.
The centerpiece of Nelson’s work is the Startup Mountain Summit, a conference he built from nothing that drew nearly 200 attendees from five states in its 2023 edition. By 2024, it was pulling in speakers like AppSumo CEO Noah Kagan — a sign that a region without a major tech-hub reputation was starting to register on founders’ radar as somewhere worth paying attention to.
Nelson’s approach reflects a broader shift worth watching: ecosystem-building as its own category of entrepreneurship, distinct from company-building but just as consequential — the kind of work that doesn’t show up on a cap table but determines whether the next 76 startups in a region get the support the last 16 didn’t have.
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