The Town That Almost Wasn’t Enough
The founder is nervous. You can see it in the way she keeps smoothing the front of her jacket, checking her notes one more time even though she has had them memorized for a week. In a few minutes she is going to stand up in front of a panel of judges and pitch the business she has been quietly building out of her garage for three years—the one her husband still calls “your little project.”
The room is a repurposed community hall in a small Arizona town, a pitch session hosted by Moonshot. Folding chairs. There is, against all odds, a genuine shot at something.
Inside the building, a team of coaches and judges has spent the morning running workshops, fielding questions, and doing one-on-one sessions with founders who drove in from surrounding communities—some of them an hour or more in each direction.
This is what Scott Hathcock, Moonshot’s President and CEO, calls “the traveling ecosystem.” Across Arizona, in towns like this one, the same scene is playing out.
