About PA Founders

In the late Spring of 2017 a work colleague shared a podcast called Startup. It was by Alex Jones, a NPR Producer who started Gimlet Media. He leveraged his background in journalism and storytelling to catalog the story of building a startup podcast studio. And I was hooked like nothing I ever had been as an adult. I thought "this is what I want to be doing with my life".

That led me to join my first startup, which led me towards a second one, which led me into freelancing, which pushed me into a lucrative tech job where I continued to moonlight and build things on the side, which ground me down until I had no choice but to start my company, Signals & Scale.

But this isn't about that.

Central PA is full of founders and business owners. But my observation from living here for ~2 years is we're disconnected. Coffee roasters, agency owners, real estate operators, manufacturers, trucking companies that have stories of working with Milton Hershey in the early days. We're surrounded by people building real businesses in Harrisburg, Lebanon, Lancaster, and everywhere in between. The problem is, most of us don't know one another.

That's in spite of the fact that there's no shortage of networking events. But I've never found a space where entrepreneurs can actually be honest about what's going on. Where you can say "I'm struggling with this" and get real counsel, not a business card or a nagging doubt the next day about opening up the 'Following up' pitch slap email.

So I set about fixing that problem in my own life. In early 2025 I started a hiking group. Once a month we'd hike Governor Dick Trail in Mt. Gretna. We'd walk and talk for two hours, following a structured agenda. We check in, hold each other accountable, wrestle with a hard life question, and set goals. It's been one of the most valuable things I've done in my life, let alone my career.

The podcast came next. I kept meeting founders across Central PA and thinking, "People need to hear this person's story." Not some polished talk, but an actual conversation that asks the follow up questions you'd have if you were talking to them.

PA Founders is my attempt to tie all this together. A podcast to find and share the stories of great entrepreneurs. A hiking group for entrepreneurs who want more than surface-level networking. And over time, more ways for the founders in this area to actually connect with each other in ways that feel exciting (who hasn't parked at a networking event and thought 'I could just leave now and no one would know?').

If you're building something in Central PA, I'd love to hear about it. And more importantly, hear about you and your story.