THE MIDDLE IS BUILDING
A show about the people making the American interior pulse again.
Philo Farnsworth was a farm kid from Rigby, Idaho, who sketched the idea for electronic television in a high-school chemistry class — inspired, the story goes, by the parallel rows of a freshly plowed field. The Wright brothers built the first airplane in a bicycle shop in Dayton, Ohio. Thomas Edison came out of Milan, Ohio; Henry Ford out of a farm in Dearborn, Michigan; Sam Walton built the world's largest retailer from Bentonville, Arkansas. Some of America's biggest ideas have come from small, overlooked places.
With the rise of Silicon Valley, attention shifted to the coasts: San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, Boston. But the economy is shifting from data science to hard science — building with atoms, not just bits. The frontier lies once again with robotics, agriculture, data centers, energy, advanced manufacturing, and a host of other unglamorous but essential industries based in states dismissively described as “flyover.”
This show is a bet on that shift — that the engine of American industry and innovation is moving inland. Flyover Founders tells the stories of a new breed of founders. We share how they got started and discover what inspired them, all to help them take flight that much faster.
America has always loved the underdog. The heartland is the underdog story of American reindustrialization.
Daniel Finley lives in the Coeur d'Alene, Idaho area and comes from the Crossroads of America — Indiana. He's spent years working in startups and supporting local founders, connecting people across Spokane, Denver, and Idaho. Flyover Founders chronicles the stories of the most interesting founders, industrialists, investors, and builders he's met — the people reshaping the country and the world.
Come along for the ride.
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