Bentonville, AR founders on the NWA Founders podcast

For a lot of people outside the region, Bentonville is Northwest Arkansas. Walmart's headquarters is here, along with the vendor offices around it, the capital that follows the retail economy, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and a hospitality scene built for everyone all of that brings to town. If you're looking at Northwest Arkansas from somewhere else, Bentonville is probably the name you already know.

The Bentonville founders on the show work in that economy. Tanner Green's Ox makes software for warehouse operations, the kind of technology the region's supply chain runs on. Bethany Taylor left a corporate job to bootstrap Gratsy, a product sampling company built for the brands based here. On the hospitality side, Carl Garrett has grown Table Mesa from one downtown bistro in 2008 into a group of restaurants, and Sam Russell co-founded The Buttered Biscuit, a breakfast restaurant that has expanded across the region since 2017.

With four conversations, Bentonville is the show's fourth-largest city archive. That undersells how much the city matters to the region, and part of the reason is geography. Much of the Walmart supplier world works out of offices in Rogers, Lowell and Springdale, so many of the founders serving it are filed on those pages instead. Harvest Group and Paradox Retail in Rogers, and Are Traasdahl's Crisp in Springdale, are three to start with.

Bentonville has many more stories to tell. What's here already covers both sides of the city: companies that serve the retail economy, and the restaurants that feed it. The four conversations below run newest first.