Route log · told once, in order
The routeso far
The home page gives you this route in four stops. This page rides the whole thing: a research desk at the Arizona State Senate, one very long email to a support inbox, the launch years, and the turn home to Flagstaff. I am Nick Jones. This is how the coat got here.
It reads in order, and it ends where you come in.
Stops 1 to 3
Arizona first
Every stop after these is the same move, learned on home ground.
- 01
The Senate
I was supposed to become a lawyer. The plan ran through nonpartisan research at the Arizona State Senate, elections and water rights, then law school. The water rights part made sense to everyone who knew me: I had just finished a History degree with a Hydrology minor at the University of Arizona, with honors, and if you want to understand Arizona politics, water is a good place to start.
The Senate taught me a habit I still use every week: get the facts right before you form the opinion. Nonpartisan research means both sides get the same numbers from you, so the numbers had better be right.
- 02
The five page email
Then a friend mentioned a startup called Uber that had not reached my hometown or Northern Arizona yet. I did not know anyone there. I did not have a warm introduction. So I wrote a five page email to support@uber.com, the only address I could find, making the case for Northern Arizona: the market, the geography, the reasons it would work.
Support tickets are not supposed to become careers. This one found its way to the right people, became an interview, and quietly ended my legal career before it started.
- 03
Northern and Western Arizona
I helped open early Uber markets across Northern and Western Arizona, and I learned the trade I have practiced ever since: show up in a place where a thing does not exist, and leave with the thing running.
Stops 4 and 5
The launch years
Two rigs, one lesson: the best launch is the one you can ride away from.
- 04
The scooter wars
Lime came next: about eighteen months on the US launch team, standing up city after city through several generations of hardware. Launch work is systems work under pressure. You have days, not quarters, and the team you are aligning met each other last week. The test of the work is brutal and clean: does the city keep running after you leave for the next one?
The cities that thrived were never the ones with the most heroic operator. They were the ones with a playbook good enough that the operator could leave. That observation became my whole professional philosophy.
- 05
Climate tech
Later I ran market expansion at Sealed, a climate tech company, which let me point the same skill set at something I had cared about since my nonprofit years: the climate. More on that lane a few stops down.
Stops 6 to 8
The turn home
The route bends back to 7,000 feet, where the whole lineup gets built.
- 06
Back at 7,000 feet
Home is Flagstaff, Arizona: the world's first International Dark Sky City, 7,000 feet up, ponderosa pines and starlight. After years of standing up other people's cities, the launch that mattered most was the turn back to my own.
- 07
The family business
This one joined the lineup back in 2015, in the middle of all that. I co-founded Freaky Foot Tours with my mother, historian Susan Johnson. She supplies the real research into Flagstaff history, true crime, and the stories people whisper. I supply the operations. It is a haunted history walking tour company, now running in Flagstaff, Prescott, and Tucson, and it is the most honest business I know: you cannot fake a good story on a dark street. The first website we put up in 2015 is still online.
It runs without me because I built it to: documentation, trained guides, and systems that do their jobs. That is not distance from the company. It is the freedom to keep building and improving it instead of being stuck just keeping it going.
- 08
Eat Sleep Launch Repeat
I founded Eat Sleep Launch Repeat about two weeks before the pandemic hit. Bad timing, in theory. In practice it forced the founding lesson home fast: when Flagstaff shut down, the businesses that survived were the ones with real systems, not the ones held together by a single exhausted owner. I set the bigger plans aside that first stretch and helped local shops get through, bringing what I had learned inside billion dollar startups to my own streets.
That season set the company's character. ESLR grows small businesses and startups by developing their digital, physical, and human infrastructure, and every engagement is scoped with a graduation date.
The house rule
Built to ride without me
Everything in the lineup is built to the same spec.
Show up where a thing does not exist. Build it with the people who will live with it. Write everything down. Train the humans. Then get out of the way and watch it run.
The greatest achievement you can have as a business owner is to build yourself out of day to day operations. I have done it in my own companies, and helping other owners do it is the work I have chosen. A traditional agency profits from your dependence. I profit from your independence.
The side streets
Not everything shows on the odometer
I volunteer with the Black Rock Rangers at Burning Man, the people who walk the city and mediate its beautiful chaos. Rangers help people; they do not police them. It is a masterclass in de-escalation, consent, and meeting people exactly where they are, and that community has taken me as far as Namibia and South Africa.
I served on the board of directors of Care About Climate, a youth climate nonprofit, from 2014 to 2020, including as chair. That work carried me into UN climate negotiations, not as a delegate but as part of the youth advocacy community, in rooms where people my age from around the world were pushing to be heard. Years later the same conviction wore a work badge at Sealed.
- B.A. History with a Hydrology minor, University of Arizona, with Honors. Study abroad: Universidad Nacional, Costa Rica (Spanish).
- Openly ADHD and dyslexic: I see systems and patterns before I see details, and launch work pays for exactly that wiring.
- In college: president of the swing dance club, campus radio DJ, and poetry with kids through Poetry Inside Out. I still dance.
The route ahead
There is an open spot in the lineup
It is open on purpose. What fills it usually starts as somebody else's idea: a business that wants an operating partner, a venture that needs launch muscle through the first rough miles, a weird one that will not sit still.
The route continues with you. The inbox at the end of it is human.