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Join the Carnelian Ventures team for candid conversations about what it actually takes to scale ventures that generate returns and create meaningful change. From early-stage operations and capital strategy to impact measurement that goes beyond metrics, each episode breaks down how founders navigate the critical decisions shaping sustainable businesses.
Building with Carnelian is produced by Carnelian Ventures, a venture studio supporting mission-driven founders through operational advisory, technology development, and impact analytics. Have feedback or want to suggest a guest? Reach out at podcast@carnelianventures.com.
CARNELIAN PODCAST EPISODE 6 TRANSCRIPT
Building with Carnelian | Lauren and Andrew Flynn
Sequence: Carnelian_Podcast_5_Dialogue_Cleanup
OPENING TEASER
Andrew [00:01 – 00:19]
What more complicated puzzle could you have than a rural community in upstate New York? And how could you do it with style in a way that you're not ruining the thing that you grow up in and love? Businesses are ecosystems. They're either multiplying or dying. We're just getting started.
INTRODUCTION AND A CAREER IN GROWTH
Lauren [00:21 – 00:31]
Hello, everyone. Welcome to this next episode of Building with Carnelian. I'm your host, Lauren. Today's guest is Andrew Flynn. Andrew, thanks for coming on the show today.
Andrew [00:31 – 00:32]
You're welcome. Excited to be here.
Lauren [00:32 – 01:01]
Andrew has 20-plus years in marketing and growth strategy, working as a consultant to Fortune 100 brands. His latest endeavor is The Valley, a rural tech innovation hub located in Cambridge, New York. And Andrew, I'll be honest, I'm most excited to get into everything you're building at the Valley: A, because it's our shared hometown; B, because it's a physical nexus of, I think everything we're going to talk about today. But I first want to back up a little bit and learn about how you got here. So what does it mean to have a career in growth?
Lauren [01:01 – 01:02]
Where did you first start?
Andrew [01:02 – 01:38]
Growth is kind of being the guy that makes the charts go up, regardless of what that means. In some of my background, that's been almost being a salesperson. In some of my background, that's meant making a pretty pitch deck and raising a bunch of money. In other parts of my life—and most of my life, probably—the predominant thing is a really data-focused mentality towards marketing and growing a business. Really mapping out the funnels and loops that all these businesses grow on and applying math to it.
Andrew [01:38 – 02:05]
Yeah, I started about 20 years ago in e-commerce businesses. Mostly. At the time they were all pretty bespoke software. There wasn't like Shopify. It wasn't like a thing that you could just hit like go, and you had like a beautiful e-commerce site. You had to like build something. There was a platform called Magento that I think eBay ended up buying, but you had to code like PHP plugins and stuff to make an e-commerce site work.
Andrew [02:05 – 02:23]
Through that, I had to learn product development and kind of went like an ape from tree to tree, company to company, and eventually ended up in what people now call growth roles. It's a merging of marketing and product: building things to grow things instead of just throwing money at it.
Lauren [02:23 – 02:26]
And what's your favorite part like? What keeps you [unclear]?
Andrew [02:26 – 02:38]
I like the puzzle, the puzzle of it all. The puzzle is what drove me to open the Valley too. What more complicated puzzle could you have than a rural community in upstate New York?
Lauren [02:38 – 02:41]
Yeah, that's a pretty good puzzle.
Andrew [02:41 – 02:42]
It is a good puzzle.
Lauren [02:42 – 03:04]
Yeah. I'm just saying, with that too, right? Obviously, Carnelian, we're a startup; we're figuring out how to grow. We have these three different lines. So for me on this side too, it's this puzzle as a team member, figuring out what we want to build and how it all fits together. But also that puzzle of how to talk about it [unclear], to package that passion in a way that can actually connect us with people.
Lauren [03:04 – 03:08]
So, yeah, the strategy. Optimization is my favorite word. I don't know if that's the same for you, but that's how I feel.
Andrew [03:08 – 03:33]
I'm definitely still working on the talking-about-it side. It's really hard to be a bridge between some of these worlds. I can sit in a room in San Francisco and talk tech stuff all day, and I can sit in a bar in Cambridge, which is the small town that we're from, and talk to those people all day about totally different things.
Andrew [03:33 – 03:47]
Being the bridge between those two worlds, I'm finding, is the challenge of this puzzle that I'm in today. They don't really speak the same language. Trying to come up with ways to help people understand both worlds has been the challenge, the puzzle.
CONNECTING TEAMS AND COMMUNITIES
Lauren [03:47 – 04:17]
Yeah, I bet. That's a great segue into what I wanted to pick your brain about. We can talk about being a bridge between physical locations—San Francisco and Cambridge, New York—but also about being a bridge between different sectors within the business ecosystem. You have founders, investors, all these different stakeholder groups. Can you talk through the people you've worked with, where you have found the groups align, and your role in being a connector?
Andrew [04:17 – 04:53]
You've got product development, software development, marketing people, the actual consumers of the business, whether they're business consumers or consumer consumers. Then on the business side, you've got funding, whether it's bank funding, startup equity-type stuff, venture world. Then you've got the other players that, honestly, until recently, I hadn't really interacted with much: academia, where a lot of people are learning how to do those supposed jobs that they're eventually going to do.
Andrew [04:53 – 05:22]
It's also where a lot of IP-type technology is created and then transferred into the world. All those education-specific roles that exist in technology, product engineering, marketing, sales, operations—it's something I didn't realize I was good at, jumping across all of those. But that's another thing that growth people tend to be good at: being able to really map out the whole system and figure it out.
Andrew [05:22 – 05:41]
What did the development guy say when he meant that? And, what did the operations guy say when he meant that? And, maybe the dev guy works in sprints and the operation guy works off a Kanban board or something, but like, how do you make them mesh, get them in the same room together and talk to each other?
Lauren [05:41 – 05:42]
Is it a matter?
Andrew [05:42 – 05:43]
It kind of just comes natural to me.
Lauren [05:43 – 05:56]
Yeah. Is it a matter of different languages? Almost, or different priorities? Is it like an issue of being in separate spaces, or being in the same space and not being able to connect, like where have you come in as a bridge?
Andrew [05:57 – 06:12]
It definitely depends. With me, it's just being flexible, figuring out whether it's a physical thing. Would they just be better off if—hey, they're a remote team and they've never sat in the same room together—perhaps they go on a trip together and figure out that they all really like each other, or...
Andrew [06:12 – 06:36]
You hate each other, and maybe you should find some other people to work with. Probably more commonly, especially in technology, people tend to be high on the neurodivergent scale. You've got a lot of people who are saying things, and they never actually exit their own head, myself included. Just helping those people figure out that, hey, you've got to actually say it.
Andrew [06:36 – 07:16]
You've got to put it on the Jira ticket or your Linear board and actually say, 'Hey, it's ready for feedback,' or whatever the thing is. More often than not, I think it's just lack of talking. Another trick I learned: [name unclear], a fascinating woman, got me on this kick of saying just the words 'How might we?' People are sometimes very combative when you're trying to get them to talk. They're defensive of their function because they love it and think it should exist and is the heart of everything.
Andrew [07:16 – 07:34]
She'd always come at it with this attitude—sometimes borderline weird—but it was, 'How might we? How might we do this? How might we integrate it? How might we figure out how to connect these two systems? How might we disconnect these systems? How might we delete this entire system?' Because maybe it doesn't even need to exist.
Andrew [07:34 – 07:58]
Then how might we rehome those people in a new part of the organization, or retrain them so they're able to do something different with us? Coming at all of those conversations with a 'How might we?' attitude is really important. Especially in startups, a lot of the time the numbers are so big or unknown that it's really hard to get to the next step.
Andrew [07:59 – 08:02]
And sometimes you just kind of start like, how might we do it?
Lauren [08:02 – 08:09]
Yeah, I like that. I'll probably start using that too, because there's a collective element to it. But it's also very forward thinking.
Andrew [08:09 – 08:13]
Yeah, I'm sure she stole it from somebody else, but it's that's where I got it from.
Lauren [08:13 – 08:22]
I'm thinking back to what you were saying about these conversations at the Cambridge bar. Can you give an example of one of those bridge conversations?
Andrew [08:22 – 08:24]
A bridge from a Cambridge person to a tech person?
Lauren [08:24 – 08:31]
Like helping them. You talk about understanding being in San Francisco and then being in Cambridge. So how do you bring insight across those different spaces?
Andrew [08:32 – 09:14]
I think like the one that I'll like bring up to people that they sort of get locally here is people are really familiar with like stories of John Deere and like recent things that they're doing like effectively like DRM, the GPS inside of their tractors. And farmers hate this. There's sort of an understanding that, like, if you went to John Deere and asked most of the people working on those products, they would assume that there's a relatively low technical aptitude of the person on the end, like using those products, and they're doing a lot of that stuff to like. Some of it is for financial reasons of wanting to keep things enclosed and like, you're in this, your ecosystem or whatever.
Andrew [09:14 – 09:37]
But others like legitimately to protect the user from doing something that might, like, accidentally drive them into a tree or something. And then the reality couldn't be further from the truth. They're like hacking their John Deere tractors now and like putting like open source stuff on them that I don't even understand. But you have like 17 year old kids that are like reverse engineering, John Deere, DRM stuff, like in the woods.
Andrew [09:37 – 10:01]
And it's cool, but they speak like an entirely different language. Like you're never going to hear that kid say like, oh, I knocked out three Jira tickets, like in my sprint last week. It's like it's very functional. It's more like they're actually closer in a lot of ways to like the job to be done of like, I made the tractor drive, right?
Andrew [10:01 – 10:37]
Part of the thing that frustrated me most about the Silicon Valley mindset and a lot of traditional product-type organizations is they're oftentimes very interested in the tools, the policy, or some disruption they're trying to cause, and not just the core job to be done. Did this tractor make it more or less easy to hay the field? That's the job to be done.
Andrew [10:37 – 11:11]
Did it do it? Or did you just implement a huge pain in the butt for a lot of people? Sometimes it can be really hard to find what those core jobs to be done are. When people say, 'Oh, they don't have common sense,' oftentimes you'll find the people in those bars in Cambridge are the ones with the clearest understanding of the job to be done. It's really more a matter of translating that back to the tech guy: 'Okay, now this is becoming a Jira backlog. We're going to break these things down, do it, and deploy it.'
Andrew [11:11 – 11:15]
I don't know if that really answered your question, but—
BUILDING THE VALLEY
Lauren [11:15 – 11:35]
That's a great example. That's a good segue too, Andrew, into what you're building at the Valley. You grew up in Cambridge, left, did other work in big cities, and came back. Tell me about the step right before launching the Valley. What brought you there?
Andrew [11:36 – 12:19]
Cambridge has pretty much always been—I've always considered it home. I've got an eight-year-old and a six-year-old. Four or five years ago, they were barely born and three years old. COVID happens, and I'm working remotely for companies, as I still do daily, pretty much alone in my barn. I'm buying nicer and nicer cars, and it's like, 'Why don't I like this? What feels weird about this?' I started doing what any good growth guy does: poking at other things. 'How does this feel?'
Andrew [12:19 – 13:04]
Talking with other people who have been in similar situations—not necessarily feeling the pressures of normal everyday life as much as a lot of people around here do—and having freedom for my brain to think about other things resulted in me starting to think about those bigger, hairier growth problems. I started to get not obsessed, but obsessed with the organism of a town. That was my original thinking: what is the growth model of a town? The school I graduated from here in town—these aren't the correct numbers, but loose numbers...
Andrew [13:04 – 13:25]
Like I graduated in the class of about 100 kids. The classes now have about 50 kids. So it was a small school. Now it's a tiny school that's like the whole community, like it's smaller and older every year. So, like, what are the growth levers in that to move things like how do you how could you make it a hundred again?
Andrew [13:25 – 13:46]
How could you do it with style? Like, how could you do it in a way that you're not ruining the thing that you grow up in and love, and that is like the Valley is sort of like my first attempt at that of, you know, like tech companies or high margin businesses. Rural towns tend to not have high margin businesses.
Andrew [13:46 – 14:13]
Perhaps if we were able to bring some high-margin-type business that made sense for a region into the region, there could be a little more slack in the system for people to not be stressed out all the time. Some of those people are pretty cool, and maybe I can create a little mecca for people who think similarly to me to move in and say, 'I'm so glad I have this escape valve from New York or San Fran or Austin or Miami,' or whatever metro they're in.
Andrew [14:13 – 14:32]
The reason for the Valley is to be that place that helps people take a random loose thought they might have and crystallize it into the point-one of a business, and maybe take it from a point-one to a one of a business. I wasn't really sure what it was going to be like.
Andrew [14:32 – 14:47]
The loose math I literally did was: if I want to hang around other people to talk about the stuff I want to do, I can either rent an office in Saratoga—which is the next large, hip town over, for people who aren't familiar with the area...
Andrew [14:48 – 15:08]
And that's going to cost me $2,000 a month, or I can just rent an entire building, and that's going to cost me $2,000 a month, and I could just add some keys to it, and everybody else could just use it because I don't need it all the time. So, like, what does that open up to a community? I don't really know.
Andrew [15:08 – 15:27]
It's just me poking the system to get data on what it needs. I've learned a lot. Even when I opened the doors, the first thing everybody pushed me on was, 'You need a business plan.' I'm like, 'Well, nope. That's not what I'm doing.'
Andrew [15:27 – 15:52]
Like kind of the opposite of that. Like, I'll do a lean canvas or something, but I'm not doing a business plan. Because there's just little things, like there's a, there's a nursing home across the street, like, literally you can it's 20 steps across the street. I would not have guessed that, like one of the primary use cases of a coworking space in a rural town would have been the kids of people that are in the nursing home that have a call to take midday.
Andrew [15:52 – 16:14]
That never would have made a business plan. But a bunch of people are now doing regular monthly-ish flights into Albany and hanging out with their parents at the local nursing homes, while also not having to skip that call or do the call in the nursing home, potentially risking somebody shouting something weird or whatever.
Andrew [16:14 – 16:28]
Some old person gets fired up and starts yelling, you never know what's going to happen in those places. Yeah. So step one for me was just like, just have a place. Like it was easy math. Like, I know I want to start hanging out with other people. I don't really know what's next with it.
Andrew [16:29 – 16:54]
But I'm just going to get started and see what happens. So, yeah, we're like a year in. I forget the exact numbers off the top of my head, but loosely 45-ish businesses have booked the place out the conference room side that I'm sitting in now. I think we're at 178 unique keys issued, which for like a town where you've got 50 kids graduating a year, that's like a lot to have through a building.
Andrew [16:54 – 17:21]
They're a cool mix of people too. You were here earlier in the year. You've got people coming up on vacation, visiting their in-laws at lakes upstate, and flip-flopping days they're working up here. It's a cool feeling, and it's cool for this space. It's maybe a good business, but it wasn't yet having the impact I want on the community.
Andrew [17:21 – 17:37]
It's not taking a class from 50 to 100 quick enough for me. So I started doing more research and expanding things. That's where the shift from just a coworking space and a conference room into more of an incubator for specific things is coming from.
BUSINESS AND COMMUNITY IMPACT
Lauren [17:37 – 18:12]
Gotcha. One of those threads there, Andrew, that I'm going to pull in is that you talked first about this passion. You talked about these very real challenges facing rural communities, Cambridge included. You recognized this and said, 'I care. It's where I'm from.' I was just writing about this today, as far as our mental divisions for what we call purpose-driven work. You want to have some kind of social impact, and I think a lot of folks will take that passion and immediately go, 'Okay, because I want to have a social impact...'
Lauren [18:12 – 18:28]
'That has to be a nonprofit, right? That's the sector [unclear].' But that does not have to be the case. Social impact can expand across all these different areas. Here you are bringing people together, hosting dialogue for the town, doing all this stuff for the community.
Lauren [18:28 – 18:46]
And it's not by any means charity. Right? It's a completely different mode in a lot of ways there's a sustainability in that. Right. So you talk about this recognition of the high margins in the tech space, the contextual low margins within this community. That's the innovation that I'm really excited about and hearing about.
Andrew [18:46 – 19:31]
To the for-profit thing: Da Vinci needed the Medicis. The Medicis were writing the checks. There was a business somewhere, a bank, making money and investing it in things they cared about. It was partially sustainable because it continued to make money until it didn't make money. Part of this design is very intentional: to try to make the community less and less reliant on grants and handouts over time, and to become a place that's more capable of giving itself handouts than needing to ask for them from an external source.
Andrew [19:31 – 19:54]
The only way you're going to get that is having highly profitable businesses in your county, your town, your village. Most of the businesses around here are paper companies, which are cool. They employ a bunch of people, and some of the tech they have is really cool and snazzy.
Andrew [19:54 – 20:29]
But they're super low-margin, so there's not a lot to play with at the end of the day. You don't have mansions being built—not that you want to build mansions—but you don't even have single-income families, for the most part. You have dual-income families struggling to find a place with childcare. There's just no slack in the system. The difficult part is figuring out, if you are a community like Cambridge, when you look at the radius around our town and county, we don't have a college.
Andrew [20:30 – 20:59]
Our industrial development organizations are partnerships with other counties. Our BOCES, our trade school, is partnerships with other counties. We are not in control of our future destiny. We at best have partnerships to do it, but are usually a B or a C [unclear] from an influence perspective in those partnerships. My current bet is I'm hoping to help people find ways to...
Andrew [20:59 – 21:20]
Ride the tailwinds of surrounding communities, not to sap from them, but to be complementary to them. Within a 45-minute radius, we have some really great science and engineering work going on. We have a chip-fab research facility that's crazy cool. We have a bunch of independent health systems. We have...
Andrew [21:21 – 21:48]
Probably 15 colleges. I don't even know what the number is. There's a ton, and we have some really great AI research, ML research going on. There's a lot of really sophisticated stuff going on. We have another company called Regeneron, this giant in the pharmaceutical industry. There's business going on. When you look at these little rural nodes, I think you have to look at how we could take those natural resources and use them in a different way.
Andrew [21:49 – 22:10]
That's where attaching an incubator comes in: what deserves to exist here? The ag thing is an obvious one because farms are everywhere. But the other one that's not obvious to people is when you have chip fabs and nursing homes everywhere, you actually have a great testbed for health tech.
Andrew [22:11 – 22:36]
Then you start to look into other threads that are like in the area. And it turns out that like, oh, we used to have a giant catheter making plant in a town called [Hartford or Argyle — unclear] that's like 30 minutes from here. So there's like history of medical devices and it's like, okay, well, let's weave together an authentic story that like taps into our past, but also like looks at the surrounding resources that we have.
Andrew [22:36 – 22:51]
We're fortunate in that those resources are mostly like 45 minutes away. I think there's some areas where you're going to have to go like a 4 or 5 hour window, but something that's true to your past. Use the resources around you, then try to come up with a path for what that looks like ten, 20, 30 years into the future.
Andrew [22:51 – 22:54]
Yeah, that's where my brain's at now a lot.
GROWING THE INCUBATOR
Lauren [22:54 – 23:13]
Yeah. So you talk about how you started with this workspace, right? Because you wanted to find other people to chat with and then just growing into this incubator. Tell me a little bit more about what you're doing recently in that space. Right. I know you've worked with some local entrepreneurs. Tell me about how you're tapping into those resources. You talked about some sessions.
Andrew [23:13 – 23:31]
I think it's important to bring the community along with everything. I always knew there'd be a component to this [unclear]. So I wanted to make sure that monthly we do tech-talk-type things, usually local people talking about some topic.
Andrew [23:31 – 23:46]
We've done one of those every month for the past year and a half now. That's become a thing. When we started, there were five people showing up. Now there's 30 people showing up. It's snowballed, and it's kind of cool.
Andrew [23:46 – 24:09]
What's happened on the other side of the business, the coworking side, is it's been a bit random. The people who show up to those go buy day passes and hang out, and there's never really much intention to it. It's not making intentional use of our surrounding natural resources; it's just what somebody's random interest happened to be. On the incubator side, so far we've had people start, again unintentionally, a marketing company...
Andrew [24:09 – 24:25]
A law firm. There's a guy who's been making a video game over there for a year and a half, and it's getting to a point where it's really good. He was working on it before here too. It's all been sort of unintentional. So I started to think, 'How could I bring more structure to this?'
Andrew [24:25 – 24:52]
So I could kind of narrow the pathway into this area that I think we kind of like, could be competitive in if other people chose to play there too. So I got into it, reached out to the University at Albany, actually, because we're New York State. So, if you're not going to play with the state, you should be in a different state because it's a high taxation area here.
Andrew [24:52 – 25:14]
You get to play the game, sort of. I took an entrepreneur-in-residence thing at the University at Albany, which controls most of the funds that exist in our area, with the intent of: if I can show these people I can help them grow things, maybe they'll put me in touch with people who have money.
Andrew [25:14 – 25:52]
If I have money, maybe I can do pitch competitions [unclear] for these businesses in these specific categories I think should be here. They can pitch things, and one thing into another. That's the state I'm in today: not sure what happens next, but hopeful that as I start to piece together some of these state-level partnerships, merged with some of my historical tech relationships, I can start to create something that puts a little more velocity into this thing than it has today.
Lauren [25:52 – 26:14]
Andrew, this is a really cool story in many ways. I'm thinking specifically about how you talked about coming to this with a very lean business plan, if that: 'This is what this would mean to do.' Then to combine that with what you shared earlier about your bridge-making abilities, it sounds like you just keep finding these different avenues based on the people you're bringing together.
Lauren [26:14 – 26:39]
That community is feeding into itself. We didn't say the word sustainability, but we danced around it when we were talking about what it takes to build impact that can grow and a business that can continue to develop. The sustainability and that growth through the community are all connected together. It's very exciting to see how that's continuing to grow through the Valley.
Lauren [26:40 – 26:41]
I think it's a really cool example.
Andrew [26:41 – 27:02]
It's an ecosystem. Businesses are ecosystems, and they're either multiplying or dying. Very few are just sitting comfortably on top of the triangle. You tend to roll from one side or the other in the triangle. Sitting on top of it is precarious.
GETTING INVOLVED
Lauren [27:02 – 27:18]
For any of our listeners who are also thinking the Valley is super cool and wondering how they can get involved—besides, if they're ever in the Albany–Bennington area, swinging by and grabbing a day pass—how else can people check you out?
Andrew [27:19 – 27:41]
Yeah. So we have the Valley Hub, which is where kind of our platform is. We have a bunch of articles that we're writing that are sort of like broader pieces I'd say the way that you can help if you're not from here is sort of especially if you're in like other rural areas or even like have friends and family that are there, just share what I'm doing to their area and say, hey, you could start something similar.
Andrew [27:41 – 28:06]
That's a lot of what I want to do with this too. I understand what your podcast is, so you guys probably know a lot more people in this circle than I do. But I don't have a whole lot of role models doing this thing. I'd love for people to share into their communities, to nudge the 35-year-old me that exists in Arkansas somewhere to do the same thing. I think that would be really cool.
Andrew [28:06 – 28:22]
There's a ton of blog articles on the site. Share them. For anybody who's quasi-local or even thinking about it, I have an office-hours link on the site. That's just my calendar that you can book, and we can chat about things remotely. But it's a great place to travel to too.
Andrew [28:22 – 28:25]
So feel free to book a trip and come hang.
LIFE IN CAMBRIDGE
Lauren [28:25 – 28:28]
Yeah. Tell us more about Cambridge. Paint the picture.
Andrew [28:28 – 28:58]
Cambridge is an authentic, old-school American Main Street town. It existed as East and West Cambridge for many years and eventually was merged. You can often feel those east and west tensions today. You might call them Republican and Democrat tensions existing in the same place. It's a place where you have...
Andrew [28:59 – 29:30]
I don't think it shows up in the voting this way, but sort of equal parts liberal and conservative being in one community, often disagreeing. But it is kind of a magical place. Its landscape's beautiful: awesome rivers, awesome mountains. We're in this perfect triangle of three and a half hours to New York, three and a half hours to Montreal, three and a half hours to Boston.
Andrew [29:30 – 29:35]
But you don't have to go there if you don't want to. You can just. You can just stay home.
Lauren [29:35 – 29:57]
It's pretty great. That's how I describe our hometown to people. I say, 'Well, it's seven miles from [border unclear], so you have the hippie rollover, and it's still Washington County, so you've got the rednecks.' But at the same time, it's coming together because they care about the same school. Everybody's kids are in the same place, and it all just [unclear] from there.
Andrew [29:57 – 30:32]
I did notice somebody had shared a thing with me of the top ten weed-smoking colleges in the world. It was Skidmore and Bennington College, which are Saratoga and Bennington, both 30 minutes from us, basically, were in the top five. I'm like, 'Well, there you go. That's why we're cool. We're in a weed sandwich with just a bunch of chillers trying to get by.' But I do think the word for it is authentic. There's a grit to Cambridge that refuses to give up that I love.
Andrew [30:33 – 30:49]
Sometimes it gets in its own way, but more often than not, it's there to help other people out when they need it to. We also check off a ton of cool boxes. We've got a [unclear] co-op. We've got one of the top five private or indie bookstores in the country.
Andrew [30:49 – 31:12]
We've got a cafe that looks like Taylor Swift built it. We've got a grocery store. We've got restaurants again. We've got a restaurant in a train station that's not a sketchy train station—a nice, cool old one. You don't get that in our [unclear]. The houses here have all had 100, 250 years to age.
Andrew [31:12 – 31:27]
You're not driving into a community of stuff that's just getting started or looks cookie-cutter, because it's been beaten up for 200 years. Everything looks different and unique. It's also survived for 200 years, so there's something to that too.
CLOSING
Lauren [31:28 – 31:32]
Absolutely. Anything else you want to add before we close out?
Andrew [31:32 – 31:34]
I don't think so. We're just getting started.
Lauren [31:34 – 31:38]
We're just getting started. So awesome. Yeah. Well, thanks for being with us today.
Andrew [31:38 – 31:40]
Cool. It's really fun. You're welcome.