The instructions for the Fuel kickoff were short. Get up, tell the room who you are, and do it without a deck.
I have pitched LiquiDonate a few thousand times by now. Almost always with slides. Take the slides away and you find out fast what you actually believe about your company, because there is nothing on the wall behind you doing the work.
So on Tuesday evening at Compton Gardens, in a glass-walled room in downtown Bentonville with the woods pressed right up against the windows, a mic went around the room and eleven founders told their stories.
How the night worked
Grace Gill, who runs Fuel, opened it. Ten weeks. Nine companies. A banner behind her that read "Empowering startups to become enterprise-ready," which is a fair description of what the next two and a half months are supposed to do to us.
Then the mic started moving. Nobody stood behind the lectern. You just stood on the floor in front of people holding pizza and talked.
I started with my Mom
She worked a retail returns desk. If you have never watched that job up close, the part nobody tells you is what happens after the customer walks away happy. The item goes in a bin. The bin goes on a truck. And a startling amount of it is never sold again, never donated, and never recycled. It gets destroyed.
That is not a scandal at one company. That is the default setting of retail reverse logistics in this country. Returns and excess inventory move backward through a system that was only ever designed to move forward, and the cheapest exit at the end of that system is a landfill.
I started LiquiDonate because that made me angry, and because the fix is not complicated. Somebody within a few miles of that warehouse needs the thing. A school, a shelter, a disaster relief group, a family resource center. The problem was never demand. The problem was routing.
What we built
LiquiDonate routes returned and excess inventory from retailers to a vetted network of more than 4,800 nonprofits across the US and Canada. The platform matches the item to the organization that needs it, close to where it already sits, and handles the logistics and the fair market value documentation on the way.
We work with nearly 200 retailers. We have placed more than 16 million items, representing over $130 million in fair market value. TIME named us one of the Best Inventions of 2025, and NRF gave us the VIP Award for Supply Chain Innovation this year.
The line I use when people ask who we compete with: our biggest competitor is the landfill. Not another platform. The status quo.
Why Bentonville, and why now
Here is the part I said out loud that I want to repeat here.
Reverse logistics is not an abstract policy topic in Northwest Arkansas. This region is where an enormous amount of American retail product gets decided on. What comes back, where it goes, and whether anyone ever sees it again.
At the same time, NWA is in the middle of a serious regional push on recycling infrastructure. Tens of millions of dollars aimed at collection. What the roadmap for that work openly admits is that local end markets are still thin, and most of what gets collected leaves the state to find a buyer.
Reuse does not have that problem. A coat that goes to a nonprofit twelve miles away does not need a commodity market to exist. It needs a routing decision. Saying that in a room in Bentonville felt less like a pitch and more like a fact about the place I was standing in.
The rest of the room
The other founders went before and after me, and the no-slides rule did all of us a favor. Hiring for the trades. Drone systems for public safety. Supply chain forecasting. Cybersecurity risk priced in actual dollars. Decision rights for AI agents.
Fuel is ten weeks. Programming three mornings a week, the rest of it self-directed, ending with Showcase Day on October 28 at The Record. My goal for those ten weeks is not a polished pitch. It is meetings, pilots, and freight actually moving differently by the end of October.
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