Don
Nicholson

Don Nicholson's career has always orbited the same problem: how do you reach people and places that the mainstream has decided aren't worth the effort? His most visible answer came in the 1990s, when he joined the National Rural Telecommunications Cooperative (NRTC) as Director of Product Management — taking on full P&L responsibility for a hardware division that didn't yet exist. Through a partnership with DIRECTV, Don directed hardware procurement, inventory, distribution, marketing, and promotion across multiple warehouse operations, growing the business from zero revenue in 1994 to over $300 million by 2001 and the subscriber base from zero to 1.2 million customers. The business was eventually sold back to DIRECTV for approximately $380 million. That is not a career footnote. That is a proof of concept at national scale.

After NRTC, Don moved through home technology integration and builder sales before joining Viasat Inc. — one of the world's leading satellite technology companies — where he spent nearly a decade as Business Development Manager. His mandate at Viasat was specific and telling: find non-traditional strategic partners in the agricultural and telecom arenas. Viasat's mission is high-speed broadband, VoIP, and connectivity services for unserved and underserved communities across the United States. Don didn't sell to the easy markets. He went looking for the ones everyone else had passed over — the farms, the rural towns, the gaps in the coverage map where satellite was the only viable answer.

Between those chapters, he served as VP of Market Analysis at ISMS, working on fiber-to-the-home network design, funding, and operations in partnership with municipalities and developers — deepening his understanding of the full connectivity stack, from satellite overhead to fiber in the ground.

Today Don operates as an Independent Consultant from Front Royal, Virginia, working with companies in both the GEO and LEO satellite sectors. The shift from GEO (geostationary) to LEO (low earth orbit) satellite constellations is one of the most consequential infrastructure developments happening right now — promising dramatically lower latency and broader rural coverage than anything previously possible. Don's consulting work puts him at the leading edge of that transition, advising new entrants on the hard-won lessons that took him three decades to accumulate: how to build the distribution, how to train the sales force, how to reach the customer who has never been reached before.

That go-to-market expertise is directly transferable to Tymmber. Building hardware products for an outdoor lifestyle market — products like RAAK, CASITA, and STUMP that serve both recreational consumers and aspiring entrepreneurs — requires exactly the kind of distribution architecture, partnership strategy, and new-market development that Don has built from scratch, more than once, at scale. He doesn't just understand the theory. He has run the warehouse, managed the P&L, built the channel, and delivered the number.

Tymmber's founding belief — that time in the outdoors recalibrates human beings, and that if you get enough people genuinely outside you change communities — is not a marketing slogan. It is a theory of human restoration. And it maps directly onto the population that Don encounters every week through Good News Global: men and women in the process of re-entering society, carrying the weight of broken patterns and limited options, looking for something that gives structure, purpose, and proof that a different life is possible.

The outdoor entrepreneurial pathway that Tymmber is building — through the Sovereign Circle, through the OREE marketplace, through products designed to generate income as well as experience — is one of the most credible on-ramps back into mainstream society that exists. It requires no credential, no institutional endorsement, no legacy network. It requires showing up, learning a skill, and doing the work. Don has spent thirty years building businesses that reach the unreached professionally, and weekends reaching the unreached personally. That combination belongs at this table. Read the Incarceration Cluster →

And when the Tymmber Moonshot projects — the Carbon Free Resort, the Sierra County Recreation Area, Prosperity Place — require satellite connectivity infrastructure in rural New Mexico terrain that fiber hasn't reached yet, Don will have already built that map twice.