The call of the wild sounded early for three Terry alumni.
Jonathan Newar (BBA ’17), Builder Brock (BBA ’15) and Marshall Mosher (AB ’15, BS ’15, MPA ’15) set compass bearings at UGA, then blazed separate trails out into the entrepreneurial world. Barely into their 30s, they have had unqualified success as founders of outdoor experiences companies… and they appear to be just getting started.
Many people assume a business degree means a straight path from campus to office-tower consultancies, corporate ladders and, for a gifted few, the C-suites.
That happens, of course — happily. But Terry also equips students with capabilities that are equally valuable for graduates daring to embark on more non-traditional journeys.
Jonathan Newar
Newar launched his startup, Captain Experiences, in March 2020, exactly when COVID shut down the world. What have I done? he thought.
A customer called. Newar stammered, Sir, I’ve got to let you know there’s a global pandemic right now.
When the man answered, Newar knew he’d hooked a monster idea.
Son, I’d rather die out there catching fish than holed up in my house.
“That moment, I knew we were going to make it,” Newar says. “The passion people have for outdoor experiences would see us through.”
That passion led to the largest fishing and hunting marketplace in the United States, connecting outdoor aficionados with thousands of fishing and hunting guides in every geography through simple online searches. Captain Experiences has booked more than $25 million in outdoor adventures for more than 100,000 customers.
A light bulb moment
The outdoors is dear to Newar. Born in Houston, Texas, he grew up in a house backing up to a bayou. “I went fishing when I should have been catching baseballs,” Newar says.
He carried a love of streams and fields onto a different field: lacrosse. The sport brought him to UGA, where he played club lacrosse for four years, ending up team captain.
“Lacrosse at UGA was a match made in heaven,” Newar explains. “I bypassed the Longhorns and Aggies to see something new, to cut my own path. It was the greatest decision of my life.”
Or the second greatest. As a Terry undergrad, Newar fell in love with finance and reveled in a monetary economics class taught by professor William Lastrapes.
“Learning how economics makes the world hum was a huge unlock in my head,” Newar says. “My Terry foundation really prepared me for professional life, even in completely different arenas.”
He started his career at SunTrust (now Truist) in oil and gas investment funds. Then his career took what he says was “a ridiculous turn.”
“I got on with WildHorse Resource Development, an oil and gas production company, running the financial model for the business,” Newar says. “We were acquired by a publicly traded company, Chesapeake Energy, for $4 billion.”
Newar was pumped.
He had youth, money and dreams. What to do with his life?
He decided to book a fishing trip to celebrate.
It was a light bulb moment.
The experience reminded Newar how aggravating it was to find quality fishing guides. He dialed out-of-date numbers. He looked at outdated websites. He couldn’t find how much things cost.
“I thought, if you can book an Airbnb or Uber online, why not outdoor experiences?”
Small but mighty
The investor grapevine loved his idea. The startup found backing from Bullish, a leading consumer investment firm, and MMC, the first institutional media-for-capital fund in the U.S.
Bullish had a yen for wide-open investment spaces — like the great outdoors. MMC, a partner with Sinclair Media Group, in October 2024 launched a “Damn Good Guides” national TV campaign generating more than 100 million impressions. Newar’s company has secured $6 million in funding to date.
In 2024, the 29-year-old Newar found himself on the prestigious Forbes 30 Under 30 list. He hasn’t let success go to his head… or his staffing.
“We’re a small but mighty team of four,” he laughs. “We’re lean but supported by an army of fishing and hunting guides and contractors and investors.”
Now based in Austin, Newar and his co-founder Attison Barnes relax by… guess what?
“We might go fish for some tuna off Cabo,” he says. “And we’re hitting the Pacific Coast off Colombia to catch some roosterfish, then heading offshore after that.”
Builder Brock
Brock lives by a simple credo: Think big. Start small. Move fast.
As a small boy growing up on Lookout Mountain, he had a big vision of outdoor life.
“In the mornings, I could run out the back door and get lost in the woods and spend all day,” Brock says. “I honestly feel like that’s a huge part of why I love entrepreneurship. Running a new business is like an adventure, charting new territory, trying to get somewhere.”
Brock is the founder of Waypoint TV, a fast-growing company focused on fishing, hunting and outdoor lifestyle programming. Think of it as a modern outdoor media platform built for the streaming era.
Recreational enthusiasts can find just about anything related to outdoor sports or adventure across Waypoint’s TV channels, streaming platforms, podcasts and social media. Its 24/7 channel reaches more than 50 million viewers monthly.
The platform includes more than 4,000 full-length episodes and films from more than 100 shows and creators available free any time, on any device. The business operates through advertising and brand partnerships and is distributed across a growing mix of platforms, including Amazon Prime Video, DIRECTV, Tubi, Samsung TV Plus, Vizio, LG, Sling TV and others.
Brock built the company without outside funding, growing it through partnerships, distribution and a scrappy, opportunistic approach.
“For our customers who love all things outdoors,” Brock smiles, “there’s no off-season.”
Iron sharpens iron
Brock says Terry equipped him to succeed as an entrepreneur.
“Terry was like a massive playground where I got to learn with world-class resources, top professors and super-sharp students,” he says. “My classmates were the cream of the crop — everybody pushing one another, just iron sharpening iron.”
The UGA Entrepreneurship Program held special meaning. “That program was incredible,” Brock says. “I was essentially forced to start a business. It couldn’t stay theoretical. I had to do something real.”
His first startup? A little hammock company.
“I was making and selling them,” he says. “It forced me to learn business: how to connect the dots, how to name something, how to find out what people really want instead of what I think they want.”
After graduating, many classmates took jobs in skyscrapers. Brock, of course, started small.
“I went the funky small business route,” he says, “doing social media and digital work for fishing videos in the Florida Keys with a tiny local company.”
But he thought big. The work morphed into selling sponsorships, then more.
What if, Brock thought, we created a way to get our fishing shows into the streaming world?
He started with a website with just a few shows. Then came an app, connections to content creators, a move to Austin and agreements with the streaming and media world that made the startup an upstart in outdoor entertainment.
Formula for success
Brock today lives once again near Lookout Mountain. He runs Waypoint, raises kids, hangs with generational family and savors the hills of home. He’s a smart, media-savvy executive who loves George Strait and Raisinets and airplanes and the elk herds at Jackson Hole. He considers his core value “bringing out the best in people.”
Brock’s in a wild west industry, but even at the age of 33, he’s learned a formula for success.
“We’re small, we think big, and we move fast,” he says. “We have the speed and ability to focus on what customers really want and to innovate.
“I wouldn’t bet against us.”
Marshall Mosher
The Executive leaves Mount Everest base camp, trudging upward.
The climb comes to an abrupt halt. A menacing 100-foot crevasse splits the glacier surface. A ladder crosses the gash, where whipping winds fling snow one direction, then another.
Does The Executive dare step onto the ladder?
In March 2015, Mosher launched Vestigo, a virtual reality adventure experiences program for corporate leadership training.
“Since a campus job at UGA as an undergraduate where I led caving, climbing and whitewater kayaking expeditions,” Mosher says, “I’ve been passionate about adventure sports helping people stay active and fit… and bringing them psychological benefits.”
Mosher attended UGA from 2009 to 2015 — “the six-year plan,” he laughs.
Each course was a rung on a ladder that took his career into the upper echelons of Fortune companies, to working as a Forbes contributor and onto TED Talk stages.
Into the wild
VR is only one part of Mosher’s body of work. He started out building teams and entrepreneurial moxie through traditional offsite outdoor ventures — think whitewater kayaking and camping excursions — for executive leadership teams at CNN, Mercedes-Benz, Chick-fil-A and startups.
These physical expeditions — some for hours, some for days — introduced leaders to themes important to business: Decision-making under pressure. Navigating fast-moving environments with precise communication. Exquisite attention to detail.
COVID stalled in-person excursions, but Mosher innovated. After Terry, he’d received a full UGA-sponsored scholarship from Google to attend Singularity University’s Global Solutions Program, where he saw the potential in how VR might support leadership training through adventure simulations such as the Everest climb.
Terry’s holy grail
Mosher’s work as an undergraduate was designed to combine his pre-med and psychology passions in ways to help his fellow humans cope with a complicated world. Then he fell in love with a course taught by entrepreneurship lecturer David Sutherland.
“I ended up starting my own company out of that class,” Mosher says. “I’d always been interested in economics and how the world works and how companies start. I never had much insight into that until Terry. That entrepreneurial class was foundational.
“It was a really powerful way to wrap up all I’d learned from the past six years in a practical way — how to find ideas, solve problems, discover customers, build the first step of a prototype… every step in finding a market niche for a product. It was the holy grail for me.
“Then I applied for a spot at Singularity University, my first real introduction to the tech startup world beyond Terry. And through that came VR and the ideas I’ve used for bringing confidence and mental strength to leaders.”
A superpower
Mosher’s vision for training leaders has gone to a place beyond VR. Today, he brings leaders — he really likes entrepreneurs — together on the slopes of the French Alps for weeklong, high-end executive team building events.
It’s not your grandfather’s team building.
Under Mosher’s guidance, participants descend snowy alpine terrain on skis with small paragliders overhead. Using speed-riding techniques, they transition between gliding just above the snow and carving turns back on it. The wing stays inflated throughout, enabling controlled, low-altitude flight. Skis reconnect with the mountain and the descent continues.
“Adventure sport lets us experience the world in a whole new way,” Mosher says. “It gives us this superpower on the other side of fear. You do whatever you have to do to make things happen.”
