How a 17-year-old raised $3.15 million to build a mountain bike park

Executive overview

Rhett Jones had no entrepreneurial background at 17. After a mentor challenged him to think bigger, he cold-messaged 550 LinkedIn investors, secured a land deal with a software company's real estate division, and raised $3.15 million to build Station Mountain — a downhill bike park an hour from Austin, Texas.

The core lesson: a focused, unglamorous outreach process — finding investors who matched both mountain biking and investing in their profile — produced results that more conventional fundraising approaches could not.

A targeted cold-outreach strategy, executed relentlessly, can replace years of network-building.

Raising $3.15 million at 17

• Searched LinkedIn for profiles containing both "mountain biker" and "investor"; messaged 550 people
• Opened with a request for advice or connections — not money — to lower the barrier to engagement
• Sent a 10-slide Google Slides deck; nurtured relationships over six months before pitching investment
• $100K came from family friends; the majority came from LinkedIn cold outreach
• Early attempts to pitch investment directly performed worse than the advice-first approach

Solving the land problem

• Initial pitches failed because investors required land before committing
• Sent 123 cold calls and handwritten envelopes to landowners within two hours of Austin; all 123 said no
• A software company with a real estate division agreed to buy the 130-acre property outright
• Deal structure: $25K/month land lease plus 40% equity in the park
• Once land was secured, the existing investor pipeline closed $350K in three weeks

Building the park

• Hired 10 specialist trail builders who travel the US in vans; lived on-site for three months
• Trail building is a precision construction project: 6.5% grade, drainage engineering, dirt mixing, compaction
• Mapped trails foot-by-foot on satellite imagery; flagged locations before excavation
• Key management failure: no master plan locked in advance; builders made subjective decisions without clear constraints
• Park opened November 3rd with a shuttle model — three buses carrying 24 riders each up the mountain

How the business operates

• $50/day ticket; park open Saturdays and Sundays only
• Revenue streams: tickets, rental bikes (13 units), food/snacks, camping ($13/night), summer camps ($900/week per child)
• Five part-time staff on open days; two to three part-time trail maintainers during the week; one full-time manager
• Monthly operating cost approximately $9K in labour, plus $25K land lease
• Texas has roughly 1,000 core riders — a smaller market than projected; limiting revenue ceiling

The land exit strategy

• Plan from the start: sell the land to a buyer who will keep the park open (e.g. RV resort, hunting range)
• Target sale price delivers a 7% positive return to the land investor and eliminates the monthly lease
• Once the land lease is removed, the park becomes meaningfully profitable
• Investors will be repaid at a positive return; Rhett has not paid himself

The world's best bike park — next project

• Goal: build a Whistler-equivalent destination in the US; Whistler draws 250,000+ visits per year
• Strategy: partner with an existing ski resort (use their infrastructure in summer) or buy logging land near Seattle
• Already 600+ cold calls deep to mountain resorts and logging companies
• Trails planned at 100+, targeting 250K+ annual visitors; budget estimate $20–35M depending on land route
• No US equivalent exists; the monopoly position Whistler holds in Canada is the model to replicate
• Ski resorts have bike parks but none built to this scale — a differentiation gap in the market

Lessons on management and leadership

• Asserting authority over experienced tradespeople as a teenager was harder than anticipated
• Lack of a locked master plan let builders default to personal preferences
• Now understands: lock the plan before day one, do not delegate creative decisions mid-build
• Running 10 employees on a live construction site at 18 is a compressible learning curve — the next park will benefit directly

Background: school and mindset

• Joined Alpha — a no-classroom, no-test private school — in ninth grade because he hated homework
• School's model: two to three hours of focused academic work per day; rest spent on business projects or life skills
• A billionaire founder of the school gave Rhett one five-minute conversation: "you can raise three million dollars"
• That conversation triggered the LinkedIn outreach the following week
• Now attending UATX (University of Austin) — first-ever graduating class — for the entrepreneurial peer network
• Long-term goal: build wealth, then launch a cost-effective, transparent hunger charity and donate the majority of his money to it