Thursday, October 1, 2026
Editor’s Note: This story is the second in a series examining the growing entrepreneurial ecosystem in North Central Washington. Produced in partnership with the NCW Tech Alliance and Flywheel Investment Conference, the series will highlight the people and ideas helping shape the region’s startup landscape — from angel investors to founders building new companies across the Wenatchee Valley and beyond. Through these stories, Ward Media will explore how local capital, mentorship and community partnerships are working together to support innovation, create jobs and strengthen the regional economy.
When Brian Eastman walked into the Flywheel Conference in 2024, he was just hoping to “meet some neat people” and maybe learn a few things. Two years later, he’s at the center of the effort, serving as 2026 Flywheel Fund Manager and helping shape how early-stage capital reaches founders across Washington and the broader Pacific Northwest.
“It was awesome,” he recalled of that first conference visit.
For Eastman, Flywheel represents both a culmination and a convergence: decades of experience in technology, entrepreneurship, and alternative investing, now focused on building an innovation engine for a rural region that’s determined to look 20 plus years ahead, not just to the next quarter.
Eastman’s path into angel investing is anything but linear. He grew up in a household with no business background—his father was a district attorney, his mother a schoolteacher. He studied humanities and once pictured a career in law.
Instead, he entered the business world just as technology was beginning to reshape it.
“I was one of the first kids in high school to have access to a word processor instead of a typewriter,” he said. He watched cell phones evolve from “big bricks” to smartphones and rode that wave into software, then into entrepreneurship.
One early formative experience came when a friend’s father, who had invested in a troubled startup, asked Eastman and his friend to step in. The company’s idea was novel—mobile oil changes on corporate parking lots—but the execution was textbook “what not to do”: lots of spending on perks and cars, very little on actually proving out the market.
“They’d read the book on how to start a business just upside down,” Eastman said. He and his friend helped turn the company around and sell it, getting the investor back to even. “We got something very different than business school that was probably a lot more valuable because of how hands-on it was.”
From there, he spent time in early retail software, helping move businesses from shoebox accounting and simple cash registers to systems where a corporate office could finally see, in real time, what each store had on its shelves. He watched founders build and sell companies, saw acquisitions from the inside—and experienced the sudden need to reinvent himself when his role disappeared after two back-to-back acquisitions.
That reinvention led him into real estate, real estate investing, and eventually into the niche he has occupied for nearly 20 years: self-directed retirement plans.
These plans allow investors to use tax-advantaged vehicles like IRAs or 401(k)s to invest in alternative assets—real estate, private equity, venture capital, private lending, even (for a time) cryptocurrency—rather than just conventional stocks and funds.
“We didn’t offer investments,” he explains. “But we created platforms and educated our clients on how they could use these tools to go invest in what they know.” That work gave him deep exposure to diligence, deal structures, and the broader investing ecosystem, while also sharpening his understanding of founders and the realities of building companies.
Over time, those threads—technology, entrepreneurship, and alternative investing—came together to make angel investing a natural next chapter.
In 2019, Eastman and his wife moved to the Wenatchee Valley so their son could play hockey in a regional development program. They weren’t ready to send him off to live with another family and Wenatchee seemed like a good fit.
Then the pandemic hit. Their son’s program shut down, he moved back to Colorado, and the usual ways families plug into a new community—especially through youth sports—dried up.
“We just had not much network,” Eastman said.
When his wife was out of town one weekend in 2024, he noticed that the Flywheel Conference was happening.
“I said, ‘Oh, that looks interesting. I might meet some neat people. I might learn some stuff.’ I was busy with my business, but I figured I could play a little hooky and go check it out.”
That “hooky” day turned into a serious commitment. He signed on as an investor in the Flywheel Fund that same year, and for 2026 he was asked to step into the fund manager role—a position that intentionally turns over every few years.
“We’ve had something like six or seven different fund managers, and that’s by design,” he said. “You want to have a certain amount of turnover in those positions. Keep it fresh. Don’t get somebody trapped.”
Flywheel, he emphasizes, is not about a single personality at the helm. It’s about building a durable system.
“We’re at a point, after these first seven, eight years, where we’ve laid down a really, really good foundation,” he said. “It’s awesome, but like anything, you got the same couple of hands doing it for a while—they either wear out or have too much other competing interest on their time. So it was ready for some fresh eyes.”
His goal as fund manager is straightforward: “Give it a couple of years and leave it better than I found it.”
The Flywheel Conference is built around a simple but powerful structure: each year, a group of angel investors pools capital into a fund that awards an investment prize to one early-stage company.
The companies must:
Typically, 50–70 companies apply in a given year. A group of 30–50 investors screens the applicants, narrowing them through several rounds:
In parallel, there is also regional relocation support available for startups that choose to base themselves in the Wenatchee area—funds administered outside Flywheel but aligned with its goals.
Crucially, the Flywheel Fund is legally separate from North Central Washington Tech Alliance (NCW Tech), the nonprofit that runs the conference and broader programs.
“NCW Tech does a great job of hosting the conference and getting people interested and getting people in the room,” Eastman said. “But it wouldn’t work without the fund. And the fund is very separate. It has to be for a lot of legal compliance, regulatory reasons.”
What makes Flywheel unusual in the angel world is not just its rural location—it’s the way the fund is structured.
Most venture funds require large checks ($50,000, $100,000, or more) and operate as black boxes: investors rarely see individual deals in detail and have little say in selection.
Flywheel is different.
“This is a great entry point for people who are interested in becoming angel investors,” Eastman said. “The mechanics, the way this fund is structured, are really appealing for newer investors.”
While investors must still meet SEC accredited-investor standards, Flywheel shifts the challenge from “Can I write a giant check?” to “Am I ready to learn?”
“If you’re just investing in a fund, your skill is really, how do I judge fund managers, not how do I judge the companies,” he said. “Here, you get the wisdom of the room. You get to learn. The cost of entry is very low, so your risk factors are mitigated there.”
It’s also a place where investing becomes intergenerational. Eastman tells the story of an older investor, in his 80s, who participates partly for his grandchildren—hoping they’ll start to understand innovation and entrepreneurship in a way their parents may not.
“We want to support that,” Eastman said, even if it’s not something Flywheel trumpets in its marketing.
When it comes to choosing finalists and winners, Eastman said the criteria shift by stage, but a few themes are constant:
Sometimes a company can look fantastic onstage and still not pencil out for a fund like Flywheel’s.
“You could have a great business idea that may be really a good company that will provide you and your family income, but it’s not going to produce anything of value for investors,” he notes.
If there’s one thing Eastman returns to again and again, it’s Flywheel’s culture—especially compared with larger, more urban conferences.
“Most of these conferences tend to be in the larger urban markets, or they’re adjacent to a university,” he said. “We don’t really have either of those, and yet we’ve created something that’s really quite viable and quite successful and quite well liked.”
He describes other events as feeling closer to “a big Vegas convention,” whereas Flywheel is “more like going to a family reunion.”
Founders and investors don’t just fly in, pitch, and leave. They build relationships, meet civic leaders, connect with other angel groups and development organizations across the state, and often get value whether or not they win the fund’s investment.
“Any of the founders that come to participate… get tremendous value out of the experience,” Eastman said. “A lot of networking at all different levels, and it’s just that sort of openness and welcoming piece of it that really makes it stand out.”
That energy spills over to the next generation too. Each year, students from regional high schools, Wenatchee Valley College, and Central Washington University attend the conference.
“It’s so awesome to see their eyes just get as big as saucers when they start talking to real people running real businesses,” he said.
For Eastman, Flywheel is about more than any one company, any one fund cycle, or even his own tenure as fund manager. It’s about helping a rural region build the economic resilience it will need decades from now.
“When you hear the PUD coming out and saying, ‘Yeah, we’re working on our 75-year plan,’” he said, “that’s just so unusual. And this is part of that same kind of thinking.”
“We’re not going to be just apples and tourism 20 years from now. If we try to just continue to be that, we’re going to wither on the vine. We’ve got to create reasons in our local region to create new businesses, diversify our economic base, draw the right kind of businesses.”
That’s the real “flywheel” he’s trying to help spin up: a self-reinforcing cycle of talent, capital, mentorship, and opportunity that makes the Wenatchee Valley—and all of North Central Washington—a place where ambitious founders and curious new investors want to plug in.
“People want to learn,” he said. “There’s no fault in coming and looking at it and deciding it’s not for you. You don’t have to be a sophisticated venture capitalist, Wall Street expert to come join the club.”
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