Celebrating Wins, Building Community

Before there was a building, there was just a big idea and a few people crazy enough to chase it.

When Jenna Colombo cofounded Groundswell Startups, there wasn’t yet a space or a name people recognized. What she did have was a belief in the power of showing up together, highlighting the real work happening on the ground, the failures founders pushed through, and the challenges they were navigating at every stage. It started with an ask and an open invitation for the community to participate in something meaningful. 

In 2015, at age 26, Jenna cofounded Groundswell Startups alongside local serial entrepreneurs and venture capitalists out of coffee shops and art galleries across the Space Coast. The team set out without a logo or a brand, but with a commitment to meet founders where they were and actively help them navigate best practices.

That “give first” philosophy, inspired in part by Brad Feld’s work on startup communities, shaped everything. Before officially launching, the team visited incubators across the country to study what worked, what didn’t, and how to build something truly founder-focused. When they returned, they implemented a radical idea for the region at the time: help founders for free, no strings attached.

The early traction in 2015 wasn’t accidental. It came from listening, learning, and celebrating wins. Trust and momentum followed.

From there, growth accelerated when the Deffebach Family donated an 11,000-square-foot skate park and worked with the team to develop a first-of-its-kind coworking space. Around the same time, Mark Mohler, one of Groundswell’s cofounders, began donating hundreds of hours of free legal support, a commitment he and his team have sustained since 2015. The core team included experienced founders with true exits, bringing real-world credibility and pattern recognition to early-stage entrepreneurs.

In those early days, the team organized pop-up events across the community, showing up simply to listen and connect founders with seasoned operators who could help them navigate barriers at no cost. The approach wasn’t about ownership. It was about service.

“Listening is a superpower,” Jenna said. “If you can be really good at knowing the motivations of people and what the real needs are, you can connect people in a way that’s pretty powerful.”

That approach turned Groundswell into more than a coworking space. It became a community engine, a place where ideas collide, mentors step in, and “failures” turn into lessons learned.

A former journalist, Jenna built Groundswell the same way she used to chase a story: by asking the right questions and digging for the “why.” That focus remains central today.

“Everyone here is spending 99.9% of their time on what needs to be done every day,” she said. “But why this matters to the world? That’s the first step to achieving product-market fit.”

Groundswell met with hundreds of organizations in its first year. Since those early coffee shop days, companies within the ecosystem have secured more than $200 million in outside capital, with a current combined company value exceeding $500 million.

Today, Groundswell stands as the largest privately owned incubator in the region, a distinction that allows the team to remain fully adaptable and personalize support to the evolving needs of founders. For the past decade, Jenna has helped entrepreneurs build and execute go-to-market strategies and early-stage fundraising plans, calling it a privilege to build alongside people solving meaningful problems with urgency every day.