Founder & Executive Director
Scott Hill
Scott Hill is the Founder and Executive Director of The Proxenia Foundation, an independent nonprofit building stronger connections between Central Florida’s hospitality experience and its entrepreneurial, educational, research, and technology communities.
Scott founded Proxenia after more than four decades working where live experience, technology, operations, entrepreneurship, and creative problem-solving overlap.
His career has included live entertainment at Walt Disney World, technical production and systems integration, entrepreneurship, project leadership, and direct work with early-stage founders. Across those settings, the same pattern kept appearing: useful knowledge existed, capable people existed, and promising ideas existed—but the relationships connecting them were often informal, fragmented, or dependent on who happened to know whom.
Proxenia grew from the belief that those connections can be made more deliberately, and that Central Florida has an unusual opportunity to do so in hospitality: a region with deep operating knowledge, world-class visitor infrastructure, growing technology capacity, strong educational institutions, and an active entrepreneurial community.
Experience & perspective
Built across disciplines.
The Foundation’s point of view is shaped by experience at the intersections—where people, technology, operations, and execution have to work together in the real world.
01 · Experience
Hospitality & live experience
Understanding environments where the guest experience and the operation have to succeed at the same time.
Work in entertainment, events, production, and guest-facing environments developed a practical appreciation for service, timing, coordination, and the invisible systems behind a successful experience.
02 · Systems
Technology & production
Turning complex technical requirements into something people can actually use.
Technical production, systems integration, and solutions work reinforced a simple lesson: technology creates value only when it fits the people, workflows, constraints, and outcomes around it.
03 · Building
Entrepreneurship
Working from ambiguity toward a real product, customer, organization, or outcome.
Founder experience and years of project-based work inform Proxenia’s bias toward practical progress: clearer problems, stronger evidence, useful relationships, and decisions that can survive contact with the market.
04 · Connection
Ecosystem building
Creating structured encounters between people who would benefit from knowing one another.
Through the Proxenia Accelerator, founder sessions, expert participation, Showcases, and community relationships, the work has moved from an idea about connection to a functioning network of founders, practitioners, mentors, and regional partners.
Why I built Proxenia
A useful relationship should not depend on luck.
I kept meeting people who had pieces of the same puzzle. Hospitality operators understood the problems. Entrepreneurs were building new solutions. Universities, mentors, investors, and community organizations had knowledge and resources to contribute. What was inconsistent was the connective structure between them.
The Accelerator became the first practical expression of that idea: put founders in sustained contact with people who understand hospitality from the inside, then make the conversation concrete enough to change what gets built.
The Foundation takes the longer view. Its purpose is to help useful knowledge move, widen the number of people who can participate, and build relationships that do not disappear when a cohort, event, or individual introduction ends.
That is the institution I want Proxenia to become—and the reason it has to be larger than its founder.
Beyond the founder
Leadership is one part of the institution.
The Executive Director leads the Foundation’s day-to-day work. The Board of Directors governs the organization, protects its mission and public responsibility, and helps ensure that Proxenia can endure beyond any one person or program.
The founding Board is currently being seated.
The work
The institution is new. The work is already real.
Explore the Foundation’s research, education, and community work—or help establish the structure that will support it for the long term.