Navigate: Nashville’s Entrepreneur Ecosystem

Our ecosystem's greatest resource is the people that call Nashville home, and minority chambers of commerce are among the front lines of making our city a more equitable place for those people to shine. Minority chambers advocate, represent and connect entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities throughout the city, fighting for their voices to be heard and empowering them to thrive. To discuss their work opening doors for entrepreneurs, four minority chamber directors joined us at the EC for a live Navigate podcast recording at Nashville's Startup Shindig.

Nashville entrepreneur Marcus Whitney shares how entrepreneurs can turn pain into success. “You’re not going to get to wins and success without failures and without losses, so the most important thing is stepping out on faith and courage and confidence and doing something.” He added, “Nobody remembers all the losses anyway.... they remember the things you did that were value creating and successful.”

One of the resources we often refer people to is Pathway Women’s Business Center, which provides mentoring, education and other tools to help entrepreneurs across Tennessee, especially women and minority business owners.

PWBC won the Navigation Partner award at the 2018 NEXT Awards for its efforts to connect entrepreneurs with resources around Middle Tennessee. As PWBC’s director, Courtenay Rogers has seen firsthand how equipping business owners with resources can help them to achieve major success, and she’s passionate about paving the way for more women and minority business owners to get plugged into Nashville’s ecosystem.

From 2012 to 2018, the Nashville tech job market grew by 30 percent, outpacing the national tech job growth by 10 percent. On this LIVE Navigate podcast episode we highlight 4 perspectives on how this growth supports our ecosystem featuring Community Health Systems’ Vice President of IS Processing and Performance Excellence Briana Alexander, MTSU Professor Charlie Apigian, Eventbrite software engineer Rainu Ittycheriah and John Wark, CEO and founder of Nashville Software School.

While the healthcare industry’s revenue is incredibly important to Nashville’s economy, people are at the heart of the equation. Entrepreneurs, mentors and investors share their reasons why Nashville is the nations healthcare capital. 

Professional investors account for only 3% of all startup funding. The other 97% of capital often comes from non-professionals, including sources like angel investors, crowdfunding, bootstrapping and friends and family. Phil Shmerling and Monique Villa share their experience and expertise on how early stage entrepreneurs fund their startups.

“Are Efforts For Diverse Founders Helping or Hurting?” Possip Founder and CEO Shani Dowell joins us in studio to share her experience growing revenue, raising money and scaling her tech startup in Nashville.

Business may be booming all over Nashville, making it one of the best places in the nation for both startups as well as global companies relocating their headquarters. But maneuvering this city’s ecosystem can be a challenge - especially for the underestimated entrepreneurs whose access to much needed resources often feels limited. Audra Ladd from the Mayor’s Office and Will Acuff, founder of the nonprofit Corner to Corner, are two Nashvillians assisting entrepreneurs towards the path of success.

To call her account one of “rags-to-riches” may be accurate – she did manage to turn just five dollars into ten million and counting – but listening to Francois describe her journey from foreclosure to fortune, it is clear the one part of her backstory that’s always remained the same is her faith.

At the height of the economic recession in 2009, Michael Brody-Waite quit his job at a Fortune 50 company to become an aspiring entrepreneur. Looking back now, he humbly admits, he had no idea what he was doing. "I know it says I'm CEO, but I had no idea how to be a CEO, how to run the business … We were creating an industry that had never been done before without any investors or advisors."

But 16 years of sobriety and three powerful words - experience, strength and hope - gave Brody-Waite the unwavering will to push on. "For me, getting clean was the hardest thing that I ever did, and so I started saying, well, how did I do that? And I went back to those words. I needed to find experience, strength and hope as an entrepreneur." Six years later, his startup was bought by a publicly traded company.

Brody-Waite is now the CEO of the Nashville EC, giving back to the very organization that helped him years ago. Only this time, he is offering his personal experiences as a mentor, his strengths navigating the often confusing community waters and a hope to better connect the local entrepreneur ecosystem. "In recovery, I was always taught you can't keep anything unless you give it away."

Included in this episode are stories and perspectives from local entrepreneurs: LeShane Greenhill (Founder and CEO of Sagents and Sales Cocktail), Julia Polk (Chief Strategy Officer and CFO of IQuity) and Shawn Glinter (Founder and CEO of Pendant Biosciences). All three attribute their success to the mentorship they received, and today each pay it forward serving in a variety of mentor roles.