Zap's Wrap Dec 9th

hi friends,

Big news- it’s day 1 of working in the new office/startup house!!!

Hard to believe it is finally happening. Wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Mr Zap telling me 3 months ago that I wasn’t really all in. That’s when the switch flipped for me, I forced myself to get over my fears, and potential options started to roll in.

The space I landed on is almost 6,000 sq ft in 2 houses with a courtyard, next to the Parthenon. I’ll be hosting all of my meetings there for folks to see it and hear about my vision of what I’m trying to build.

Huge, HUGE shoutout to Matt Cooper for finding this killer deal!!! Lots of folks thought what I was looking for was crazy, but he always took me seriously and in the end we found an incredible fit.

If you want to help, I am looking for outdoor patio furniture, modern lighting fixtures, and anything else an office would need (:

Startup stuff that’s cool:

• I caught up with Aly Hancock who is joining/starting a new logistics/supply chain startup! She’s teaming up with the cofounder of FreightWise, Alex, to launch ShipTrac.AI. I love the idea of this team- she is a previous founder whose last startup didn’t work out and she’s super hungry to make a winner and FreightWise is a Nashville success story where Alex can bring his track record to get strong partnerships and backers. They are looking for strategic investors who can make introductions to early stage brands. Also, there is a growing conglomeration of founders in this industry in Nashville- Goodship, Qualle, BitFreighter, and Offload.

• I met Antony and David who are building Anise Health, a smart billing platform for medical providers. David is already in Nashville and Antony lived here in covid, so they are thinking of making this their HQ given the presence of the healthcare industry and capital.

• I met Chris who has built his career on selling public safety tech. He just left his job to pursue building a startup in the same space, where he has great founder-market fit. He is on the hunt for a technical cofounder, especially folks who have computer vision experience. If you can build it, he can sell it!

• I ate lunch with Ben, the founder and CEO of PerformYard, a later stage company which recently took capital from Updata Partners. It was cool to hear his story about how he bootstrapped his company at the start, only raised like a million bucks, and has now built a company worth nine figures.

• Liam is hiring for a full-stack engineer for WhiteCoat AI. Check out the JD here and ping me if you are interested.

• I caught up with Stephen with Project Admission who recently raised a round from some big name strategics!!

Events:

• I’m hosting a workshop about how to get started as an angel investor on Tuesday, Jan 14th. Teaming up with my friends and the people I rely on for their expertise- Peter at Gust and Tommy at Riverfront Advisors. Link to sign up is here.

Personal stuff:

Honestly, I spent the entire weekend working on getting an office set up so it wasn’t a crazy fun one (: Lots and lots of work ahead for the next few months. Luckily, that’s the fun part!

to the moon,

zap