Zap's Wrap February 9th

hi friends,

I just made my 25th investment into a Nashville startup- SiteVue AI.

I met the founder, Andrew, this summer when SiteVue was just an idea. This was one of those rare "love at first sight" deals. I knew immediately I wanted to invest, it was just a matter of when.

What they do: SiteVue uses first-person wearable cameras and software to capture and analyze frontline work in industrial settings. They're saving customers money today while building what could become the ultimate training dataset for future humanoid robots.

Why I invested: Andrew accidentally fell into the meat processing industry with customers #1 and #2. Turns out, meat processing plants are the perfect customer- highly manual workflows, complex operations, massive inefficiencies.

He's spent every week driving back and forth to Kentucky, embedding himself in their plants to onboard customers and deliver real value. That kind of founder grit is rare.

I don't know what things will look like for SiteVue in six months, but I know they have something magical right now. Things are working, yet everything is chaotic and exciting in that quintessential 0→1 way. In < 5 months they went from 0 → 489k ARR.

I'm now interviewing founders so you can follow along and learn about the cool startups being built in Nashville. You can watch the first episode with Andrew here. 

We will have this in podcast form + will release 2nd episode later this week!

Lorenzo joins the Lighthouse

Really excited to announce that Lorenzo is joining me as Chief Chaos Wrangler at The Lighthouse.

Lorenzo is a former founder who ran an extremely operations-heavy business. He's great at managing me and keeping the trains running on time, which, let's be honest, is exactly what we need right now.

Lorenzo is going to help me do more of what I'm good at and less of what slows me down. More time with founders, more time finding great companies, less time juggling logistics.

Excited to see what we build together.

Startup stuff that I think is cool

• We hosted FOUNDERS ONLY last week and I got to catch up with Derek, a 3x founder, about what he’s building this time around! Consumer fintech…

• We hosted Engineers Meet Nashville Startups. A ton of teams are hiring for engineers. Including: Basalt Health, Unity AI, Watt Data, Optura, Offload, Neural Payments, 4IR, & Fresh KDS! Email me if you’re an engineer who wants to join a startup. I have a TON of opportunities.

• I am looking for an early career killer to join a startup as Chief of Staff.

• I spent most of last week locking in the details for my anti-conference, Lightning, happening April 23rd!

• I went to a celebration lunch with the Finch team & Sydney @ Focal! So pumped with what Tom is building and that I am on the cap table with team Focal for their first Nashville deal.

Events

• Tech Operators Only Networking, Thursday, February 12th

  • If you work in tech and want to meet other people who do to, I am putting together an event for you! Looking for product, sales, marketing, growth, design, ops, etc type folks.

• Angel Investing 201, Friday February 13th

  • ​This session goes deeper than the basics and focuses on how early-stage returns actually work: power laws, portfolio construction, position sizing, and why most of the outcomes you care about come from a very small number of companies. We will use real examples to walk through the numbers and make you feel more confident when evaluating startups.

• Startup internship fair, Wednesday, February 18th

  • If you are a startup who is looking for interns or post-grad hires, hmu to join this!!!

• SAFE Notes 101: Intro to Early Stage Fundraising, Thursday, Feb 19th

  • If you are planning to raise your first round, you should come to this to make sure you know exactly what this means.

Personal

I mostly worked this weekend, but I did make it to my new gym, HDub, which I'm really loving. It feels more like high school sports practice, very social & supportive, everyone trying to lift heavy.

Unfortunately, I got a little too excited doing hang cleans for the first time in many years and tweaked something in my back 😭😭😭 Rookie mistake. Hoping to be back at it soon!!!! I need to warm up way more now that I’m getting older lol.

to the moon,

zap⚡