Zap's Wrap November 18th

hi friends,

Last week was a BIG week.

• One of the deals I’ve been working just signed a term sheet with a lead investor!!! Woohoo!! Can’t wait for this deal to happen. I’m personally investing into this startup and doing an SPV. If you already are on my list, you should get details before Thanksgiving.

• My friend Ajay starts as a Principal PM at Soundstripe today (:

• I am looking for a super hungry chief of staff for a startup.

• Also looking for a true technical cofounder/vp of engineering for a startup. Role is paid + equity. Ideally someone who can lead teams, has a lot of experience doing it, and can still roll up their sleeves to write code themselves.

Startup stuff that’s cool:

• I caught up with Alex, he’s a founder who built and sold a business previously in the HVAC space called Ravti. He is now working on his 2nd startup in the home services space. There is a growing crew of founders in Nashville who built and sold businesses before, relocated here for lifestyle reasons, and are now building their 2nd thing here!

• I met Michael, CEO of Homegrown. They provide non-dilutive growth capital to brick & mortar businesses with at least 2 locations. They are coming to visit Nashville to launch their brand here, but they already have their first customer in town who many are probably familiar with, Switchyards! While I focus on tech, I am so excited to know about them so I can help brick & mortar founders connect with potential capital resources. If you have more than 2 locations and want to learn more, shoot me an email.

• I met James the founder of Gumband. He has been hiding from me in Nashville and I finally found him thanks to Claire at Firebrand!!! They are a saas platform that allows brands to control and measure their interactive environments in real time from anywhere. They were incubated at WPP and are now spinning out. They have super big customers like Google, TikTok, Stripe, Meta, and Nike.

• I met Drew, who is a Partner at Number Group, a venture studio for bitcoin projects that has an office in Nashville already! Nashville has a lot in that industry- Bitcoin Park, Ten 31 Ventures, HQ of Bitcoin Inc, and UTXO Management. Fun fact- he was the photographer for Fyre Festival back in the day lol.

• I hosted 2 founder dinners so it was a busy week of getting to catch up with folks like Deannah with Couture Tech, Ira with CUE, Brian with Arena Labs, Eric with AdCritter, Patrick with District Cover, Brianna with Vampons, Jonathan with Cardinal Security, and a few other stealthy folks haha. Thanks to my hosts, Pavel for one and Josh for another, for always supporting my community building efforts.

Personal stuff:

Spent my Friday night trying Butterlamp Bread and Wine and catching up with one of my favorite people- Grace. I invested in her startup Elysian which is bringing AI to the insurance claims space.

I get to work with a lot of amazing founders, but there’s something so special about Grace. I think part of it is because she’s the only woman I’ve invested in so I relate to her more, but part of it is that Grace is one of the most capable people ever. She has been building so much for OTHER people that watching her realize that she has all the knowledge, network, and attitude to build something massive around her own vision brings me a lot of joy. She’s so surprised and happy when she gets investors and recruits a rockstar team and gets customers to say yes. And it’s like, of course you are putting all these pieces together because you’ve done the work over decades to make it happen!!

And I just had this overwhelming feeling of gratitude over the weekend that I get to do what I do. It’s so amazing to watch people build things they care about, suffer for them, survive through hard shit, and find the success they’ve spent so long working toward.

And even though I am not building a tech startup myself, I feel like I am right there too. Somewhere along the way, I started to believe in myself and build toward my own vision. I became a pirate who did things my own way. And yes, it’s harder than other things I could be doing, but this is way more fun and I don’t think I can do anything else.

In a few hours I am flying to Brazil! I did not have on my bingo card this year that I would start a Brazilian company, but I’ll share updates next week on what I’m doing down there (:

to the moon,

zap