Zap's Wrap October 21st

hi friends,

Last week was a suuuper busy week where I feel like I simultaneously got nothing done LOL. It’s currently taking me 3-5 biz days to reply so apologies to everyone…

One win from last week- I helped a startup hire a growth person (: That’s 23 people hired to Nashville startups this year!

I’m now on the hunt for more engineers for local startups:

• A senior engineer with 5-15 years experience, front end (react), backend (spring, node, rails), who has experience leading people. AI b2b saas startup.

• A couple mid-level engineer who knows c#/react/typescript for a local adtech startup.

I am also actively looking for commercial real estate which has been a great learning experience so far!

By the way, I keep an Airtable of all Nashville founders (high growth, primarily focused on tech, outside of healthcare) and venture funds. You can check it out here and let me know if I’m missing anything.

Startup stuff that’s cool:

• I met Shea, a teacher who is building a better tool to find subs with Subbey. If I have any teachers or spouses of teachers who read this newsletter, check this out and report back to me!

• I met the squad for Dressy Club, an app to rent local clothes, built by Cole and Taylor who are in Nashville for the month looking to launch at local college campuses. As a super user of Rent the Runway and Nuuly, I’m a fan of the concept!

• I caught up with Aditya who’s building DBTwin, a software that makes creating synthetic data faster and cheaper. His tech is there, but he really needs perhaps a venture studio or a biz cofounder to take the company to the next level.

• I caught up with Matan, founder of Spinach. They are building an AI meeting agent that not only takes notes and assigns tasks like some other tools out there, but is capable of leading the meeting and essentially being an AI copilot. Matan came to Nashville because he previously sold a company to Asurion.

• I brainstormed with Matt, founder of DealCompass, the copilot for real estate leasing agents. He just closed his first customer! Honestly he needs to find a local leasing agent to build more product around what they do day-to-day.

• I drank wine with one of my fav founders, Grace with Elysian. They are certainly a team to watch. Something unique about them, Grace has a ton of experience in the insurance industry (5x Chief Claims Officer) and she has teamed up with her son, a young software engineer on their team who just gets shit done. I really love the perspectives of multiple generations on building this project and I think it will be a super successful dynamic for them to have for the future.

• I ran into Amy, founder of Mamaya Health, while I was at Braintrust Live. They provide therapy services specifically to moms. I stay out of healthcare, but I am a big fan of Amy and her resilience. She has raised 500k toward building Mamaya!

• I learned more about what 2 Nashville OGs are working on. Jamie previously built and sold a company called Initial State. Now he’s working on an NIL marketplace for high school + college athletes in the less popular sports. Chris previously built and sold a company called LeanKit and is now working on LLM as a Service.

Events coming up:

• Nov 6th 4pm- Program Showcase at the Nashville Entrepreneur Center. This is a first time event where companies from across programs will be sharing about their business and pitching for investments and customers. Great way to meet and support the early entrepreneurs in town! I will be MCing so please come out and check it out!

• I’m headed to Money2020, if you are going to be there, HMU!

Personal stuff:

I celebrated my 1 year anniversary of dating Mr. Zap!!! He made a super impressive homemade sushi dinner and I cried over a letter he wrote to me.

For folks who don’t know, I met Mr. Zap through the things I love most, startups. He always came to my startup events as a founder and engineer and even a lot of my personal events (bar crawls, house parties, etc).

After two years, I decided we should go to dinner. We started dating immediately. 3 months in we got matching :P tattoos. 6 months in we moved in. 9 months in we started a business (Alvorada, where we help local startups hire engineers in Brazil).

Our anniversary is also the 1 year anniversary of where I started betting on myself and working full time toward my mission of building the Nashville startup ecosystem. While I have to do the work, he helped me gain the confidence to pursue my dreams!

You can always find him by the lightning bolt tattoo on his thumb ⚡

Finally, I got to attend a couple of cool events. One was a room of powerhouse women who ate breakfast with Nancy Pelosi! Thanks so much to Victoria for the invitation.

Since I’m on the hunt for real estate, I decided to go shake some hands at the CA South Fall Party. Their founder Meg is truly one of the movers and shakers in the city and hosted the event right after having a baby! Honestly met some good folks and got more leads.

to the moon,

zap