Zap's Wrap October 7th

hi friends,

Last week I had a new first- I invested as an LP into a venture fund! Here’s the story:

When I was in Cincy, my friend Max with Cintrifuse brought Tim from Fireroad to lunch. Tim had the ethos of rolling up his sleeves to do the work with startups. Later, he emailed me asking if I wanted to invest as an LP as they were about to close. I politely said no because, truthfully, I needed to reserve my capital for Nashville deals.

A few hours later, Tim called my boyfriend Mr. Zap to tell him about a potential business opportunity with a startup in Cincy. It was a startup where he’s not invested, calling Mr. Zap’s startup where he’s also not invested.

It made me rethink my answer and I emailed Tim back that I changed my mind. Why? I have met only a few investors who are willing and looking to help startups, even the ones outside of their portfolio (one of the few is the great guys I get to work with- Sean and Michael at Overline). Personally, my own thesis is to be the smallest check writer who adds the most value. Because of that, I really like learning from other value-add focused investors too.

Fireroad is an extremely early investor, writing small, first-checks into b2b startups. They don’t have a Nashville deal yet, but they will soon!

Startup stuff that’s cool:

• I got two folks hired!!! Woohoo (:

  • One month ago, my friend Corbin came to me to tell me he was giving up on startup life and was going to go work in consulting. I said- no way in hell that’s happening!!! I knew exactly the job for him. One intro later, he’s now the Ops and Growth Lead at a soon-to-be Nashville startup working with talent in the manufacturing industry.

  • Almost 2 years ago, I met LaSawni on Zoom and we hit it off. I even went to visit him in Tulsa to check out the startup ecosystem building efforts there. Now, he’s moving to Nashville in 2 weeks to work with a very important investor in our ecosystem! I’m so glad to have him here.

• I have a local startup hiring for a TON of folks right now. Right now, they are looking for a senior full stack engineer (focus on Typescript, SQL, MongoDB, and Redis), a Junior AI engineer (looking for LLM lovers with 1-3 years experience), a Product Manager, and an Analytics Engineer (SQL, data transformation). Email me to check out a job description.

• I met Matt Salerno, who recently moved to Nashville with his startup DealCompass, a specialized CRM for real estate and PE investors. He is looking for more folks to pilot his platform! He found most folks in this space use several tools where he combines it all into one. He has a great growth mindset and I’m glad he’s in town.

• I got to dig in with Brian who’s building Arena Labs, a human-performance company powering folks on the front lines of our hospitals and military. They’ve even partnered with the guru Andrew Huberman to help doctors, nurses, and the military reduce burnout and be happier at work. He’s doing a couple mil a year in revenue already and is scaling fast!

• I spent a lot of time with the Grouped team as they had their team offsite here in town. I got to meet Chris in person, he is joining the team as CTO after building and selling a company to Coinbase. He’s hiring for a senior backend engineer and a senior frontend engineer.

• I caught up with Matt founder of Rabble AI. They are a freight optimization platform focused on improving efficiency of front line dispatchers and carrier reps. He is launching with his first two customers!

Events coming up:

• I’m headed to Venture Atlanta!!!! If you’re going to be there, let me know. It’s my first year attending. Excited to be there with the Overline team!!!!

• I’ll also be at the Teamworthy Ventures Founder Forum in Nashville on Thursday for a few hours. If you want to check it out, shoot me an email!

Personal stuff:

• We had over 100 engineers show up to the last Engineers <> Startups event. We heard from startups Grouped, InRev, Giggs, and Opsera who are all hiring! And from Soundstripe and Triplit.

• I watched the documentary Mr. McMahon on Netflix and I am OBSESSED with it. It was one of the best things I’ve watched in awhile. As a business nerd who is super curious about WWE, I’m blown away how he created a 10 billion dollar industry out of fake wrestling and storylines. And how he became the most famous character of them all. I highly recommend watching it and let me know if you like it!

to the moon,

zap