Navigate: Nashville’s Entrepreneur Ecosystem Nashville Entrepreneur Center

Our ecosystem's greatest resource is the people that call Nashville home, and minority chambers of commerce are among the front lines of making our city a more equitable place for those people to shine. Minority chambers advocate, represent and connect entrepreneurs from underrepresented communities throughout the city, fighting for their voices to be heard and empowering them to thrive. To discuss their work opening doors for entrepreneurs, four minority chamber directors joined us at the EC for a live Navigate podcast recording at Nashville's Startup Shindig.

Nashville entrepreneur Marcus Whitney shares how entrepreneurs can turn pain into success. “You’re not going to get to wins and success without failures and without losses, so the most important thing is stepping out on faith and courage and confidence and doing something.” He added, “Nobody remembers all the losses anyway.... they remember the things you did that were value creating and successful.”

One of the resources we often refer people to is Pathway Women’s Business Center, which provides mentoring, education and other tools to help entrepreneurs across Tennessee, especially women and minority business owners.
PWBC won the Navigation Partner award at the 2018 NEXT Awards for its efforts to connect entrepreneurs with resources around Middle Tennessee. As PWBC’s director, Courtenay Rogers has seen firsthand how equipping business owners with resources can help them to achieve major success, and she’s passionate about paving the way for more women and minority business owners to get plugged into Nashville’s ecosystem.

From 2012 to 2018, the Nashville tech job market grew by 30 percent, outpacing the national tech job growth by 10 percent. On this LIVE Navigate podcast episode we highlight 4 perspectives on how this growth supports our ecosystem featuring Community Health Systems’ Vice President of IS Processing and Performance Excellence Briana Alexander, MTSU Professor Charlie Apigian, Eventbrite software engineer Rainu Ittycheriah and John Wark, CEO and founder of Nashville Software School.

While the healthcare industry’s revenue is incredibly important to Nashville’s economy, people are at the heart of the equation. Entrepreneurs, mentors and investors share their reasons why Nashville is the nations healthcare capital. 

Professional investors account for only 3% of all startup funding. The other 97% of capital often comes from non-professionals, including sources like angel investors, crowdfunding, bootstrapping and friends and family. Phil Shmerling and Monique Villa share their experience and expertise on how early stage entrepreneurs fund their startups.