What I'm actually doing (and how you can help)

I have come to dread the question, 'What do you do?'

I’ve hit a point in my career where my job is obnoxiously niche and difficult to explain to people who aren’t exposed to the industry so it’s boring and futile to talk about. Unless we’re doing business together, I’d much rather tell you about all the stuff I do outside of work.

What ends up happening is I just say I’m unemployed, I laugh, and nobody thinks it’s funny except me.

BUT, here’s my long explanation of why, what, and how you can help me.

First I should share, I am happy and excited about what I’m doing. I am learning a ton, solving problems I care about, helping people, and am stimulated by the activity and progress forward. I feel incredibly grateful that I accidentally found myself in this career joy. 

Hat: Capital Connector at the EC. This is a new role that I’ve modeled after Nick Spiller at the Capital Factory in Austin.

There are some problems I want to solve in Nashville:

• Few early stage investors 
• Nobody teaching founders what is an investable company vs not 
• Nobody bringing angel investors together
• No one source for outside venture funds to easily access the ecosystem

What I actually do in this role:

• Meet with founders to learn about their company and see what we can do to help 
• Introduce founders to interested investors
• Introduce founders to advisors, lawyers, and other operators who have raised and sold businesses to help/advise them on their capital raise 
• Meet with investors and share with them relevant deal flow, introduce them to founders/other investors, or help them plan a worthwhile trip to Nashville
• Host educational events about capital

What I’ve done already: 

• Helped 2 companies get angel checks
• Made intros between 64 founders and funders who saw their deck and requested a meeting
• Built a Capital Council of 16 investors, lawyers, and operators to advise startups on capital raising
• Met 25 new funds outside of Nashville who are interested in seeing Nashville deals

How you can plug in:

• I host weekly public office hours to chat with whomever. You can sign up here.

What I’m most excited about:

• Lots of change and exciting things coming with the EC, especially with the best team we’ve had + the leadership of the new CEO Sam Davidson
• I am getting way, way better about knowing what deals investors want to see and what advice to give founders
• One of the intros I make is going to get a lead investment from a fund. Then I want to gather all the angel investors I’ve met to follow that deal with a smaller SPV depending on the allocation available. And then I want to do that over and over and over again, getting people more exposure + collaboration in town on angel investing so it can become more common.

How you can help me:

• Introduce me to angel investors 
• Introduce me to funds interested in Nashville deal flow 
• Introduce me to founders building scalable companies in Nashville

Hat: Head of Scouts and Startups at Venturous. We're a startup coming out of the Venture Studio, Hashed Health, that's on a mission to connect the dots between students, startups, and VCs. 

Problems we’re trying to solve:

• Students want to work in startups/VC, but don’t have a chance to actually learn about it hands-on
• Venture funds want deal flow outside of the coasts and it’s time/labor intensive to access it 
• Founders outside of the coasts can build great companies, but their local ecosystem oftentime doesn’t have early stage capital for them and it’s difficult to build relationships with coastal investors even in a zoom world

What I actually do:

• I hired and trained 22 student and young professional venture scouts in 21 different cities on how to find founders raising capital in their city 
• I teach about how venture works, how to build your network, how to build a personal brand, how to find deals, and how to evaluate deals
• We find deals and share them with 5 venture funds (and hopefully more soon) 

What I’m most excited about: 

• I essentially see this role as a way to scale myself. What if every city had another Zap running around trying to help their founders? How would startup ecosystems change?
• We’ve found 2,501 companies raising capital outside of the coasts
• The funds looked at 69 of those companies
• It’s really fulfilling to push young people to put themselves out there and then watch them succeed

How you can help me:

• Introduce me to any students or young professionals interested in participating in our Venturous Scout Program, our next cohort starts in January
• Introduce me to any funds who are looking for more deal flow 
• If you’re in VC, let me interview you on an hour Zoom call in front of our scouts 

Other stuff I am doing:

• I am helping run the Investor/Founder Matchmaking event at CES in Vegas. Here’s more info. If you’d like to attend, I will be the one picking who you talk to!
• I’ve started hosting industry-specific events for founders. While I’ve hosted bigger networking events for a couple of years, I’ve found that these smaller groups have significantly more value-add. If you think you should be invited to one of these, hmu.Musictech founders dinner through the ECB2B SaaS for boring industries with support of my friend and founder Tristan Wilson About to start a creator economy startups gathering Trying to start a woman founders gathering I want to start another dinner with just technical founders
• I am trying to build my network of technical folks/software engineers to either 1) know them in case they want to try and build something or 2) convince the good ones to go work for startups. I’ve hosted a couple of events exclusively for software engineers with my friend Josh Segall and we might start a CTO dinner too. 
• I’m hosting another Dumb Shark Tank. This is just for fun, but it’s my favorite thing.

Everyday feels like a sprint to get everything done, but I'm thrilled about where we're running toward.