The 2026 NEXT Awards Finalists
Meet the 2026 NEXT Awards finalists: 24 Middle Tennessee companies, and what this class says about who is building in Nashville.
Blog
She Built the Go-To Agency for Influencer Strategy — And She’s in Nashville
How Tiffany Hardin built Gild Creative Group — from a Marcus Collins moment at Translation to Zoom's Hard Stop Burger Shop, the Nashville Creator Summit, and the Zoombassador Program she's standing up with Zoom.
Nashville doesn’t have a resource problem for minority founders. It has a connection problem.
Five Morehead-Cain Scholars ran 33 interviews on minority founders in Nashville. The finding: it's not a resource problem — it's a connection problem.
One year, $80,000, zero equity taken
One year ago today, we announced the EC Impact Grants: non-dilutive cash for founders graduating our accelerators — TakeOff, InFlight, and Project Healthcare. The pitch was simple. Win a competition...
Two Founders, a Governor, and a Janky Prototype at the McWhorter Circle Legacy Celebration
Mark Norton was stuck. He and his best friend had both quit good jobs — one at Apple, one practicing law — to build a diabetes management platform in Nashville....
The Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame Class of 2026: Three Founding Teams Who Built the Bank, the Buildings, and the Restaurants
It was October 1999. AmSouth had just acquired First American National, the $20B Nashville-headquartered bank where Rob McCabe was Vice Chairman and Terry Turner ran the General Bank. McCabe and...
The Demo That Changed the Diagnosis
Richard MacKinnon didn’t expect to walk out of The Room as Ian Nott’s next investor. What happens there doesn’t always stay there. The Room is invitation-only — reserved for Nashville...
How a Broken Toe Led to a Marketing Platform That Solves a Major Pain
Pamela Wilson had spent 2025 doing the work she loved: building marketing strategies for growing companies that needed to compete. The strategies were solid. The positioning was sharp. The problem...
55 Sundays and Counting
A new user emailed Justin Gray in March 2025 with a few questions about how Potluck worked. He wanted to try something: a dinner party every Sunday with the people...