Navigate: Nashville’s Entrepreneur Ecosystem

Navigate, powered by the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, is a podcast dedicated to shining a light on Nashville’s entrepreneur ecosystem. EC team members and hosts Brynn Plummer and Clark Buckner interview entrepreneurs, business experts, investors, local government officials and organizations that support entrepreneurs across the city. Businesses aren’t grown in a vacuum, and neither are entrepreneurs. Nashville is unique – and there are a few special ingredients that make it a community that’s ripe with entrepreneurial success, including more than 250+ resources that exist for just one purpose – to work alongside entrepreneurs. Through this podcast, you’ll learn how successful Nashville entrepreneurs built their businesses, while meeting the people and places that support entrepreneurship throughout our city. Navigate is supported by the Mayor’s Office of Economic and Community Development and presented by the Ewing Marrion Kauffman Foundation.

Entrepreneurship for All: LIVE from Nashville Startup Shindig 08/15/2019

Entrepreneurship for All: LIVE from Nashville Startup Shindig 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. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/10890645

Learning from Pain: Marcus Whitney’s Steps on Turning Pain Into Success 07/13/2019

Learning from Pain: Marcus Whitney’s Steps on Turning Pain Into Success 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.” /episode/index/show/navigate/id/10504802

Be Bold w/ Pathway Women’s Business Center 06/12/2019

Be Bold w/ Pathway Women’s Business Center 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. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/10135637

Nashville's Tech Community 05/23/2019

Nashville's Tech Community 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. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/9890294

Humanizing Healthcare 05/08/2019

Humanizing Healthcare 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. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/9696665

Funding Early Stage Startups 04/18/2019

Funding Early Stage Startups 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. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/9439607

Underestimated Founders and Scaling Tech 04/02/2019

Underestimated Founders and Scaling Tech “Are Efforts For Diverse Founders Helping or Hurting?” Possip Founder and CEO Shani Dowell joins us in studio to share her experience growing revenue, raising money and scaling her tech startup in Nashville. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/9242531

State of Small Business In Nashville 03/19/2019

State of Small Business In Nashville Business may be booming all over Nashville, making it one of the best places in the nation for both startups as well as global companies relocating their headquarters. But maneuvering this city’s ecosystem can be a challenge - especially for the underestimated entrepreneurs whose access to much needed resources often feels limited. Audra Ladd from the Mayor’s Office and Will Acuff, founder of the nonprofit Corner to Corner, are two Nashvillians assisting entrepreneurs towards the path of success. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/9064793

LIVE with Mignon Francois 03/05/2019

LIVE with Mignon Francois To call her account one of “rags-to-riches” may be accurate – she did manage to turn just five dollars into ten million and counting – but listening to Francois describe her journey from foreclosure to fortune, it is clear the one part of her backstory that’s always remained the same is her faith. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/8879690

Mentoring: 5 Tips to Fostering the Right Mentor Relationship 02/19/2019

Mentoring: 5 Tips to Fostering the Right Mentor Relationship At the height of the economic recession in 2009, Michael Brody-Waite quit his job at a Fortune 50 company to become an aspiring entrepreneur. Looking back now, he humbly admits, he had no idea what he was doing. "I know it says I'm CEO, but I had no idea how to be a CEO, how to run the business … We were creating an industry that had never been done before without any investors or advisors." But 16 years of sobriety and three powerful words - experience, strength and hope - gave Brody-Waite the unwavering will to push on. "For me, getting clean was the hardest thing that I ever did, and so I started saying, well, how did I do that? And I went back to those words. I needed to find experience, strength and hope as an entrepreneur." Six years later, his startup was bought by a publicly traded company. Brody-Waite is now the CEO of the Nashville EC, giving back to the very organization that helped him years ago. Only this time, he is offering his personal experiences as a mentor, his strengths navigating the often confusing community waters and a hope to better connect the local entrepreneur ecosystem. "In recovery, I was always taught you can't keep anything unless you give it away." Included in this episode are stories and perspectives from local entrepreneurs: LeShane Greenhill (Founder and CEO of Sagents and Sales Cocktail), Julia Polk (Chief Strategy Officer and CFO of IQuity) and Shawn Glinter (Founder and CEO of Pendant Biosciences). All three attribute their success to the mentorship they received, and today each pay it forward serving in a variety of mentor roles. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/8699609

Death by 1,000 Coffees 02/05/2019

Death by 1,000 Coffees Buckle up and get ready to test-drive Season One of Navigate, a brand-new podcast dedicated to helping budding business owners like yourself maneuver through the myriad of resources that make up Nashville's fast-growing entrepreneurial ecosystem. Think of it as your GPS to business success! In this episode, we hear from Jessica Harthcock, co-founder and CEO of Utilize Health, a Nashville-based startup that assists patients with neurological disabilities find treatment programs around the country. Michael Brody-Waite, CEO of the Nashville Entrepreneur Center, shares his journey from drug addiction to being named one of the Top 40 Under 40 CEO's by the Nashville Business Journal. We also talk with Renee Bobb, owner of the Music City Icons, a semi-professional women's basketball team. She describes how quickly the waters can be muddied, sometimes unintentionally, by Music City's many communities willing to help each other out. We call this Death by 1000 Coffees. /episode/index/show/navigate/id/8527229

Navigate: Coming soon 01/28/2019

Navigate: Coming soon Think “NPR’s How I Built This” meets “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” /episode/index/show/navigate/id/8418950

Navigate: Nashville’s Entrepreneur Ecosystem

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