The Nashville Entrepreneur Center at 41 Peabody Street, photographed at sunset.

41 Peabody Street. The EC's home today — and where your mark would live.

Legacy giving at the EC

Somebody took a chance on you in 2010.

We'd like to make that repeatable.

You called us, which rarely happens, and you did it in the middle of moving your family to another country. We want to make sure we're building the right thing — and you're the only person who can tell us that.

Where it started

There's a line in your goodbye post we keep coming back to:

"It's a town that welcomed a newly minted MBA with a crazy idea into their Nashville Entrepreneur Center and angels who provided the financial backing I needed to get Concert off the ground back in 2010."

Two things had to be true in 2010. An organization supported an unproven founder. And a group of people wrote checks on almost no evidence.

The first one we can do on purpose. We do it every day.

The second one we are still trying to solve. It happened to you, and sixteen years later those angels saw returns most Nashville investors have never seen. Some of them, by your account, had written the whole thing off and are now reconsidering what they thought they knew about angel investing in this town.

We'd like to make it a system.

Help us make legacy giving repeatable

We've been thinking about this for three years without a good answer, and you're the first person we're asking.

When you think about the version of yourself who walked in here in 2010 — what did you actually need that you got? And what did you need that you didn't get?

We'd build the answer to the second one.

Of everything Nashville gave you, what's the piece you'd least want the next founder to have to find by luck?

The room? The capital? A specific person who told you something true?

You said you always intended to give back if you had an exit. When you made yourself that promise fifteen years ago — what did you picture?

We'd rather build that than talk you into ours.

Is there something you wanted to see happen in this city that nobody has built yet?

Including things the EC has never done. We have a big network that can help us.

What we're asking for

We're asking for $100,000.

Every dollar of it, at any level, supports founders and the work of the Entrepreneur Center. Program fees cover the program. They don't cover the building the program runs in, the curriculum we haven't built yet, or the technology underneath all of it. That's the gap, and that's where your gift lands regardless of the number.

The range starts at $25,000, and every level does real work. We'd rather be direct about which end we're hoping for.

What changes is the impact and how we recognize it.

The recognition levels

$25,000

A floor medallion

The EC cafe floor, with circular bronze donor medallions set into the concrete.

The medallions, set into the floor where founders walk in.

The one you remembered from the early days. It marks a foundation: you started here and built on top of it. Of everything on this page, it's the most literally true.

$50,000

A conference room, with your story on the wall inside it

Four founders working around a table in a conference room at the EC.

Founders working in one of the rooms, this spring.

Founders sit in these rooms for an hour at a time. We'd put a photo of the 2010 Concert Genetics team on that wall, what Concert set out to fix, and what it became.

Rooms don't build founders. But a founder who sits there and reads what happened to the person who sat there before them learns the ceiling is higher than they thought.

$100,000

We rebuild the room so founders want to keep building together

The EC cafe: metal bar stools at a high table, a coffee counter, and one person working alone.

The cafe on a weekday afternoon.

This is the only level where the money goes one-for-one into something you could stand in, and it's the biggest opportunity we have.

Right now it's a room a few people sit in. A founder told us this week that the seating isn't even that comfortable. That's the whole problem in one sentence — the most valuable thing this building does is put founders in the same room by accident, and we've given them a room they don't want to be in.

We'd stop calling it a cafe. What we want is closer to a living room: soft seating, good light, the kind of place founders come to early and stay in late because working there beats working at home. Somewhere the accidental conversation happens on purpose, several times a day. It would double as an event space that earns revenue, which makes it the rare project that pays us back.

Working name

Concert Hall

A room called Concert Hall, in Music City, named for the company you started with the EC's help — and a space we'd use for events. It works three ways at once. Yours to veto.

The recognition is important, but the impact is the gift.

Two more things, separate from the money

Your angels

You mentioned roughly 20 people who were still on the cap table, and what their returns looked like. We have 40-plus healthcare companies coming through right now and not enough Nashville investors willing to look at an unproven founder — the same bet those people made on you. With your permission, we'd like an introduction, and we'd like to be able to tell them what happened.
An hour with our healthcare founders

Once you've landed, on video. They only ever hear the two-year version of a founder story. You have the sixteen-year one, including the part where you stepped out of the CEO seat in 2016 and it still worked.

Tell us the number and where you'd like it pointed.

We'll handle everything else from here.

Sam Davidson — sam.davidson@ec.co Chief Executive Officer, Nashville Entrepreneur Center