A quarterly survey that asks Nashville health system executives what they need, then turns the answers into a product for founders, a premium service for investors, and a sourcing engine for EC programs.
Health systems tell us what's broken. We tell founders what to build. Investors pay to be introduced to the ones who built it.
The respondent isn't "HCA." It's the VP of revenue cycle at HCA, the chief nursing officer at Ardent, the head of patient access at Vanderbilt. Department-level answers are what founders can act on, and the department is also the contact EC keeps.
Founders in EC programs get it because they're in a program. Alumni get it cheap because they've earned it. Investors and outside founders pay for the thing that's actually scarce: a curated introduction to a department that already said yes.
Price points are deliberately blank. Kerry's portfolio put curated intros at "a couple thousand" a year. That's the anchor, not the decision.
The survey is the product people see. The information behind it is what EC uses and never sells. Each quarter's responses answer three internal questions:
EC doesn't offer the raw data to anyone. What it offers is the claim the data makes true: access to a bench of founders who have been pointed, by evidence, at the problems health systems actually have.
That's the pitch to a donor, a partner, or a health system. Not "we run programs." Rather: "we run the only program in Nashville that starts from what the buyer said."
NHCC has questioned the types of companies coming through Project Healthcare. Aidan is already working on a second opportunity to align better with their members. The RFS is the structural version of that fix: NHCC's members define the demand, and EC sources to it.
The relationship stops being "EC runs a program NHCC sponsors" and becomes "NHCC and EC jointly identify what Nashville health systems need next."
Kerry Kellogg polled his healthcare portfolio in May on a different EC idea and came back with the RFS instead. Unprompted.
"With a list of the relationships you have plus an understanding of what those relationships are looking for, i.e. this hospital group is actively looking for chart reading solutions or radiology workflow tools or whatever, and can provide curated intros that make sense on both sides and the intros are with decision makers, then people would pay for that but the number is closer to a couple thousand. Wouldn't need to be in Nashville, could just be calls. And then figure out how you structure a success fee based on signed contracts."
How it would read if we launched tomorrow. Draft copy, not final.
What exists in or near this space, and whether it actually competes.
| Source | What they publish | Overlap |
|---|---|---|
| Nashville Health Care Council annual report | Industry achievements, event recaps, macro stats. Backward-looking, celebratory. | Adjacent Advocacy, not investor signal. And NHCC is our partner here, not a competitor. |
| NHCC Health Care Investors Conference | Annual in-person PE/VC panels on outlook and trends. | Adjacent Once a year, live. RFS is the durable artifact between conferences. |
| Bass Berry, Waller, Frost Brown Todd thought leadership | Quarterly healthcare M&A reports, regulatory updates, deal volume. | Adjacent Legal lens, lagging indicators. |
| Rock Health, CB Insights, Pitchbook | National funding data, sector heat maps, deal lists. | Adjacent Founders can't act on "AI care delivery is hot." They can act on "Ardent's revenue cycle VP wants X." |
| YC Request for Startups | Free aspirational list of what YC wants funded. | Adjacent The structural inspiration. Different geography, and YC's is lead-gen, ours is the product. |
| Nashville Post, Nashville Business Journal | Deal news, executive moves. | No overlap Reporting, not signal. |
| Other Nashville accelerators | Cohort newsletters, demo days. | No overlap None publishes buyer-side demand at department level. |
The white space: department-level, forward-looking, Nashville-specific demand signal from health systems, published on a cadence, with a curated-intro layer on top.