A paid, recurring intelligence product built from the people EC already knows.
A conversation Sam had with an HCA executive — spinning up a separate vehicle to find investment targets — surfaced an obvious gap: nobody is publishing what Nashville's healthcare investors, lawyers, and operators are actually looking to buy, build, or fund right now. EC sits on the network that could answer that question better than anyone in the city.
Quarterly survey of Nashville investors, healthcare executives, M&A attorneys, and senior operators. We ask the YC-style question: "What do you want a founder to bring you in the next 12 months?" We synthesize the answers into a digest that tells founders three things: what to build, what to reposition, and what's already overbuilt. EC publishes it. Alumni pay for it.
The HCA spinoff conversation isn't unique. Council Capital, Heritage Group, Frist Cressey, FCA Venture Partners, and a dozen family offices are all hunting in the same pond and won't talk about it publicly.
Alumni keep asking Sam and the program team variants of "do investors care about what I'm building?" — a paid RFS gives them a real answer instead of a coffee meeting.
Nobody else in Nashville has standing relationships with both sides of the table — the investors and the alumni who'd act on the signal. NHCC has the investors. We have both.
62% of H1 2025 digital health funding went to AI-native plays. Investor priorities are rotating faster than annual reports can keep up. A quarterly cadence is the right cadence.
| Role | Who | What they give | What they get |
|---|---|---|---|
| Respondents | Healthcare investors, M&A attorneys, senior operators | 20-min quarterly survey + permission to attribute | Visibility, deal flow, position as Nashville's signal-shapers — free |
| Buyers | EC alumni founders, Alumni Circle members, possibly broader founder community | Subscription | The Digest, intro routing, office hours |
| Sponsors (later) | Bass Berry, Frost Brown Todd, banks, payment processors | Annual underwriting | Logo placement, hosted issue, distribution credit |
| Option | Cadence | Price point | What's included | Honest take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lite | 1x / year | $199 one-time, free to Alumni Circle | Annual digest | Easy to ship, low ceiling, doesn't compound |
| Standard | Quarterly | $600-900 / yr | 4 digests + private Slack | The right starting product. Subscription economics, real cadence. |
| Pro | Quarterly + office hours | $1,800-2,400 / yr | Digests + live investor Q&A + warm-intro routing | Where the real value sits. Test in year 2 once respondent base is proven. |
Quick look at what already exists in or adjacent to this space, and whether it actually competes with what we're proposing.
| Source | What they publish | Overlap |
|---|---|---|
| Nashville Health Care Council — Annual Report | Industry achievements, event recaps, macro stats ($97B revenue, 550K jobs). Backward-looking, celebratory. | Adjacent Different format, different intent. NHCC is industry advocacy; we'd be investor signal. |
| NHCC Health Care Investors Conference | Annual in-person event with PE/VC panels on "2026 Key Outlook & Trends." Sponsored by Bass Berry. | Adjacent Same audience, but live and once-a-year. Our product is the durable artifact between conferences. |
| Bass Berry / Waller / Frost Brown Todd thought leadership | Quarterly healthcare M&A reports, regulatory updates, deal volume summaries. | Adjacent Legal lens, lagging indicators. Our product is forward-looking founder action. |
| Rock Health, CB Insights, Pitchbook digital health reports | National funding data, sector heat maps, deal lists. | Adjacent National + data-heavy. Founders can't act on "AI care delivery is hot" — they can act on "Heritage wants X by Q4." |
| YC Request for Startups | Free aspirational list of what YC wants funded. | Adjacent The structural inspiration. Different geography, different monetization (YC uses theirs as lead-gen; ours is the product). |
| Nashville Post / Nashville Business Journal | Deal news, executive moves. | No overlap Reporting, not signal. |
| Other Nashville accelerators / incubators | Cohort newsletters, demo days. | No overlap None publishes investor-side signal at this granularity. |
White space we'd own: Forward-looking, Nashville-specific, named-investor RFS in a repeatable cadence with a founder-action layer. Nobody publishes this today.