A paid, recurring intelligence product built from the people EC already knows — and the front door to The Gate.
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. Kerry Kellogg's reply to The Gate (below) validates the product and gives us its price.
We don't mind spending money for leads, but [The Gate] is very expensive lead gen ... From a purely economic perspective where most people landed is: 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.
— Kerry Kellogg, healthcare investor, May 2026 (relayed to Sam)
Read carefully: Kerry didn't reject EC's product — he described the RFS. He named the price (~$2K), the format (calls, not flights), and the upside structure (success fee on signed contracts). The thing we were brainstorming, a buyer has now priced.
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. For paying subscribers, we layer curated warm intros when their company matches an investor's stated RFS. EC publishes it. Alumni and outside founders pay for it. Investors participate free because we protect their time and bring them vetted founders.
The RFS is the always-on layer. The Gate is the once-a-year concentration.
Kerry's feedback reframes the relationship between the two products. The RFS gives investors a low-cost, high-signal way to stay in the EC orbit year-round. The Gate is where the highest-fit relationships graduate to in-person, in Nashville, with a fund-level commitment. The RFS qualifies who's worth flying in — and gives The Gate a continuous pipeline instead of a cold-start recruitment problem every October.
Not theoretical anymore. Kerry's portcos named the product, the price, and the format. The HCA spinoff conversation is the same demand from a different seat.
Alumni keep asking Sam variants of "do investors care about what I'm building?" — a paid RFS plus curated intros 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 founders 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, curated deal flow, position as Nashville's signal-shapers — free |
| Buyers | EC alumni founders, Alumni Circle members, vetted outside founders | Subscription + opt-in success fee | The Digest, warm intros to decision-makers, office hours |
| Sponsors (later) | Bass Berry, Frost Brown Todd, banks, payment processors | Annual underwriting | Logo placement, hosted issue, distribution credit |
The Curated Intro tier is now the center of gravity. It's what an actual buyer told us he'd pay for. Lite stays as an on-ramp; Pro stays as an upsell. The Gate sits above all three as the once-a-year in-person tier.
| Option | Cadence | Price | What's included | Honest take |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Digest | Quarterly | $600–900 / yr | 4 digests + private Slack | The on-ramp. Founders curious but not yet warm to investors. |
| Curated IntrosRecommended | Quarterly digest + intros as they fit | ~$2,500 / yr + success fee on closed contracts | Digest + double-opt-in warm intros when a founder matches a stated RFS. Calls, not flights. | Priced by Kerry's portfolio, not guessed. This is the product. |
| Pro | Quarterly + office hours | $4,800–6,000 / yr + success fee | Curated Intros tier + live investor Q&A + named-investor advisory hours | For funded founders mid-build who want pattern-matching from the source. |
| The Gate | 1x in 2026 | $20,000 / company | Two days in Nashville, six curated customer conversations, ecosystem dinner | Sibling product. RFS subscribers are the natural pipeline. |
Both questions are the same constraint Kerry named on May 15: "it's hard to scale cool." The relationships are the asset. The protections below are non-negotiable from day one.
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 and a curated-intro service on top. Nobody publishes this today.