nashville
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Sogol Sepehri Works the Seams of the System
The physician-executive moved from Austin hospital medicine to a national role translating clinical judgment across operations, documentation and revenue - the quiet seams where modern healthcare either connects or frays.
The Grocer Who Bet His Life Savings on a Building Older Than the Supermarket
John Dyke grew up raising tobacco and heirloom tomatoes, then poured his life savings into a natural grocery in a building that predated the modern supermarket. Twenty-five years later, The Turnip Truck is four stores, one juice bar, and a running argument for shopping like your neighbors are farmers - because his are.
The Private Equity Firm That Would Rather Walk the Shop Floor
LFM Capital built a $1 billion-plus investing platform around an unfashionable conviction: the best way to understand a factory is to have run one. Its engineers-turned-investors bring capital, operating muscle and a respect for the companies they buy.
The Company Private Equity Calls When the Clock Is Ticking
BluWave built an invite-only network of vetted specialists and matches buyout firms with the exact consultant, interim CFO, or diligence team they need - usually inside a day, usually for free.
The Quiet Fund That Turned Tennessee Into a Startup State
For more than a decade, a small Nashville nonprofit has been doing the unglamorous work of turning Tennessee ideas into fundable companies. Here is how LaunchTN built a statewide engine out of capital, connections, and commercialization.
Tyra Palmer Built a Career in the Work Between Words
Across hospitals, statehouses and community rooms, the former Ardent Health marketing chief made communication an operating discipline - then carried that instinct into nonprofit service.
The Company Behind One in Three Sewing Machines on Earth
SINGER, PFAFF, and HUSQVARNA VIKING sit under one Nashville roof. Together they sell about a third of the world's household sewing machines - and they are betting the next stitch is a cloud subscription.
The Seafood Chain That Turned Batter-Dipped Fish Into a 500-Store Habit
Fifty years after a Nashville KFC franchisee couldn't grow his burger territory, the seafood concept he built as a Plan B runs 500 restaurants and keeps trading hands between private equity firms who like the numbers.
The Opry’s Second Act Is a Business Model
A century-old radio show became the anchor for a portfolio of venues, bars, festivals and media. Opry Entertainment Group’s advantage is not simply owning famous rooms - it is knowing how to keep their history commercially alive.
The Tire Company That Wants to Sell Fewer Tires
Bridgestone Americas built a continent-sized business around the part of a car most people notice only when it fails. Now it is turning that overlooked circle of rubber into a service network, a data stream and a test of whether mobility can become less wasteful.
HCA Healthcare Built a Hospital Network Big Enough to Learn From Itself
The Nashville company turned a 1968 experiment in shared hospital resources into a vast care network. Its real edge is what happens when local medicine, centralized operations and 47 million annual patient encounters begin teaching one another.
Hiller Plumbing, Heating, Cooling & Electrical
Hiller started with $500, one truck and a promise to leave the work area clean. Thirty-six years later, its real product is bigger than plumbing or HVAC: a repeatable system for making an anxious homeowner feel in control.
David Cygan
He runs marketing for the country's biggest senior living company - and bet the brand on letting residents tell their own stories.
Genesco Inc.
Genesco Inc. is a Nashville-based, footwear-focused retailer and brand operator founded in 1924. Trading on the NYSE as GCO, it runs more than 1,200 stores and a portfolio of retail and lifestyle brands - Journeys, Journeys Kidz, Little Burgundy, Schuh, and Johnston & Murphy - alongside a wholesale and licensed-brands business (Dockers, Levi's, Bass and others). The company generates roughly $2.3-2.4 billion in annual revenue and pairs physical stores with branded e-commerce across the U.S., Canada, and the U.K.
Stacy Doren
Stacy Doren is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Journeys, the teen footwear retailer owned by Genesco. She stepped into her first CMO role in August 2024 after a 24-year run at Levi Strauss & Co., where she spent a decade leading marketing for the Americas and helped return the Levi's brand to the center of youth culture. At Journeys she is rebuilding the brand's marketing foundation for a Gen Z audience that is making the mall cool again.
Emily Brittain
Emily Brittain is a Senior Communications Manager at Microsoft, working within the Office of the Americas Markets & Industries President. Based in Nashville, Tennessee, she crafts the stories that shape how Microsoft's largest regional business - spanning Canada, the United States, and Latin America - communicates its vision internally and externally. A Northwestern University-trained journalist with over 11 years at Microsoft, she brought a multimedia storyteller's instincts to one of the world's most consequential technology companies, producing town halls, executive narratives, and brand messaging at scale.
Matt Rubinstein
Matt Rubinstein is the founder and CEO of LiveSchool, a Nashville-born K-12 behavior and school-culture SaaS platform used by more than 1,200 schools across 48 states and 10+ countries. A former KIPP Nashville teaching fellow, he built the first LiveSchool prototype on an iPad to replace his own school's paper 'paycheck' behavior system, and has run the company since 2011.
Aecore
Aecore is a technology-enabled commercial general contractor based in San Jose, California, with a second office in Nashville, Tennessee. Founded by Casey Bell and Anthony Cirinelli and backed by Y Combinator (S17) and CEMEX Ventures, the company pairs an in-house team of designers, project managers, and software engineers with proprietary project-management software to deliver corporate interiors, life-sciences labs, retail buildouts, and building renovations. Its pitch is simple: run construction like a software company, with real-time schedules, transparent budgets, and weekly photo updates so clients always know where their project stands.
Casey Bell
Casey Bell is the co-founder and CEO of Aecore, a technology-enabled commercial general contractor based in San Jose, California. A UC Berkeley graduate and former Turner Construction project manager, Bell took a payments startup called Net30 through Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch, then pivoted the whole thing into a construction company built with software at its core. Aecore delivers office fit-outs, life sciences facilities, R&D centers, and retail buildouts while running its own proprietary tools for scheduling, photo documentation, and rapid pricing.
Sam Richardson
Sam Richardson is the CEO of Volley Automation, a robotics and software company that uses AI-enabled automated guided vehicles to densify parking garages, fitting up to twice as many cars in smaller footprints. A former Hamilton College quarterback turned channel-sales and operations leader at companies like Hewlett-Packard, Fellowes Brands and SGS & Co, he now runs Volley from a 35,000-square-foot research and demo facility the company opened in Denver in 2026 after relocating from South San Francisco. Based in Nashville, he is steering robotic parking projects across New York, Tennessee, Florida, California and Massachusetts.
Sam Weinstein
Sam Weinstein is a pediatric cardiac surgeon turned healthcare executive who runs SpecialtyCare, the Brentwood, Tennessee company that supplies the specialized clinical teams - perfusionists, neuromonitoring technologists, surgical assistants and sterile-processing staff - working inside more than 1,200 hospital operating rooms across 45 states. After 16 years operating on children's hearts in New York and leading more than 30 surgical mission trips to Latin America, he joined SpecialtyCare as Chief Medical Officer in 2015, became President of Operations in 2016, and has been CEO since 2017. His pitch is simple: take the largest operative procedural database in the business and use it to make surgery safer and cheaper, one case at a time.
Tadas Jucikas
Tadas Jucikas is the founder and CEO of Genus AI, a generative AI platform that produces tens of millions of product images, videos, audiences and ad copy each month for direct-to-consumer and e-commerce brands. He holds a PhD in computational neuroscience from the University of Cambridge, where he decoded the behavior of microscopic worms and published in Nature Methods and PNAS, then spent years applying AI to human behavior for UK government departments and companies like Uber, EDF Energy and Tesco. He co-founded Genus AI with his brother Viktoras, raised $11M in seed capital, and also serves as founding dean at Turing College.
Bryan Frist
Bryan Frist is the CEO and co-founder of Yoshi Mobility, a Nashville-based automotive services startup that began by delivering gasoline to cars in San Francisco and has grown into a fleet maintenance, virtual vehicle inspection, and mobile EV charging company backed by General Motors, ExxonMobil, Bridgestone, and Y Combinator. A Princeton and Harvard Business School graduate and son of former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, he also runs the early-stage investment firm Friale Ventures and has raised more than $90M for Yoshi at a valuation north of $200M.
Gokul Mohan
Gokul Mohan is the co-founder and CEO of CareHarmony, a Brentwood, Tennessee health-tech company that pairs machine learning with around-the-clock clinical teams to deliver chronic care management and care coordination at scale. A Wharton finance and entrepreneurship grad with a biomedical engineering degree, he traded a Morgan Stanley and McKinsey track for a bet that the gap between a doctor's visit and a patient's daily life is where healthcare actually breaks. CareHarmony serves dozens of hospitals and health systems across more than 20 states and raised a $15M Series A led by Maverick Ventures in 2022.
Marcus Baney
Marcus Baney is a co-founder of Spec (specapp.com), a restaurant and bar inventory management and recipe costing platform, and a seasoned beverage consultant based in Dayton, Ohio. Drawing on 11 years of hospitality experience - seven years behind the bar at Nashville's most celebrated craft cocktail bars including The Patterson House, Pinewood Social, and LA Jackson, plus four years as a bar manager and beverage director - he bridges the gap between artisan craft and operational profit. His consulting work focuses on designing cocktail programs that hit 85% gross margins while being executable by real teams. Beyond hospitality, he's an avid photographer with over 2,600 images on Flickr, a guitar player, and a golfer.