Revolution Team
June 5, 2018
6 min
Steve Case, J.D. Vance, and the Revolution team hit the road last May to visit burgeoning startup ecosystems in Dallas, TX, Memphis, TN, Birmingham, AL, Chattanooga, TN, and Louisville, KY. At each stop on the road trip, the team met with elected officials, ecosystem leaders, investors, and entrepreneurs to spotlight and celebrate rising entrepreneurial ecosystems and to invest $100,000 in a local startup in each city.
We asked the winners in each city to tell us about their companies and where they’re based, provide advice to entrepreneurs looking to start a business, and to share a little more about themselves.
What does your company do?
NICKSON fully furnishes apartments on demand.
Why did you choose to launch NICKSON in Dallas?
We launched in Dallas because of its dynamic population, great infrastructure, and the opportunity to create jobs in our hometown.
What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs in your city?
Dallas has everything you need to get started — put yourself and your idea out there.
What are a couple of the books that you have read in the last 12 months that have inspired your thought process or outlook as an entrepreneur and leader?
Principles by Ray Dalio
Get Backed by Evan Baehr and Evan Loomis
What’s the most underrated virtue in an employee?
The willingness to give honest and sincere feedback.
What does your company do?
Soundways is revolutionizing the music industry’s supply chain with innovative solutions like Sound Credit, our next-generation IMDb-style music database.
Why did you choose to launch (or land) your startup in your city?
Memphis’s history of innovation in music provides unparalleled insight, relationships, and authenticity in this space that cannot be found anywhere else.
What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs?
Make sure you’re solving a painful problem for a very large group that is actively working to solve it.
What can your city teach Silicon Valley?
Memphis places the highest value on being your true self, whatever that happens to be. That authenticity underlies our strength in music, logistics, and medical innovation.
What’s the most underrated virtue in an employee?
Resourcefulness is a virtue that is not discussed enough. In the information age, resourcefulness is more powerful than ever.
What does your company do?
Mixtroz makes events more valuable by driving attendees from phone to face-to-face in real time — increasing engagement & collecting real-time data.
Why did you choose to launch Mixtroz in Birmingham?
We landed in Birmingham while completing Innovation Depot’s Velocity Accelerator in January, 2018. We were able to move our company further & faster in 13 weeks than we were in 1.5 years in our home city.
What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs in your city?
Birmingham wants you — the city wants you to be a successful entrepreneur! Be intentional, get engaged, hustle, blend out, and the community will embrace you!
What can Birmingham teach Silicon Valley?
Fail fast and pivot. Birmingham is not a perfect ecosystem, but it understands the stats on entrepreneurship and why it is not a ‘nice to have’ but necessary to move the needle — the city is pivoting to be intentionally diverse and inclusive — and it’s working!
How do you unwind after work?
Boxing (Ashlee) // Wine (Kerry)
Who is a living person you admire?
Sara Blakely because she self-admittedly did not know the most about fashion before she started Spanx but she cared the most to solve the problem. This has been our approach with Mixtroz. We did not know the most about tech but we cared the most to solve the problem we identified.
What’s the most underrated virtue in an employee?
“Street Smarts”
What does your company do?
FreightWaves provides data and market analytics for the North American freight industry.
Why did you choose to launch FreightWaves in Chattanooga?
Chattanooga has the largest concentration of people connected to the US surface freight industry than any other city in the country, on a per-capita basis.
What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs in your city?
Seek out the influencers in your industry to ensure that you gain access to the most important companies, media outlets, investors, and deal-flow in your corner of the market.
What can Chattanooga teach Silicon Valley?
If you want deep knowledge of a traditional brick/mortar sector, you need people that have tribal knowledge of how the industry works. For freight, there aren’t a lot of that folks in the Valley. They live in Chattanooga, NW Arkansas, Green Bay, Chicago, Dallas, Savannah, etc.
Who is a living person you admire?
Micheal Bloomberg
How do you unwind after work?
Spending time with my kids.
What’s the most underrated virtue in an employee?
Passion and commitment.
What does your company do?
Inscope Medical has developed an innovative technology that optimizes intubation, improving this high-risk procedure’s efficiency, speed and safety — saving lives and lowering costs to healthcare providers.
Why did you choose to launch Inscope Medical in Louisville?
Our technology was originally developed by University of Louisville graduate school students. Louisville has a very strong healthcare community.
What advice would you offer other entrepreneurs in your city?
Local funding is all about personal connections. The best team with the best idea will struggle to find initial funding in Louisville without personal connections to investors that have been built over time. So, get out there and start building your network!
Who is a living person you admire?
Tori Murden McClure — the first woman to row across the Atlantic Ocean Solo.
What are a couple of the books that you have read in the last 12 months that have inspired your thought process or outlook as an entrepreneur and leader?
The Brad Feld Series: Startup Communities, Startup Boards, Venture Deals
The Boys in the Boat
Never Split the Difference
How do you unwind after work?
To unwind, I weight lift with a friend before work, bake sourdough bread, and read/listen to fiction books.
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