Nashville has genuine structural advantages for certain kinds of entrepreneurs, and real gaps that others will run into quickly. The answer depends heavily on what you are building.
Where Nashville Wins
Healthcare and health-tech entrepreneurship is the clearest case. The density of healthcare companies, health systems, insurers, and healthcare professionals in Nashville is unmatched outside of a few markets. If you are building a product for hospital administrators, clinical operations, patient engagement, or healthcare data, your first ten enterprise clients are geographically accessible. HCA Healthcare, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and dozens of mid-sized health systems are here. This market access is worth more than any accelerator program.
The Nashville Entrepreneur Center (NEC) is legitimately functional infrastructure. Located near the Charlotte Pike corridor, the NEC provides co-working, mentorship, and accelerator programming. Its Works accelerator has supported more than 40 companies since launch. The NEC connects founders to investors, corporate partners, and professional services. It runs the Nashville Entrepreneur Summit annually and functions as a real hub rather than a networking facade.
The no-state-income-tax environment extends obvious advantages to entrepreneurs. S-corp and pass-through income does not get hit with a state income tax layer. For founders who successfully exit or take distributions, Tennessee’s tax structure is among the most favorable in the country.
Nashville’s cost base extends runway on startup capital in ways that coastal markets cannot. A Nashville startup can hire a strong generalist engineer for $90,000-110,000. The same person costs $150,000-180,000+ in San Francisco. Office space costs a fraction of comparable New York or Boston space. For bootstrapped founders and seed-stage companies, this extends the timeline to profitability.
The Infrastructure That Exists
Beyond the NEC, Nashville’s entrepreneurship ecosystem includes:
TakeOff is a startup accelerator with a specific focus on high-growth companies and investor access.
The Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce runs economic development programs and connects founders to state incentives. Tennessee’s FastTrack and other state economic development programs provide grants and tax credits that startups can access with the right advisor.
Vanderbilt’s entrepreneurship programs and Belmont’s Mike Curb College of Entertainment and Music Business both produce founder talent. MTSU runs programs for music industry entrepreneurs specifically.
The investor community in Nashville is smaller than Austin or Raleigh but is growing and has improved substantially since 2018. Nashville has produced multiple unicorns, which creates the next generation of angel investors from their founders and early employees.
What Nashville Lacks
Deep venture capital concentration. If you are raising a Series A or Series B in a non-healthcare sector, Nashville has fewer local VCs than coastal ecosystems. This is improving but it is still a real gap. Most Nashville founders raising serious capital are eventually traveling to New York, San Francisco, or Boston.
A mature tech startup culture. Nashville’s technical talent is concentrated in established companies, health systems, and corporate campuses. The pool of engineers who have exited a startup and want to join the next one is thinner than in Austin or Boston.
Consumer-facing consumer tech. Nashville is not a media or consumer technology market. If you are building the next social app or consumer marketplace, the talent and investor base here is not optimized for that.
Who Succeeds Here
The entrepreneurs who get the most from Nashville are those building in healthcare, health technology, music and entertainment technology, logistics, fintech, or hospitality technology. These are the sectors where Nashville’s market proximity, customer density, and network effects are real.
Nashville attracted 3,906 tech professionals in 2020 alone, startup funding hit a record $2.1 billion in 2022, and the mayor’s office has treated economic development as an active policy priority for years. The foundation exists. What Nashville is building is a more sustainable version of what coastal cities accidentally created, with lower burn rates, more grounded corporate culture, and founders who are making deliberate bets rather than geographic defaults.
Sources:
- Nashville Entrepreneur Center: entrepreneurcenter.com
- CNBC – How Nashville Transformed Into a Booming Business Hub (May 2025): cnbc.com
- Greater Nashville Technology Council: technologycouncil.com
- NuCamp – Nashville Thriving Tech Hub (December 2024): nucamp.co
- Hypepotamus – Nashville Ecosystem (November 2021): hypepotamus.com