It was July 2019, and we’d just received our first seed investment for my startup GraphiteRx, a B2B marketplace
for pharmaceuticals and medical supplies.
Our team was entirely remote at the time — back then, we were three full-time and three part-time employees — and we needed to decide where to set up an oIce and grow the company. (We’re now at 15 full-time and three part-time employees, and plan to grow to 25 before the end of this year.)
Silicon Valley would have been an obvious choice for me, having spent more than 20 years in the Bay Area. However, the competition for top talent was very tight. If you’re building deep tech, the Bay Area is still probably one of the best places to scale a company. But if you’re a company like ours that’s utilizing technology to solve
business problems, you can find more relevant talent in other parts of the country.
We considered other tech hubs like Austin and Dallas, Texas, and Boulder, Colorado, along with Nashville.
Tech talent was generally similar in these cities, but Nashville had the added bene:t of having healthcare focused
talent. I met Brian Moyer, CEO of the Nashville Technology Council, who explained to me that while it’s known as
Music City, healthcare is Nashville’s largest industry.
The robust and growing tech ecosystem in Nashville has sprouted many successful health-tech and digital-health
startups. On a more personal level, I felt very much at home in Nashville and appreciated the diversity of the city and its workforce. I also found people to be genuinely friendly and willing to help.
I met startup founders and tech leaders like Jason Moore of Strategic Growth Experts, John Bass of Hashed Heath, Matt Houston of Beachy, Jason Turan of Healthcare Bluebook, What sealed the deal on opening our
office in Nashville was the fact that Amazon was establishing a larger presence there.
For us, it was a good indication that the city, over the longer term, would be a great place to find tech talent, such
as engineers and product specialists. We opened our office in East Nashville in September 2019 and relocated two team members — one from Southern California and the other from Minnesota — who were excited to move.
Unfortunately, our office was hit by the tornado in March 2020, and we’ve since relocated to downtown.
With three kids in school, it took my family a little longer to relocate, so I commuted back and forth every two weeks or so, staying in Nashville for a week at a time. This helped me get acquainted with different neighborhoods.
In May 2020, my wife and I came to Nashville to house hunt. We had a great real-estate agent, Franklin Pargh, who
showed us more than 20 houses in two days. We had a bit of sticker shock when we saw the prices for
nice neighborhoods in Nashville. Back in San Francisco, we lived in the East Bay, which was considered one of the
more affordable areas in the Bay Area.
Because we were still early into the pandemic, it was a buyer’s market, and we got a good deal on our home, which
cost about the same as the house that we sold in California but was twice as large.
We have very friendly neighbors, and I especially like being close to downtown and having access to great restaurants with a short rideshare. It also reduced my commute to about 10 to 15 minutes, when it would have been over an hour each way had we opened an office in San Francisco.
Professionally, I’m also confident that Nashville has the kind of diverse talent pool and startup ecosystem that’s
needed to build GraphiteRx into a company that can have a meaningful impact on healthcare.
Like the great Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been” —
Nashville seems like the place where tech is going.
