Judith Byrd, Executive Director, Greater Nashville Private Capital Association
Nashville continues to rival similar Sunbelt cities for private capital investment. As such, leaders in that space need support, guidance, and recommendations on how to evaluate deals, maximize value, and exit deals appropriately. The Greater Nashville Private Capital Association, a newly formed organization, seeks to be the support for this industry segment. In an interview with Invest:, Executive Director Judith Byrd highlights the organization’s mission and its efforts to support the regional private capital segment.
What are some key milestones for the organization in recent times?
As a new organization formed in the fall of 2023, we embarked on a listening tour as a way to introduce ourselves to the community and formulate the best way to assist those businesses grow and determine what was important to them. With that came the launch of our 2025 membership campaign. To date, we have 71 members and counting. It was a great privilege to receive a grant from Vanderbilt University, which established our operating budget. The goal is to become a self-sustaining financial nonprofit over time and continue to build our revenue to support our membership and our staff. However, at the moment, it is very important that we build trust within the community. We have a robust schedule of programming and events for the size of our team and the size of our industry. We feel like we need to be aggressive so that people have an opportunity to be exposed to what we offer. Our efforts have been very successful so far and very well received
What gaps is the organization seeking to meet?
It is about networking and providing a forum and place for people to connect, collaborate, and engage. We are focused on storytelling. We need to share globally outside of Nashville that the region is a great place to live, work, and play, and we are very proud of this. It is a very attractive business climate for investors. The traditional hubs of investment across the country such as the Northeast are expensive places to do business. There is a diversified market in Nashville that features an increasing number of attractive deals. We know that the region is also a very attractive place to retire with no income tax and that it is a great place to exit a deal. As a result, sharing this message is important for continued growth in our market and to prepare for the anticipated growth that we expect to come.
The connectivity aspect is very important. We have traditional strong thought leadership, particularly in healthcare and FinTech. There are investors in the community whom we want to support. Additionally, there is a growing population. We want to be the place where people can connect and build relationships with one another. A reflection of this is seen in the larger funds that are coming into the market such as Edison Partners, which moved from Princeton, and Teamworthy Ventures from Yale. They are a sample of the kind of organizations creating a presence in the market. We are delighted to bring people together so they can have an increased opportunity for success. We know that growth happening in the region will continue. The key metrics are not slowing down and we are seeing large corporate relocations happening all throughout the region. For example, the expansion of Amazon and the additional staff that is coming in as a result. This is very important to the market, but particularly for innovation. We are excited to see what will happen next with the Oracle Global Headquarters, knowing that they will bring a lot of talent to the market. We anticipate thousands of engineers coming in. Some of them will spin out and start their own companies as we have seen historically at HCA. We know this influx of talent and innovation will continue to grow the marketplace.
What are the immediate strategic goals for the organization?
We need to build a critical mass. We are asking people to lean in and help us shore this association up. Secondly, we are building a credible association that offers our members real benefits for their businesses. The third priority is to become self-sustaining. The priorities for the market are harder to measure but it would be an engagement metric and over time it will be the number of deals, assets under management, and number of firms.
What is the organization’s approach to its educational programming?
We are offering high-quality content to a bespoke room. As we become more self-sustaining, we will seek to add more education for the market if warranted. We have three large panel discussions with networking receptions slated in 2025 and one summer family office panel discussion. We started the year with “How to Raise a Fund,” which was a conversation with three managing partners that ran very successfully. We followed that up with “State of the Market,” which is our annual signature program to provide updates on what is happening in the marketplace. Lastly, in the fall we will repeat our “Endowment Fund” conversation. Our previous one was very successful, and we want to make sure there is access to different endowments. We are offering a lot of dinners for our capital allocators, featuring great speakers that have included Oracle, Anthropic, Ascension Ventures and The Boring Company.
We distinguish ourselves by bringing national experts to speak to our private investment community. We want to have the best people available to present great and timely information to our members.
