The current strategic record for The Gate, as of May 18, 2026. Format is locked. Pricing is set. The matchmaking model is the product. What follows is the executive summary, the design spine, the prospect inventory, and the validation timeline that got us here.
The Gate is a two-day Nashville matchmaking experience for healthcare founders. Each participating company gets six curated customer conversations and one ecosystem dinner with Nashville's healthcare investors and operators. Founders fly in one morning, work two days, fly out the next night. The fund or the company pays $20,000 per founder.
It's not a cohort and it's not a conference. Each founder runs their own slate of six conversations — the ecosystem dinner is the only shared moment. The product is one-to-one matchmaking, protected by ruthless curation on both sides. The EC says no a lot. That's why the buyers keep showing up.
One event in 2026, targeting late October or early November. Dakota flagged a six-month lead time. The first paying-customer test is the follow-up email Sam is sending to Kerry Kellogg this week — moving him from validator to buyer. Saurabh receives the briefing for his Asia flight. Marty Bonnet gets the ask to sit with founders as a "gift to the EC."
The validation record holds. Ayo and Saurabh framed the opportunity on May 7. Kerry Kellogg validated price, profit math, and the matchmaking model on May 15. Sam locked the format and pricing on May 18. Kareem's return visit next week is the accidental proof-of-concept — same model, no event wrapper, real meetings with Dakota assembling them.
Sam and Rob have settled the product mechanics. What remains are the strategic calls that need a second set of senior eyes before we develop The Gate into a revenue-generating program. These are the questions where the board chair perspective changes the answer.
Kerry validated $10K per startup as the floor. We landed at $20K per company. Ayo's instinct on May 7 was that the access piece is dramatically underpriced. A fund-tier price (one fund buys the whole slate of six for $150K–$200K) is on the table but uncommitted.
The Gate is a 2-day matchmaking product. Project Healthcare is a 12-week commercialization sprint. Same universe, different shape. The risk: cannibalization if a fund views The Gate as a cheaper substitute. The opportunity: an upsell path from The Gate into PH, or vice versa.
Kerry's "hard to scale cool" line is the binding constraint. HCA, Vanderbilt, Humana, and Ardent will only show up if we curate ruthlessly. Open question: at what cadence does the buyer side fatigue, and what's the rotation strategy for the buyer field across events?
Currently Rob and Sam, with Dakota holding the contact inventory. The 6-month lead time per event is non-trivial. Open question: does The Gate need a dedicated practitioner whose full-time job is curating the room and protecting the relationships?
Attaching The Gate to an existing healthcare conference so executives are already in town would lower the lift on buyer recruitment. Risk: we lose control over the room dynamics and the velvet-rope principle gets diluted. Trade-off to call.
The Gate joins the InFlight / TakeOff / PreFlight / Project Healthcare family naming-wise. But the buyer (a fund or a portfolio company) doesn't buy EC programs — they buy access. Open question: do we position The Gate as an EC product line, or as a standalone brand the EC powers?
Of these six considerations, which two would you weight heaviest before we go to market? The answer shapes the next 60 days.
EC doesn't sell the horses. EC provides the track, the conditions, and the field of buyers who only show up because they trust the venue. The fund pays for the right to run its horses on EC's track, in front of EC's buyers, under EC's credibility.
The vetting is the product. If we let any startup into the room, the buyers stop coming. The quality of the field is what makes the venue worth attending.
The format is locked. The model is matchmaking-first, not cohort-based. Each founder runs their own slate of six conversations across two days, with the ecosystem dinner as the shared moment. The price is $20,000 per company. One event in 2026.
Each company runs its own slate. No shared curriculum. No group programming. The "cohort" word now just means the group of companies running on the same dates. The product is one-to-one access.
$20,000 per company for the full experience: six conversations, ecosystem dinner, pre-meeting prep, post-meeting follow-up. Fund slate (six companies on the same dates): $120,000. Bespoke dinner upgrade adds to the per-company fee.
One event in 2026 — not two. Target window is late October or early November. September was ruled out (too soon, too much happening that week). December was ruled out (post-Thanksgiving travel is hard).
Attaching The Gate to an existing healthcare conference (Healthcare Sessions named) so executives are already in town. Founders would get conference tickets as part of the package, plus their curated conversations during or the day after. Not committed; staying open.
At the end of the May 15 call with Kerry, Rob articulated what The Gate actually is at its core. Kerry confirmed the efficiency and named the tension. The exchange below is the design north star.
"Your velvet rope is removed. This place is actually quiet and you can hear yourself think — versus a club bouncing with people."
Rob, on the distilled version of the product · May 15
"Yes. But that's not sellable, so to speak... that's definitely the most efficient."
Kerry Kellogg's reply
The conference wrapper, the cohort wrapper, the three-day format — those existed because they're easier to package and price. The May 18 lock answered the question: we sell the quiet room. Six conversations and a dinner. No booths. No badges. No throat-clearing. The price is the package.
Kerry's most important line on the May 15 call was the constraint, not the validation: "It's hard to scale cool." Every operational decision flows from one principle — the buyer relationships are the asset, and we protect them by curating ruthlessly on both sides.
Buyers in 2026 are not a monolith. The CIO and the CFO buy on different criteria. Every founder in The Gate must answer both — distinctly — before they enter the room. We use this as the curation gate and as the buyer-matching axis.
| The CIO | The CFO | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary concern | Integration capacity. Technical debt. Cybersecurity attack surface. | P&L impact. Reimbursement shifts. Service-line margin. |
| Risk filter | Rejects "one-off" integrations that destabilize the stack. | Demands direct ROI. Rejects long-term liabilities. |
| What earns the meeting | EHR-native posture. Built to live inside Epic, Cerner, or the regional instance. | Quantified P&L story. Reduced ED boarding, denial-rate lift, service-line contribution. |
| Pair with | HCA enterprise architecture. Ardent IT. Vanderbilt's clinical informatics. | Vanderbilt finance. Humana plan economics. HCA margin teams. |
Every founder produces a one-page Workflow Integration Map before the conversation. Not an EHR sandbox — a single artifact the founder brings into the buyer meeting.
"We protect your buyers' cognitive load by curating only founders who've mapped their workflow to the buyer's actual operations. The company pays. The founders show up. The buyer never wastes an hour."
Marcus Evans, HLTH, Plug and Play, Rock Health, General Catalyst — none of them can replicate Nashville without buying a building here. HCA, Vanderbilt, Humana, Ardent, CHS, BCBS-TN inside a 30-mile radius is structural geography, not curation methodology. A bigger stadium doesn't strengthen the moat. A tighter field does.
People we are currently talking to about The Gate, with current status and next step.
| Name | Role | Status | Next step |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kerry Kellogg | Ayo's partner · NY-based healthcare investor · co-runs AVSC · primary product-validation prospect | Validator → buyer test | Sam sends the direct follow-up this week with the one-pager. Test: would he put a portfolio company through The Gate for $20K? Two-week follow-up after that for named portfolio companies. |
| Saurabh Sinha | EC board chair · founder of eMids | Strategic partner | Rob to send the briefing document for his Asia flight; follow-up call after. |
| Marty Bonnet | EC board member | Due-diligence ask | Ask him to sit with six founders for two hours as a gift to the EC. Rob's read: "He'd say absolutely." |
| Brian Fox | Healthcare investor | Dinner participant | Invite to the ecosystem dinner once dates are locked. |
| Bobby Frist | Founder · potential buyer/investor | Open | Discussed as someone who might pay to get his portfolio companies access. |
Meridian Street first — Woody Baum founded Local Infusion in Nashville and has publicly called Nashville "the Silicon Valley of healthcare."
| Fund | HQ / Fund | Healthcare DNA | Why this order | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Meridian Street Capital Woody Baum, Scott Law, George Ribaroff MD |
NYC (orig. Indianapolis) 34+ investments, 3 exits |
100% healthcare × tech | Founder/CEO started Local Infusion in Nashville. Warmest geography fit. |
| 02 | Twine Ventures Leshika Samarasinghe, Ethan Yeh PhD |
Bay Area / NYC Fund I ~$25M |
~50% portfolio is health | Purest thesis match. Waltz, Waymark, Rupa (exited), Teiko, Alaffia. |
| 03 | Floating Point Eddie Segel, John Loser |
Boston + NYC Fund II $70M |
Core thesis vertical | Both ex-Bridgewater, both founding team Oscar Health. Deep payer DNA. |
| 04 | Manresa Ventures Jackson Gates (solo GP) |
SF $40M Fund I |
Opportunistic | One health portco (Camber, RCM/billing). |
| 05 | Recall Capital Sarah & Somrat Niyogi |
Bay Area | Not confirmed | B2B SaaS focus. Qualify before pitching. |
| Company | What they do | Buyer ICP | Fit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Charta Health | AI pre-bill medical chart review. | VP Revenue Cycle, CFO, Chief Compliance | Strong |
| 02 | Sage Care | AI patient access — triage, scheduling. | Chief Patient Access Officer, COO | Strong |
| 03 | Substrate | AI agents for medical billing. | VP Revenue Cycle, CFO | Strong |
| 04 | SuperDial | Voice AI outbound calls — eligibility, prior auth. | VP Revenue Cycle, RCM outsourcers | Strong/Medium |
| 05 | YouShift | AI shift scheduling. | CMO, CNO, VP Medical Ops | Medium |
| 06 | CloudCruise | Dev infrastructure for browser-agent automation. | Engineering at HC-AI companies | Weak |
| 07 | Nen | Cloud Windows desktops for AI agents. | Engineering at HC-AI companies | Weak |
Three of the seven startups Ayo named trace back to one ex-team. Ayo Omojola was CPO at Carbon Health. Caesar Djavaherian, MD co-founded Carbon Health — he's now co-founder of Sage Care and CMO of Charta Health. Ayo is CEO of Substrate. Land one Nashville visit, close all three.
Buyers we curate from. The Gate's product is access to this field, delivered as six conversations per founder.
HCA · Vanderbilt Health · Humana · Ardent (including Ardent CIO) · Community Health Systems · BCBS-TN · LifePoint · Surgery Partners · Health Stream · Nashville Health Care Council · Vanderbilt Innovation Alliance