Nashville has experienced tremendous growth over the last decade and continues to attract people from all over the country at an unprecedented rate. The city’s hospitality industry, construction boom, and business support services have been and continue to be the primary drivers of these gains. Our low-cost and high quality of life environment has given us a clear advantage when attracting the back offices of successful companies. As local firms provide services and construct new offices and homes for these businesses and residents, they have further accelerated the city’s economic surge. It is easy to get caught up in the limelight of the accolades and praise Nashville continues to receive and lose sight of the changing economic landscape. During this boom, our core industries that serve as the foundation of the region’s economy such as healthcare, music, publishing, and advanced manufacturing are experiencing incredible market changes and are under a sustained threat of disruption.

Our success has overshadowed the reality that the ecosystems of our competitive peers Austin and Denver have created over twice as many funded startups and have attracted over twice as much venture capital investment per capita. Between 2011-2015, Nashville has generated a fraction of patents compared to our peers. Even with our high growth rate in technology talent, we consistently ranked below our peers and had considerably fewer jobs than would be expected for a city our size. Our peers aren’t slowing down. All of the selected peer cities are posting over three times the amount of absolute job growth in tech jobs as compared to Nashville.