Memphis has long been a hub for innovators. We live in a time when it’s essential to up our game, whether it’s for better health, a better community, or a better way of life and living. Memphis Magazine has been honoring those people and organizations who have looked not just to the next level but who reach for the stars. Our 2024 Innovation Awards — the 12th annual event — has found those thinkers and doers who have already made the city a better place to live. We had plenty of candidates to choose from, but these five people representing four organizations are working to make tomorrow an amazing time.
This year, we recognize BreAnna Boyd, founder and CEO of FeedWells; Dr. Evan S. Glazer at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center; Eric Mathews, CEO of Start Co.; and Susan Cooper and Megan Williams with Regional One Health.
Please attend the 2025 Innovation Awards Breakfast:
Wednesday, January 15, 2025 | 7:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. | 750 Cherry Rd, Memphis, TN 38117
photograph by jon w. sparks
“I always had this interest in the future.”
As CEO of Start Co., Eric Mathews brings innovative solutions to innovative people with the organization that began as a startup accelerator and has now become a venture architect firm providing processes to launch early-stage technologies, business innovations, and economic solutions.
A dedicated enabler, he wants nothing more than to enable his clients to succeed, not only in enterprise, but in improving the community.
Mathews’ unstoppable curiosity brought him to Memphis, where he attended Rhodes College and studied artificial intelligence with professor Natalie Person. He then went on to the University of Memphis studying more AI, reading Wired magazine, watching as venture capital went online, and tracking the dot-com revolution through its ups and downs.
He joined the FedEx Institute of Technology bringing along a chemistry degree, a natural science degree, his AI studies, and IT-based research. “I could talk just dangerously enough about the things going on at the FedEx Institute, which was artificial intelligence, robots, geospatial systems, high-performance computing, medical devices, new media systems, things like that,” he says. “So, when it opened in 2003, they tapped me to be kind of the business translator.”
In his role of associate director for corporate R&D and technology commercialization, he provided that research translation but found himself facing a question: “We were building cool technologies, but where were the cool tech startups?”
He saw there were startup incubators, but they weren’t full. And venture capital firms were growth-oriented, supporting entrepreneurial systems in later stages. But what about people with ideas who weren’t sure what to do next?
“We’re really social civic entrepreneurs at heart. We’ve had to build for-profit investment funds along the way, work with public private partnerships, work with mayors’ offices and all that to try to realize the change here.” — Eric Mathews
“That’s really where my spark was solidified and why I went down this road for the past 18 years,” he says. “My theory of change was to find people that are unsure if they should be entrepreneurs and ensure that, if they have good ideas, help them walk through the startup valley of death to get to those existing later-stage resources in our community.”
In 2006, Mathews himself became an entrepreneur. Or, as he puts it, “really an entrepreneurial enabler and innovation enabler for our community.” As many such risk-takers find, getting capital was a challenge. “I got some corporate R&D contracts with some local big companies here, burned my savings, melted my credit cards. I even had a generous business partner, Marc Diaz, who is a serial entrepreneur that put in money as well.”
It set him on the path to create what he calls the continuous virtual cycle.
“I look at this as a 20-year journey,” he says. “There’s a five-year period of failure, false starts, and scar tissue but some twinklings that this may work. And then you actually get to something that does work and you reduce it to practice in the next five years. Then it’s five years to scale up and pour gasoline on what is working. And then the last five-year zone is the full circle of all this: People that have gone through the entire system come back and start supplying what was supplied to them back to the community that built them.”
Start Co. was founded in 2011. Mathews got a boost when Vic Gatto, with a venture capital firm in Nashville, provided the money to launch the enterprise. Mathews also partnered with Andre Fowlkes, who shared his vision and continues to bring complementary skills to the endeavor.
“We’re really social civic entrepreneurs at heart,” Mathews says. “We’ve had to build for-profit investment funds along the way, work with public private partnerships, work with mayors’ offices and all that to try to realize the change here.”
The results? “We’ve made over 200 direct investments in this period of time, and 65 of those investments were women-led tech startups or just women startups,” he says. “There’s also social impact in there as well. And 65 minority led. The companies that we’ve directly worked with raise over $110 million, and most of them are still active.”
For Mathews, who has authored books on harnessing personal potential, there’s a world view on how to make the most of life. As he puts it, “There’s incremental innovation and then there’s big leaps. We only have 4,000 weeks on earth, so you probably should swing for the fences and take that big journey. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn you may impact the world in a significant way. I just want to encourage everybody to take the courageous pathway and bet on themselves and their ideas and bet on Memphis.”
