Sheldon Grizzle

Sheldon Grizzle is a serial founder and early-stage investor widely credited as one of the architects of Chattanooga's emergence as an entrepreneurial hub — the "Gig City." Originally from Boca Raton, Florida, he moved to Chattanooga to attend Covenant College (class of '03), where he studied psychology and was a two-time All-American soccer player. His athletic roots later fed directly into co-founding Chattanooga Football Club in 2009, a fan-owned soccer club he has helped lead ever since.

Grizzle's central role in the startup community came through The Company Lab (CO.LAB), which he founded and co-directed from 2010 to 2013, building it into the region's leading startup accelerator and idea-competition platform. In parallel he co-founded GIGTANK (2011–2013), an accelerator built around Chattanooga's municipal gigabit fiber network, and co-founded CO.STARTERS, a program supporting creative entrepreneurs and small-business owners that has since spread to communities across the country. In 2011 he co-founded Blank Slate Ventures alongside Lex Tarumianz, a seed fund created specifically to back pre-revenue startups in the Chattanooga region.

Beyond the accelerator and fund work, Grizzle has been an operator himself: he co-founded the software/IoT development firm Very (2014–2018, formerly branded "Spartan") and the startup ReadyCart, among other companies. Since April 2020 he has been a Partner at Thousand Hills Co, a developer of new-home communities, marking a move into real estate while remaining active in the local startup and civic scene. He has served on the boards of Chattanooga Football Club, CO.LAB, the Tennessee Aquarium, and the Chattanooga Visitors Bureau.

His work and Chattanooga's startup story have been covered by outlets including the Wall Street Journal (which dubbed him a "Startup Guru"), the New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, TechCrunch, and Inc. In 2025 he was inducted into Chattanooga FC's inaugural-era "Hall of Legends" as the lone member of the Class of 2025, recognizing his founding role with the club.

• Invests at the pre-revenue / pre-seed and seed stage, typically writing small initial checks (~$5K–$100K) through Blank Slate Ventures, the fund he built explicitly for early Chattanooga-area startups.
• Backs teams first — the fund states it looks for "teams of entrepreneurs building companies that have the potential to disrupt their respective industries," and emphasizes providing "not just capital but also strategic support."
• Sector lean toward software, SaaS, esports/gaming, and TMT/media, though the portfolio has ranged into e-commerce, healthtech, and consumer.
• Deeply place-based: much of his thesis is captured in his own repeated mantra, "Why not Chattanooga?" — betting on founders willing to build in and for the region rather than defaulting to coastal hubs.
• Comfortable with failure as part of the process; another oft-quoted line is "If at first you don't fail, you're not trying hard enough."