Every few months or so, various Atlanta startup thought leaders are corralled together on a panel or round-table to discuss what can be done to improve our startup ecosystem.  Invariably, the outcome is the same: a regurgitated list of things we already know all too well.

Examples:

• Lack of local funding sources for early-stage companies
• Lack of management talent to take a company from startup to growth stage
• Georgia’s legal inability to invest state pension funds into alternative class investments such as venture capital funds
• Too many smart people are leaving the state
• Lack of this
• Lack of that
• Blah.

Undoubtedly, we all want the Atlanta startup ecosystem to improve (or continue to improve, as I believe is the case).   But for the past few years,  there have been two distinct threads running in parallel.

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I just ordered my personal copy of Faded Glory, a documentary produced by my friend and Atlanta-based filmmaker, Rick Cohen.  If you are actively involved in the Atlanta startup scene, you may have run into Rick before.  Besides being a great guy, and an awesome filmmaker, the story behind the story is one for the ages.

Faded Glory is a true story of a group of aging athletes, good friends for over 18 years, who never gave up the dream of playing baseball at a competitive level. Through the eyes of their manager Rick Cohen, Faded Glory follows the National Network team, 18 men over the age of thirty-five who have overcome life’s adversities, including injury, divorce, bankruptcy, infidelity, drug addiction, incarceration, and one life-threatening disease. It all takes place as National tries to win a National Amateur Baseball World Series title. Faded Glory is a captivating document of friendship, courage, humor, and the indomitability of the human spirit.

Through his hard work and passionate evangelism of his film project, Rick raised some angel capital for this film (partially through connections he made at one of our StartupLounge events).  I haven’t sought permission to mention the name of the investor in question, but he is one of the most successful technology entrepreneurs in the past decade here – and a good guy to boot.  Just goes to show you, no matter what industry sector your venture is in, you never know where a possible angel investor is lurking, and what motivates them to make an investment.

And interestingly enough, this investor shared this with me:

“I did invest some money in his movie as a result of meeting him at your StartupLounge event.  Not so much because I think movies are a good investment, but because I admire his passion and the way he has bootstrapped it thus far.”

There ya go.

The film has gone on to win a lot of critical acclaim:

• Delray Beach Film Festival Audience Award
• LA United Film Festival Audience Award
• ALL SPORTS LA Film Festival Audience Award
• Atlanta Film Festival Runner-Up Audience Award
• Real to Reel International Film Festival Runner-up Audience Award
• Newport Beach Film Festival – Leigh Steinberg Sports & Entertainment names the film – audience favorite.

And hey, you can’t get better endorsements than these:

ANGELO PIZZO -
Writer of both “Hoosiers” and “Rudy.”

“A compelling documentary with authentic, well-earned emotions.”

ROGER TOWNE -
Writer of “The Natural.”

“Roy Hobbs and the New York Knights live in Rick Cohen. I’ve not seen so much blood and guts, self-less honesty, despair, pathos, passion, honor, and above all, — so much bravery in filmmaking.  Rick’s poignantly invested and dramatized love for his friends and the game of baseball shows clearly in this documentary.”

LEIGH STEINBERG -
Legendary Sports Agent who inspired the character of “Jerry McGuire.”

“This is THE documentary that resonates and connects with the deepest hopes and fears of males throughout the country and is a landmark event–Rick is a truly gifted talent! Faded Glory offers an unique opportunity for women to experience the locker room environment and psyche of men in an alternative habitat. It should not to be missed!”

In fact, Angelo Pizzo and David Anspaugh (writer and director of Rudy!, respectively), are now on board to turn this amazing story into a feature film.

Hey Rick, can I get a cameo role for promoting this?

Sooooo ….. support a local Atlanta entrepreneur and pre-order this awesome film on DVD.  Get the original indie film before Hollywood turns it into a blockbuster that may or may not capture the true spirit of Rick’s original vision. You can visit the online store here.

Rick will be attending our upcoming StartupLounge event on March 6th, and we’ll be giving away some signed copies of the DVD there as well …

Cheers.

Sometimes, out of the chaos of business, great ideas emerge.  Unfortunately, you rarely have the chance to aggressively chase those great ideas in the here-and-now.

I’ll be blogging more about this soon, but we’ve been pretty busy at StarPound lately.  We ended Q4/2009 strong, including the deployment of our platform to solve some major problems for a Fortune 50 customer (largest global player in their industry).  But amid all of the frenetic activity in Q4, something else emerged.  A really, really cool thing that I’ve decided needs to be it’s own thing.

So, to cut to the chase – here is what I am looking for.  Hopefully, some of you may have someone in mind for this:

I’m looking for an energetic, startup-minded developer (C++, Javascript, AJAX, XHTML, CSS, widgets, maybe some PHP, MySQL, etc).  Some Java would be nice, but not required.  The technology is a very unique IP voice application.  I am willing to give this person:

• Fully paid 3-4 bedroom apartment, including utilities – we’ll eventually give you some roommates to work with
• Salary, albeit small, but there nonetheless
• Equity in the newco

This person needs to be here in Atlanta, and is ideally a junior level person and is looking for a cool startup opportunity.  This is an awesome chance to get in on the ground floor of something very cool and exciting.

If you have anyone in mind, you can reach me at sburkett AT star-pound-tech dot com (no dashes).

Cheers.

Warning to readers: This is not my typical blog post about venture capital, entrepreneurship, startups, etc.  This is a very personal, unfiltered stream of thoughts.  If you have a problem with profanity – stop now.

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Jason Calacanis has a new cause.  He is railing against the so-called “pay-to-pitch” phenomenon.  A good read – check it out here.

Update: Scoble, Fred, and Lance have since commented on it as well.

My views on the pay-to-pitch thing are pretty well known, as I’ve written about it a ton in the past, and we’ve torn the topic to shreds several times on the podcast.  And I think we (the larger community, of which I am but a small part) have done a pretty good job here in Atlanta, at least, of (A) educating the entrepreneurs, and (B) tearing down the walls that allowed that sort of thing to come about in the first place.  Many of the pay-to-pitch groups don’t even bother with Atlanta any more (because they know they’ll get a boot in the face from the community). But I will add a few additional thoughts here …

I think the fact that someone with Jason’s “web-clout” is a bit late in jumping on this bandwagon is illustrative (to me, at least), of how “disconnected” the valley-minded crowd can be from the rest of the country.  Don’t get me wrong – I want Jason to fight the good fight   But StartupLounge (and others) have been screaming about this, and fighting against it, for several years.

There is a difference between someone in a place like the Valley paying to pitch, and someone in Des Moines, or Tampa, or Atlanta, et al.

If you are paying to pitch in the Valley, you and/or your idea, must really blow. It’s like the handful of applications for CapitalLounge that we get from startups in California that want to come to Atlanta to find money.  Wow – really? WTF?

If you are paying to pitch in some other part of the country (i.e. an under-served capital region, like Atlanta), you may very well be sitting on the next Google, but you likely don’t have the infrastructure and support system around you to tell you that you are wasting your capital paying to pitch – you may think that you don’t have an alternative. And that is where education comes in play.

Uneducated entrepreneur + desperation = “Gee, I bet I can charge this clown $5K to come ‘pitch’ at my service-provider dry hump fest.”

To me, it is all about supply and demand.  How do you kill the demand, since killing the pay-to-pitch organizers is, well, illegal? We’ve found that making more well-rounded, educated, and agile entrepreneurs is the best antidote for the pay-to-pitch problem.  If I had a nickel for every entrepreneur that we’ve collectively “converted” from the dark side through stuff like StartupLounge/CapitalLounge, PitchCamp, Startup Riot, ATDC, Startup Gauntlet, mentoring, et al, I could fund half the deals in the Southeast at least through Series-D

At any rate – good read – Jason’s a firebrand – gotta love it.  Kick ass – take names – peace out.

Cheers.

Several weeks ago, Unblakeable and I spoke at the monthly gathering of the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs group.  We provided a pretty thorough treatment of where we thought the Atlanta startup community was in terms of its maturity, and then presented a concept that we thought was pretty compelling at the time – the Atlanta Startup Cloud.  We put the call out to the community, and had a ton of people volunteer to help us build it.

We were pretty excited about the reception we received both at the event, and afterwards via email and other conversations.  Nevertheless, up to now, we haven’t had much time to get the ball rolling on some progress. Such is the joy of having day jobs

Fast forward a few weeks to now.  The ATDC announced a big revamp under the leadership of Stephen Fleming (of VentureLab fame).  As part of the revamp, the ATDC is proposing a number of new initiatives and policy changes.  Many of these initiatives either mirror or complement some of the things we were proposing as part of the Atlanta Startup Cloud concept.  As such, we don’t think it makes much sense for us to duplicate the effort.  Instead, we want to do our part to help ensure that the ATDC’s efforts are as successful as possible – and we ask that you get involved as well!

Note: I do think the first part of the Startup Cloud video is still worth watching, especially if you want some background on the Atlanta startup scene.

If you weren’t able to attend their open forum meeting, check out the video here.  It’s definitely worth the time.  Also be sure to read Stephen’s post (Why Are We Doing This?), and our most recent StartupLounge.com podcast featuring Stephen and David Sung (who manages the ATDC Seed Fund).

Mike and I both think that this new ATDC is going to have a profound impact on Georgia.  Stephen is the perfect man for the job, he has a good team in place, and we think his plan is pretty solid.  There has never been a better time to be an entrepreneur in Georgia, and we hope to see everyone at the upcoming CapitalLounge event in a few weeks!

Cheers.

A few months ago, Paul Freet (VentureLab) reached out to me and asked if StarPound would be interested in being a beta tester for a new software testing platform (Tarantula) being developed by a team of researchers at Georgia Tech.  I forwarded the message on to our CTO, Wei Wang, who followed up with the team down there.  We are incredibly busy right now, and Wei didn’t think he would have enough spare time to dedicate to the task, despite the fact that we have wanted to bolster our QA processes for some time now.  I was a little disappointed (not at Wei, but at the situation), because I believe very strongly in QA, even in an agile environment.  Then, something wonderful happened.

The Tarantula team took the initiative, downloaded our open-source platform, and started running their own tests.  They are coming in next week (I think) to share their findings and get our feedback.  Kudos to the Tarantula team for thinking out of the box, and finding a way to get their product out there in the hands of users. There is most certainly a lesson there for other entrepreneurs – never take no for an answer – be creative – adapt, improvise, and overcome.  Be a real partner!

I am excited about the meeting, and I’ll post a followup here with the results of their findings.

If you aren’t familiar with Tarantula, here is a quick rundown:

Tarantula is a technique and tool for helping developers find bugs in source code.  The tool takes source coverage information from a set of test cases and produces a color-coded visual representation of the code. The color coding identifies areas of the code which are most likely to be buggy so that the developer may focus his/her attention in suspicious areas first.

For each statement in the source code, a suspiciousness and confidence value is computed. The suspiciousness is based on the relative numbers of passing and failing test cases that execute a statement. The confidence is based on the percentage of the total passing and failing test case sets that execute a statement. In the visualization, suspiciousness is represented by hue ranging from red to green; more suspicious statements appear more red and less suspicious statements appear more green. Confidence is represented by the brightness of the color; less confident statements appear dimmer and more confident statements appear brighter.

How does it work?

The Tarantula tool requires the source code, a set of test cases and per-test coverage information. While it has an independent data format that will support other tools in the future, the current implementation requires test cases written in JUnit and the use of Clover for coverage instrumentation. To use Tarantula, one instruments the source code with Clover and then runs a set of JUnit test cases. Assuming there are failing test cases to address, the data is imported from Clover reports into Tarantula. Then, the project is opened in Tarantula and the code is reviewed using the information it provides. The import functionality is available both as a wizard and a custom Ant task.

According to their FAQ, the original version worked only with code written in C, which makes it an prospective fit for Linux/UNIX system developers, embedded systems developers, etc.  StarPound is over one million lines of J2EE (not C), so it will be interesting to see how their approach and tools fare against a different code base.  Stay tuned!

Cheers.