I disagree the community of more established entrepreneurs should keep a bind eye. This is their moral obligation to pass the knowledge and watch out for the growing kids. It is essential to provide a nurturing ground for a significant and scalable success of entrepreneurship in the region. Doing this one has to keep constantly in mind that the rules in kindergarten are different than those on the boxing arena. To preserve the differences is the community job and the higher motive – I think – of Scott’s efforts.

It is incorrect to think that the real life boxing rules are applicable for the GRA/TAG competition. GRA is partly funded by Georgia’s budget. So the funds must have the only aim to maximize the gross benefit in Georgia (in this sense in Georgia’s entrepreneur community.) Gross benefit and a company success (net benefit) are not synonyms. It is better to lose under boxing arena rules and win under kindergarten rules.

The market survival philosophy may be good for selecting of a particular best one-time effect supplier, but is extremely inefficient for analysis and control of the long-run adoption capabilities of a society. (For a popular training on the subject watch http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QalNVxeIKEE) So it is essential, the business plan competitions send the correct signals out there to the children in entrepreneurship. It is an encouraging state-rage Olympics. It is not a professional world-class play-off. The real value of correct signaling is tremendous. It is in activating of hidden reserves – the only resource able to shift situation.

But -yes- in institutional investment terms the money on signaling would be spent inefficiently. The VC-guys club was probably not the best judge service here. They bias off the big picture if not under control.

I’ve been there and took notes. The best presentation was by ProperNotice. Though, they represented weaker market and had less anchoring to the Atlanta’s financial market moguls. ATM Direct were out of time, have jammed financial part and have not made plausible the technology is hacker-safe (I could provide you a couple of tips if you are in hacking.) I left the event with a thought, I miss something in the story. Now I know what. Thank you all.

I was unaware that Ashish was on the board of TAG, but according to the TAG web site, he is.

I haven’t seen Accullink’s corporate charter, so I’ve no idea if Ashish is actually a corporate director.

I will say this, though: if Ashish is indeed a Director on the board of ATM Direct/Accullink, this whole affair just got much worse. I desperately want to believe that this was a horrible oversight on the part of the screening committee/judges/et al. I would think that this would be a pretty obvious conflict of interest.

I worked with Ashish years ago in the old iXL days. He’s a good guy. This is puzzling and/or unfortunate.

Cheers.
Scott

A lot of ideas for improvement have been thrown out there as a result of this, and I’m sure others will follow. I have some thoughts on this which I’ll share later as well …

Cheers.
Scott

Let me be clearer about my post:

1. The winning company deserved it. Second place was very far behind the winner.
2. From what I read (grated on the web) they purchased a patent and some servers from bankruptcy. They did not buy a company with customers or revenue from what I understand. I also remember from the presentation that they are building a new product from scratch leveraging these patents. This sounds like a start-up to me. If they were lucky enough to purchase the patent and servers at pennies on the dollar, more power to them.
3. I read up on the holding company that owned some of the asset that ATM Direct purchased. Well this company raised over $250MM and lost all of it. Even if they were stupid enough to pay $30MM there is no indication that it gives ATM Direct any market advantage. On the contrary the looming question will be if this other company sunk millions into this with little traction what makes you think you can make a go of it! In many cases it is harder to buy assets from bankruptsy that have under performed, and than build a new venture around them.
4. It seems to me that TAG/GRE acted with positive intentions. If there was a qualification problem there was ample opportunity for it to have surfaced, and the winner would have been disqualified much earlier. Four companies made it to the finals and the best company won.
5. This type of competition can bring in outside money. Look at the list of judges a lot of them were VC’s from out of town. This is good for Atlanta. So even if this competition may not have been perfect these events make Atlanta more relevant.

I understand that I hold the counter view point on this blog, but that does not justify the personal attack. I will not lower myself to counter the latst sentance.

It’s healthy to have different opinions.

Colin

You also said that “We need more serial entrepreneurs that have a track record in the Atlanta community. Rather than encourage them we sit on the side lines and turn this competition into a joke.” I don’t think this competition has encouraged anyone this year. in my view this competition isn’t a joke but seems to be in jeapordy of being devalued.

You also said “No wonder Atlanta gets such little seed capital compared to other cities of our size. The maturity of its self proclaimed entrepreneur community is laughable. I can see the VC and PE firms in the North East and West Coast mocking us.”

They don’t mock us because they don’t have to. We are irrelevant in their markets. And your comment here about the startup community shows your lack of knowledge about what is happening here in Atlanta and what has happened over the past 18 months. The lack of seed capital in Altanta has nothing to do with anything in this debate. Do your homework on this topic before you come here and make a fool out of yourself.