The following is my account of the Wifi Cat ruse we pulled off last week at Startup Riot 2009 in Atlanta.  This is from memory, so the timeline may be a bit off here or there - but it will give you the gist.

Birth of a Kitten

Several weeks ago, I was down at the ATDC doing something or another - can’t remember exactly what.  Whenever I’m down there, I try and stop by and say hi to some of my fellow entrepreneurs located in Tech Square who are working hard getting their ventures off the ground.  Of course, I usually end up making the trip down the hall to visit with the rowdy crew over at Georgia Tech’s VentureLab (Stephen Fleming, Paul Freet, and Keith Mcgreggor).  On my drive down I had exchanged some text messages with Paul and we committed to hooking up for a quick lunch to get caught up, as I hadn’t seen him in a while.

At any rate, I walked in and Paul was giggling like a two year old in his office. He said something to the effect of “man, you’ve gotta see this.”  The rest is history.  I think.

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Unfortunately, we just received word that our normal location for CapitalLounge (The Pavillion of Dunwoody) has had to close their doors due to a disagreement with their landlord.  So, for our upcoming event on Wednesday, Februrary 25th, we have had to change the venue.

If you’ve already applied and been accepted to attend, you should receive an email tonight with directions to the new location.   If for some reason you do not receive an email tonight, check your spam folder (doh!), or go to the StartupLounge.com web site and pull up the event details page - if you’re logged in, you’ll see the information on the new location there.

We apologize for the inconvenience, and look forward to seeing everyone on the 25th!

Cheers.

The down market seems to be working in our favor. This probably isn’t going to news to some of you, but I thought I’d share a few random thoughts on this.

As a FOSS (Free, Open Source Solution) company, that also offers a cloud-based software-as-a-service option, we’re sorting through more deal opportunities than we can handle right now. We’re hiring based upon real growth … which is the ultimate barometer of any startup’s progression.

CIOs and other tech decision makers still have the same problems to solve within their organizations, they just don’t have a blank check book to work with anymore.  No one ever got fired for bringing in a Microsoft, Avaya, SAP, or any other market leader to implement a solution.  But if they can’t afford to do that, they can either look to a startup or smaller company for a solution, or postpone the project until the market gets better. Tech decision makers like to be heroes, so cater to that.  Give them a solution that makes sense to them in a down market. A down market is a GREAT time for an emerging company to secure a beachhead against established players.

So how do you cater to them in a down market?  I suppose there isn’t one correct answer - it will vary depending upon your business, but … here are some thought starters based on what we’re seeing.

Startups can be more agile and creative with pricing and infrastructure. You don’t have 25,000 mouths to feed.  Yet … You have a handful.  Be aggressive with pricing - don’t try to get your whole nut on your first deal or two.  Get creative. Options are limitless - per seat, per transaction, per CPU hour, etc.  Are those up-front professional services fees getting in the way of closing the deal?  Waive them, and incorporate them into a transaction fee where the customer can pay for them over time.

Make your solution solve a real problem. In this market, the checks are being written to solution providers who can truly offer an efficiency or savings (of either time or money, or hopefully both).  If you aren’t doing this, you probably won’t last in the enterprise space. Don’t make your internal champion go back and explain why his or her boss needs to write a check to you.  Instead, arm them so they go back and show how much time and money they’ll save by bringing you in AND how painless it will be to get started. Everyone wants an on-demand solution these days - the days of NIH are shrinking.

If your solution doesn’t really solve a problem - make it solve one.

Get the deal DONE (especially if it involves a reference customer). If you can do this, others will dial down their perceived risk of entrusting a critical function to a startup provider.  It could even be worth losing money on a deal like that if you know it will open other doors for you - plus it slows your burn or at least helps you get to breakeven.

Put it in the cloud. Hardware is now a commodity.  It is a lot easier and cheaper to build a cloud solution these days.  Blade server prices are down to incredibly advantageous levels.  And if you can’t or don’t want to do it yourself, check out Scalr.net, which has a fantastic interface around Amazon’s EC2 service.

Enterprise services are the “ultimate mashup”. If you are an enterprise services startup, and you can effectively add value somewhere in a chain of web services, you have a decent shot at surviving this “Great Correction” as I’m calling the current market - but you are going to have to get deals done outside of the box.

Would love to hear some other thoughts …

Cheers.

My StartupLounge.com partner in crime Mike Blake is gonna hate me for this, but I can’t help myself.

Besides sharing a deep-rooted passion for helping entrepreneurs, we also share a fanatical love of video games - good ones, bad ones, doesn’t matter.  Lately, we’ve been playing Madden NFL 2009 a few nights a week on our XBOX 360s.  Good stuff.  Gotta love Internet play.

I always play the Falcons, because, well, I’m a real fan.  I’ve been a Falcons fan since the pre-Bartkowski days when Auburn QB standout Pat Sullivan warmed up the bench behind Bob Lee and Kim McQuilken.  Blake tends to rotate his teams from night to night - but lately, he’s been fond of trotting out the Raiders.

Madden 09 has a great post-game feature that lets you take any play from the game and turn it into a highlight reel.  You can choose the camera angle and what not, and then publish to EASportsWorld.com for sharing. 

Lately we’ve been having some pretty competitive games - many of them coming down to the wire. Big surprise - the risk taking entrepreneur (me) is usually going for it on anything less than 4th and 5 outside of my own 20. The conservative finance guy (Mike) won’t hesitate to trot out the punter. He usually wins in the end, mostly because I can’t control my urge to roll the dice.

But the other night, I got my revenge.

Here is my inaugural video recording - a single back formation, halfback draw to Michael “The Burner” Turner, who breaks no less than 4 tackles and victimizes the Mike Blake-led Raiders defense on his way to a 63 yard TD run. Booyah!

Sorry, Mike - couldn’t resist

Cheers.

The day after I left PlayMotion, I decided that I was going to take a little time away and clear my head and figure out what my next “thing” was going to be.  About 2 days later, I was approached by a friend of mine (Michael McChesney) about taking over the operations of one of his companies. The short version is that my self-imposed sabbatical didn’t last terribly long.

I quietly took over the reigns at StarPound back in late May or so.  StarPound is playing in an incredibly compelling space - Enterprise 2.0 mashups, a topic that I plan on writing a bit about moving forward. The company has been in heavy R&D mode for the past four years, funded by investments from Michael, Tripp Rackley, and Noro-Moseley Partners.

So for the past four or five months, we’ve been busy cranking out code, getting traction from some early customers, refining the business model, and preparing for the launchpad. We’ve nearly completed the shift from R&D to market mode, and that’s always simultaneously draining and exhilarating.

We’ll be rolling out a new web site in the next few weeks which will get into a lot more specifics. But for now, think a cloud-based, open-source J2EE application server that drives voice/data/web services (via SOAP/REST/SIP/etc), with a visual business process modeling tool sitting on top of it. Think Visio, but with little boxes that actually “do something”.

We’ve also built a number of open-source add-on modules, including a free cloud-based PBX, and an entire suite of applications for contact centers.  Think telephony (Avaya) + BPM (Pega), but for free.

More soon …

Cheers.

Regarding Mike’s presentation at the upcoming TAG/ATDC Entrepreneur meeting - the correct date is March 6th, not the 5th!

Cheers.

Wow, what a rush. We had a great time the other night at our latest StartupLounge.com Capital Connections event.  It is absolutely amazing how the community has embraced this grassroots movement. We had 250-300 entrepreneurs and investors there at the peak of things. I’m still waiting to get the pics from the photographer, and as soon as I do, we’ll get a full recap posted.

Thanks to everyone who helps to make this a great event for early-stagers in the Southeast!

Cheers.