Knox Massey was kind enough to invite me down to last night’s meeting of the Atlanta Technology Angels. While I know many of the members individually, this was the first time I had actually attended one of their monthly meetings.

In keeping with the confidential setting of the meeting, I don’t want to reveal anything about the actual companies, but I can make some generalizations.

The format was very interesting. They had two companies do their pitch. One company was an ATDC company, the other was commercialized technology coming out of Georgia Tech. There were a few questions asked of each entrepreneur. Afterwards, the entrepreneurs left the room and the 20-25 angels in the room had an open discussion about what they thought of the deal. There were some really interesting exchanges of information, and I really like the format they used.

The diversity of backgrounds in the room made it so that there were “logical subject matter experts” on hand. The rest of the group relied on these individuals to give legitimacy to (or shoot holes in) the deal. Very nice.

For those interested, they were discussing 500K-$1M deals. After the discussion, someone was appointed to lead a “due diligence group,” I would assume to go off and meet with the company, and put together a more formal assessment of the company, market, technology, team, etc.

I also learned that Knox will soon be joining the blogosphere. I think this is a very welcome addition to the landscape here. I wish we could get more of the Atlanta venture folks blogging and exchanging ideas.

Afterwards, I had a great chat over dinner with Jeff Haynie. Bright guy – I wish I had met him years ago, but certainly glad we’re connected now. I love people that are brimming with ideas. It’s great to feed off that energy.

Cheers.

Sorry this post is a day late – I’ve been deluged with emails and other stuff.  We just published a nice wrapup and photo gallery of the recent Capital Connections event.

Enjoy!

If you weren’t able to attend, we hope you can make the next one. We certainly had a blast putting it together, and even more fun sharing ideas and connections.
Cheers.

Well, the big day is tomorrow (or technically today, since it’s after midnight.) The first ever StartupLounge.com Capital Connections event will be in full swing tomorrow night.

We sent out 30 emails to our friends, and quite honestly, we thought we’d have 30 or 40 fast-growth entrepreneurs and a handful of angels hanging out in a bar somewhere. Now we’re pushing 200 people. There are over 35 investors slated to attend, ranging from individual angels to a $1B fund and everything in between. We moved the venue due to demand, then filled up the second venue. We finally stopped accepting applications – we had no choice. This thing has morphed into something that far exceeds our wildest expectations. Our next event (in the fall) could very easily have 300 people in attendance.

Am I nervous? I suppose a little. I’m no event planner, that’s for damn sure. But I’m of the belief that if you put ideas and capital in the same room, lock the door, and let nature take its course, only good things can come out of that. Of course, the hors d’oeuvres and fully stocked bar will help … Hopefully it won’t be a complete goat rodeo.

Today we made 200 phone calls. We called every single person that had RSVP’d in order to make sure they received the email on the change of venue (we wanted to make absolutely certain that everyone was aware of it.) The comments we received during those calls were amazing. People are not only excited about the event, but they are very gracious for it, and that makes us feel very good indeed. And I’m not just talking about the lowly entrepreneur here – the investor comments ran along the same lines (especially so among the angel community.)

There is some serious pent-up demand out there.

I want to serve up some props.

The “Atlanta venture community” (an oxymoron to many here, including some local investors) really responded to this event. Most of the local players will be there (Noro-Moseley, Imlay/Sig Mosley, Kinetic, EGL, Croft-Bender, Atlanta Technology Angels, Smith-Hoffman Capital, the UPS Strategic Venture Fund, VentureLab, etc.) and I’m very pleased about that. I don’t expect them to start dramatically swinging back to the early stage come Thursday morning, but the pulse is there. I give them props for realizing that there is a new movement happening around them. They know they need to become more immersed in the community, and I hope our quarterly event can be a catalyst to help with that moving forward.

I also have to give mad props to North Carolina. First off, they are totally kicking Georgia’s ass in venture investments. Second, at one point there were more NC funds slated to attend our event than GA funds (although it is more balanced now.) There are some lean, mean, hungry funds coming out of NC, folks.

I should also thank the many folks that pitched in to help pull this event together.

• Mike Blake
• Stacy Williams
• Jeff Haynie
• Jerry Recht
• Sam Bailey
• David Ratajczak
• Sanjay Parekh
• Paul Freet
• Lance Weatherby

Some gave cash, some their time, and some just helped to spread the word, but everyone is chasing the same dream here, and that is to bring Atlanta back. We’re going to do it, hell or high water.

See everyone tonight!

Cheers.

The big date approaches for our first Capital Connections event here in Atlanta. The response has been so tremendous that we’ve had to change the venue – we went WAY over the capacity of our original venue. We currently have over 150 entrepreneurs and investors that will be in attendance. Given that we’ve gone to some pretty good lengths to keep the service provider crowd out, that number sounds even bigger. My guess is that we’ll hit 200 before the actual event, which would be awesome!

Over the past two months, I have evangelized this event to hundreds of people. I’ve worked the phones, email, the blogosphere, message boards, and even went door-to-door in some cases. It is pretty easy to see why people get excited about the event – I mean – what’s not to like?

But I keep getting asked this one little annoying question.

How are you getting paid?

Perhaps people ask me that question because they assume that because I’m an entrepreneur, we must be monetizing this effort in some way. However, I don’t think so. I think this question is symptomatic of one of the things that I dislike about the culture here in Atlanta. Before you chastize me, I was born and raised here – so yes, I have a license to vent – I’m not a carpetbagger.

As I’ve blogged about before (and talked about on the StartupLounge.com podcast), one of the things that is wrong with this community is that everyone is walking around with their hand out looking to get paid. It seems to bug people to no end that we aren’t charging a door fee, charging for people to pitch their deal, or instituting some sort of membership fee. I’ve even been told that we should “scale this out nationwide and charge for it.” Blah.

We are trying to tear down the artificial walls in the early-stage community here, not add new ones.

We will get paid in the end the same way every attendee will: a rising tide lifts all boats. By creating a more vibrant early-stage community here in Atlanta, there will be more fun things to invest in, more great people to meet, more jobs created, and more problems to solve. And that, my friends, is what it is all about.

This event is not the answer to everything that ills us in Atlanta – but it does represent a start. It is an artificial process that will hopefully jumpstart a few deals (especially since we’re doing it every quarter.) The real startup ecosystem or process will evolve on its own – it cannot be artificially created. But hopefully, this event can be a catalyst to help ignite the fire.

Cheers.

Atlanta is a tough market for early-stage companies, and I (along with many others) spend a great deal of time trying to figure out ways to make it better. No doubt. But one of the things that we don’t do enough of is tout our successes - I am guilty of that as well.

On Thursday, May 10th, the ATDC will be holding their yearly showcase event. They’ll be graduating a handful of companies and there will be some good networking and product demos all around. From what I understand, there are nearly 300 people signed up to go, so it should be a pretty big affair.
The graduating companies this year are Cambia, Jacket Micro Devices, FTrans, Qcept, Racemi, and ScanTech.

For more info on the event, click here.

Sidenote: Some of these companies will be at our Capital Connections event coming up in two weeks, so if you are an investor or entrepreneur, and want to get closer to them, check it out.

Graduation from the ATDC effectively means that the company is finally sustainable (or they have overstayed their welcome of 3 years – whichever comes first, I believe.) In either case, these companies have all worked very hard to reach this point, and I encourage all of you to head down and congratulate them on this achievement (and to learn more about some of the newer companies.)

I do want to make a few observations, however.

The ATDC is calling this year’s event the Billion Dollar Celebration. According to their promotional material:

Join us to celebrate the Billion Dollars that ATDC companies have raised since 1999!

This number is a little bit misleading though, IMHO.

In my view, they shouldn’t count the 1999-2000 timeframe in the calculation at all. That was the height of the dot com bubble (and some could make an argument that 2001 shouldn’t be counted either, but …). That timeframe easily represents half (if not more) of the billion dollars, and lets be honest, since the vast majority of those companies imploded (or were acquired at ridiculous valuations, and then imploded), I don’t think we should go there.

I believe that the $1B figure also includes acquisitions, exits, and IPOs – essentially, any capital activity that occured against an ATDC company. Unless the activity occured while the company was physically in the ATDC, I don’t think it should count either. Anything that happened to a company after it leaves a business incubator is largely a reflection of their leadership, not who incubated them. Caveat: It may not actually be counted – I’ve no idea, as I haven’t seen the detailed numbers behind the actual calculation. Subtract all that out from the $1B and divide by the five or six remaining years and a slightly different story might emerge. Not a bad story, mind you, just one grounded in a little more reality.

However, I want to offer a slightly different perspective on things. The mission of the ATDC is to incubate companies that will provide economic/job growth for the state of Georgia (as opposed to wealth creation for individual entrepreneurs or investors.) To me, a better metric would be telling us how many jobs have been created (and are currently active) that stemmed from ATDC companies. I would venture to say that there aren’t many jobs still around from the dot com flameout. So how many companies graduated post-2001 from the ATDC and went on to (and continue to) have a substantial impact on the high-tech job market in Georgia?

The answer is: it is too early to tell. Food for thought.

So lets not get hung up on the $1B number. Instead, focus the celebration on the graduating companies and their hard work, along with the new class of ATDC entrants.

In any event, I do like where the ATDC is going. They are beginning to expand their operations and reach, and I like what Lance Weatherby is doing in putting a more transparent face on things there (via his blogging and open outreach to entrepreneurs.) If anything, I’d like to see them get even more funding from the state, so that they can have more of an impact in other parts of Atlanta and Georgia.

Cheers.

The purpose of this post is two-fold. One, to provide an update on the upcoming StartupLounge.com Capital Connections event, and two, to provide some quick tips for entrepreneurs to get the most out of the event.

Currently, we have over 60 companies and over 20 investors signed up to attend. We’ll probably hit around 80 to 90 companies and 30 investors before all is said and done (space is limited for this first event – it is already getting close to standing room only). What is also equally as impressive (to me at least) is the sheer diversity of ventures that will be in attendance. There are companies from at least a dozen different industry sectors, including information technology, IT security, social media, new media, outdoor media, cleantech, biotech, nanotech, pharma, and even athletic apparel!

We’re going to be doing our first ever podcast from a live event as well, so have your pitch ready!

So if you are an early-stage entrepreneur that doesn’t have much experience with investor networking, Mike and I would like to serve up a few tips that will hopefully help you get the most out of the experience. Feel free to add your own as a comment!

1. Bring demos/laptops! If you have a demo of your product that can be shown on a laptop – bring it! We’ll have a few tables on hand. If you get into a hot discussion with a potential investor, hop to the back of the room and fire up your laptop. Show and tell, baby!
2. Perfect a concise pitch! You want your pitch to deliver value in one or two sentences. I like the old format of: “We are Company Name, and we solve this problem, for these customers, by doing X.” Example: Acme Corporation is a maker of “magic paint” for homeowners who are tired of having to paint their house every few years.
3. Don’t hog an investor’s time! Toss out your pitch, listen to their questions, and answer them equally as concisely. Nothing turns an investor off more than an entrepreneur who drones on and on about how great they are. I’m guilty of this, too – most entrepreneurs are! So you have to check yourself. Get their card, thank them for their time, and let them know you’ll be in touch with your business plan, etc. Then free up their time for someone else (and your time to move on to another potential investor.)
4. Likewise, don’t let an investor hog your time! Do you really want to talk to the same investor for two hours? Probably not. Raising capital is a numbers game, so hit and run!
5. Ask investors what they are investing in (a novel idea, I know.) Seriously, it helps to set expectations. If you are a technology company and the investor in question is only looking for a nanotech deal, probably not worth camping out there (for either of you.)
6. If an investor doesn’t invest specifically in the kind of opportunity that you have, ask for a referral to someone he or she may know that actually might be interested – networking 101!
7. Don’t overlook the the value of making connections with your fellow entrepreneurs – they are gatekeepers to capital, customers, and other resources, and are often investors themselves!
8. Dress in a manner that will make an investor comfortable in giving you lots of money. Should you wear a suit? Up to you … but definitely don’t go any lower than business casual.
9. Help others! If you meet an investor that can’t help you, but may be able to help a friend of yours, walk the twelve feet and make the introduction.
10. There will be a handful of observers in the room. You’ll be able to identify them by their red name tags. They aren’t necessarily entrepreneurs or investors, but are industry luminaries, community figures, media members, and special invited guests. Do yourself a favor and take a moment to introduce yourself to them. You’ll thank us for it later.

This first event will be held on Wednesday, May 16th, from 6-8pm, so mark your calendars. You can read more about the event here.

Cheers.

Walls are great for privacy. But they impede progress unless there are doors in the walls that allow you to move freely from one room to the next. And if you can’t build doors, then tear down the walls. It’s far easier than measuring and fitting new doors for every room in the house.

Yes, I think all of these apply to Atlanta. But not Atlanta alone.

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