Last week Shotput Ventures announced they had decided to "blow up" their summer program and turn it into more of an ongoing application process.  This week David Cummings provided a little more insight into the why of the change. 

Both Sanjay Parekh and David cited an underlying cause for the change that did not surprise me.  There is a small supply of investable seed stages companies and little demand for a capital light web accelerator program in the southeast.  When Shotput, and its never funded predecessor BoostPhase, where in their formative stages I estimated the supply of investable companies in the southeast to be four.  Shotput invested in eight in 2009, three from the southeast (and intend to do three to five deals annually going forward). 

The five from the 2009 class not from Atlanta left when the summer program was over.  The saddening fact is they saw no follow on funding.  Not enough VCs and angel investors interested in the deals.  To the best of my knowledge, two four Shotput companies (Eventhive, Khush, Looxii, and OpenHatch) received follow on funding.  Solve that problem, like the TechStars results show, by getting investors from around the country at investor day, and the class structure could work.