Earlier this week Flashpoint, Georgia Tech's new startup accelerator, held it first ever demo day. While really a bit more of a pitch day, I only saw one demo, the teams did a great job. Locally David Cummings has a nice summary of the companies that pitched and TechCrunch even covered the event.

While in many respects it is to soon to tell, the capstone of the program begs the question "is Flashpoint a success?" The early answer is yes.

This answer is based on my involvement in the formative stages of Flashpoint back in the second quarter of 2011. Call me a bit player but I was a member of Flashpoint's formative team. I was there when we hashed out the concept of "startup engineering", an idea of Merrick Furst's that I thought was brilliant when he first pitched it. I there when we defined winning (we actually used the word) as creating two or more fundable companies after four months. It is a real metric. So how is Flashpoint doing against it?

Flashpoint is winning. Pindrop Security recently received an investment from Sand Hill road based Andreessen Horowitz (a little cherry picking perhaps from Flashpoint's valley demo day event host). And word is, while a bit odd to be jumping from accelerator to accelerator, that two Flashpoint companies will be joining the next Y Combinator class where they are assured to get $150k in funding from Yuri Milner's and Ron Conway's Start Fund.  Add in Social Fortress' executed term sheet to raise $2 million (they still have to fill out the round and that is often quite difficult), and you have between three or four companies that have become fundable. In terms of the goals of Flashpoint, that is winning.

And it is still early. The Flashpoint companies have come a long way in four months. It is going to be most interesting to see how they are received next week when they enter the land of Fred Wilson for demo day at Union Square Ventures in NYC and they week after at Andreessen Horowitz in Menlo Park.