With a big pointer from Daniel Sims, I went to the SWAT Labs Facebook social app and created the graph below.
LinkedIn Social Graph
So my friend Russell Jurney, who is an analytics architect at LinkedIn, sent me my LinkedIn social graph. It's pretty cool.
According to Russell the colors represent clusters of well-connected people. Moving from lower left to upper right the clusters go something like this:
- Dark blue: Established Atlanta technology community
- Bondi blue: CipherTrust
- Green: Up and coming social/startup crowd
- Light orange: Kelley School of Business
- Baby blue: Indiana University
- Orange: EarthLink/MindSpring
It is interesting that there is no clear ATDC/Georgia Tech cluster.
The people between two of the various colors are the bridges between clusters. The up and coming startup gang is much more tightly networked with the established techies than one might expect. For the most part the MindSpring team is less connected and those closer to the other clusters seem to be more entrepreneurial.
If you double click you will get a full size image with all 800 or so of my LinkedIn connections named. The size of a person's circle reflects many people they are are connected to within my network. It's fun to play with. Would love to hear thoughts on your graph location as well as those you are connected with on LinkedIn.
Tech Marketing Awards
On November 18 I will be playing master of ceremonies to the first ever, and hopefully annual, Tech Marketing Awards.
I am quite sure that the highlight of the evening will not be anything that I have to say about the chief marketing technologist meme in my opening comments. Nor will it be the spectacular views of downtown Atlanta and the lights of Centennial Olympic Park from the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce Roof Top Pavilion. The really good stuff will happen when some of the best and brightest marketers in Atlanta get together with a fine list of finalists to mingle and discuss the latest in marketing technology (easily confused by the non initiated with the marketing of technology.)
This will be fun. More details and tickets here.
ATDC Gwinnett
In a somewhat historic event Bud Peterson president of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Michael Adams president of the University of Georgia came together on Monday to officially launch ATDC's new presence in Gwinnett County. ATDC, a Georgia Tech based technology business accelerator has established a presence on the University of Georgia's Gwinnett Campus.
Roll the tape.
Here is the official Georgia Tech announcement.
It is not clear if the two presidents discussed the future expansion of engineering education in Georgia.
Venture Atlanta Companies
In a few short minutes the companies that were selected for Venture Atlanta will be making their way to the stage for six minutes of fame. There are 20 companies on the agenda for the day but a few that are more interesting to me.
I have been advising and coaching Venture Atlanta participants BLiNQ Media, Preparis, ScoutMob, Toomah, Twitpay,and Wavee for quite some time now. Providing strategic advice on their business, helping them to determine the best funding strategy, reviewing and providing feedback on the presentations they are going to be giving. Some of them are going to do better than others. But a year from now I would venture to guess that five of these companies will close a round based in some part on what they do today.
Enjoy the show, it is going to be a good one.
October 13, 2010 | Comments | Tweet | Posted in Entrepreneurship, Presentations, Startups, Venture Capital
Baby You’re a Rich Man
Last night I ventured out with the BLiNQ Media team to see The Social Network. Good movie. Not sure where I read it but one critic called it the "Wall Street" for this time. I agree.
If you happen to hang out in the Internet, social media, or startup worlds you need to go see this movie. It shows the dedication, ruthlessness, and struggles it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. It worships the creative hacker class. It depicts the characteristics of a company when it raises F&F and seed rounds. It shows how ideas get morphed and co-founders get pushed out. It's just a darn good movie that is likely to inspire a new generation of entrepreneurs.
While only loosely based in fact it also changed my perception of Mark Zuckerberg. While I still find Facebook's privacy polices to be aggressive, after viewing The Social Network I have nothing but admiration for Zuck and Facebook.
The Social Network made me realize how quickly Mark Zuckerburg has matured. It made me realize that somewhere underneath all that brashness is a coachable young man who listens to people he trusts when he gets a little hot under the collar about such things as privacy. Perhaps it is a result of the movie itself but he recently showed up in public portraying a very non hoodie image to donate $100 million to the Newark public school system and put the shots on his public Facebook profile. A 26 year old guy with more than a billion who listens. He is going to be in the game for awhile.
So go see the movie. It has the perfect ending with the perfect closing credit song which inspired the title of this post. And after you do that go take a gander at The Harvard Crimson's A Look at Mark Zuckerberg Through the Years. A fascinating set of contemporaneous links. As Erica Albright, the girl whose rejection sent Zuck on a programming binge that resulted in Facemash said, "if you put it on the Internet, it never really goes away."
Stopping
A few weeks ago I wrote an article about GroupOn and how I had been tinkering around at the intersection of the mobile, flash marketing, location-based services, and social spaces. The day I published the article was the day that I stopped working on the concept. It's because the market experienced a Netscape moment. There are really two type of Netscape moments. I will explain.
One type was initiated by the Netscape IPO. I was being recruited to join MindSpring at the time and when it happened you just knew that it was going to change everything in a very positive way. Everybody was talking about Netscape and the Internet. Most the people who where talking about them had no idea what they were talking about. But the world was heading to a new place and they wanted to be part of it. This ignited the visions of many an entrepreneur and investor. A slew of companies, including MindSpring, followed Netscape down the IPO path. Not just the technology world but the world as a whole has never been the same.
The other type of Netscape moment is not so positive. It's the "holy shit the world's largest most powerful company is entering my market, what the hell am I going to do?" moment. Being a bit player in the browser wars I can tell you that when that happened to Netscape they decided to do nothing. They were arrogant and non responsive. They lost their IPO mojo and their market. Doing nothing is a bad choice when this type of Netscape moment happens (this happened to MindSpring when AT&T entered the market, we dropped our pricing 40% and significantly changed our business model).
The Netscape moment for the flash marketing space occurred on August 19. That was the day that GroupOn offered a national 50% off deal at Gap. They sold $11 million. Everybody noticed. It was apparent that there were going to be thousands of GroupOn clones. It was apparent that if a company already did not have some traction in the space or some serious resources to bear it might be a little late for a new market entry. It was apparent that any company with a sizable installed consumer base would be turning like a Tyrannosaurus Rex to get into the space. That happened yesterday. AOL is launching Wow!
When the GroupOn Gap deal happened my partner and I knew it was time to stop working on our concept. Despite the fact some of the things we were working on were unique to the market. It did not matter. So we stopped. Sometimes stopping is the smart choice. Exit is always an option.
Southern Seed Venture Capital
So I was talking to an Atlanta based venture capitalist type. Told me that they were putting together the paperwork to raise their next fund. Going to be twice the size. Good news. The even better news? It is going to include provisions for seed investments in the $250k – $500k range. Another Atlanta VC has been poking around for deals in this range as well. With IDEA, Novak Biddle, and Vahalla dipping down to fund the likes of SolidFire and StatSheet the VC seed funding trend is making it's way to the South.
Everyone knows Atlanta has a bit of a void in seed stage funding. It seems that venture capitalists are starting to move to fill that void. Everybody needs to know that as well.
Most Interesting Atlanta Startups
So over on Quora someone posed the question "what are the most interesting tech startups in Atlanta?" I responded with a top 20. It's a bit of a personal list. I figure that we can have a more interesting discussion here as opposed to there. So here's my list with a short blurb on each.
BLiNQ Media
Founder Dave Williams and three simple rules. No drama. No bullshit. Don't fuck up.
BrightWhistle
Successful entrepreneur and former VC Greg Foster tackling the lead gen space.
Clearleap
Most of the N2 team working on the future of TV with wins at all the major MSOs.
ClipZone
Successful mobile entrepreneurs attacking the intersection of deals and location based services.
Cloud Sherpas
Revenue traction in a big big space.
CRESecure
Unique hosted PCI solution.
Endgame Systems
A big hunk of the ISS tech team tackling an important and interesting problem.
MailChimp
Adding 4,000 new paying customer a month at a min of $15 each. Every WC VC wants a piece. The monkeys continue to focus on the bananas.
RentWiki
CEO Jamie Gallo has domain expertise and is building a solid business.
PlacePunch
The latest Shotput Ventures play creating a cross LBS check in loyalty application with early customer traction.
PlayOn
A media spin out of Turner focused on high school sports.
Preparis
Armistead Whitney is working deals to position the company for growth.
Regator
How can you not like the scrappy team Regator? They have a real business model in all that curated media. And they brought us Mashlanta.
ScoutMob
Dave and Michael have the WC feel going, good customer traction, and an interesting spin on social commerce.
Solidfire
Dave Wright is back in the saddle after a nice JungleDisk win.
SoloHealth
Ciba spinout is executing a smart funding strategy and creating a big retail presence.
Twitpay
Startup Weekend company with backing from Ashish Bahl.
Vertical Acuity
The big idea is to move content to people. Perhaps part of the answer for old media.
Vitrue
Founder Reggie Bradford has brought on board a number of the MindSpring team to scale this social media play.
Wavee
This young team from Emory may have cracked the code to efficient hyper-growth in the world of entertainment shopping.
In hindsight I would have put Cardlytics on the list. And had to chop off more than a few worthy companies to get to twenty.
Who did I miss? What are the most interesting tech startups in Atlanta?
Disclaimer: I know the founders of all of these companies. I work with a number of them on a regular basis. I participated in the initial formation of Twitpay.
So An Enterpreneur Walks Into An Office…
Me: Hey!
Entrepreneur: I need a print ad.
Me: When.
Entrepreneur: Tomorrow by noon.
Me: Dead silence.
Entrepreneur: So can you help me?
Me: Yeah.
So with the help of a few of the graduate assistants that I hang out with we popped this out in less then 24 hours.
Only the second ad I have ever directly created. Not going to win a CLIO but will do the job on short notice. Entrepreneurs walk into my office everyday. I help however I can.