This fall ATDC, along with our friends at TAG, will once again is put on the wildly successful CapVenture that is designed to educate and equip early stage technology companies to go
out and get their first institutional round of funding. Actually, it is not just designed to do so, it has been highly effective in getting participants meetings with investors and actual funding.
Quote of the Week
"No one is going to run a mission critical application on Windows. It has a tendency to crash."
ATM Direct Cashes In
ATM Direct, led by Nandan Sheth, the co-founder and COO of Harbor Payments, is the winner of the 2008 GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition. ATM Direct seeks to become the leading alternative payments provider
with a platform technology that enables PIN debit payments on the
Internet.
$100,000 in cash. $200,000 in services. Cha-Ching!
ATM was selected by a group of judges that included Adam Coyle of Advent Group, Tom Crotty of Battery Ventures, Cynthia Glassman of the U.S. Department of Commerce , Mark Johnson, formerly of CheckFree, Chris Klaus of Kaneva, Ann Lamont of Oaks Investment Partners, and Fred Sturgis of H.I.G. Why did this stellar team chose ATM? The company has great management with a unique solution that is addressing a large and growing market. They present well. What more do you want?
This was a great year for the competition. Seventy five companies, the most ever, initially applied. Thirty one mentors helped the companies refine their businesses and presentations. Forty five companies completed the second stage of the competition. And ATDC played a larger role then ever. Leading a kickoff luncheon, evaluating the initial applicants as well as the full business plans and recommending the semifinalists.
Most importantly I am proud of the fact that I, (along with my partners in crime Scott Burkett, Nelson Chu, Alan Graber, Melanie Leeth, Sig Mosley, and the whole ATDC gang) helped to move these companies along and make them stronger startups. How did we do this? With pitch coaching for the semifinalists and finalists. With one on one coaching with companies that requested it. By providing feedback to companies when they missed a cut.
How do I know we helped them? Because they told me and GRA the value they were getting. It took a lot of time and effort to support this effort from the time it launched in January. It was time well spent.
Congratulations to Sid Elliot of GRA and Tino Mantella of TAG for putting together the best competition yet. It is a great program. One that deserves continued support from GRA and from the community at large.
And congratulations to ATM Direct and all the companies that utilized the competition to make their startups stronger.
Open Source Cluster
Atlanta has long been known as a center for the InfoSec industry. It seems that ISS alum with the quiet support of Tom Noonan spawned a nice little cluster of well over 30 startups.
Well leave it to a guy from North Carolina to point out that another such cluster is raising in Atlanta. An open source cluster led by JBoss alum. With the support of Marc Fluery. Who does nothing quietly.
In an article explaining why Marc is his hero, Mark Hinkle lays out the following:
I think one of the biggest contributions Marc made to open source was
that he infected a bunch of guys with the bug to go make it on their
own. Many of them walked away with more than a little pocket cash and
they started their own open source companies. Here’s a list of JBoss
alumns and what they are up to now.
Appcelerator – Rich Internet Applications
JBoss alumni: Jeff Haynie, Ben Sabrin, Matt QuinlinLoopFuse – Marketing and Sales Automation
JBoss Alumni – Roy Russo, Tom ElrodRingSide Networks – Social Networking Server
Jboss Alumni – Bob Bickel, Rich Friedman, Mark Lugert, Shaun Connolly
All of these companies made Mark’s list of future open source superstars. The beginnings of I nice OSS cluster in Atlanta.
And finally I have news for you. The real reason Marc F is not Mark Hinkle’s hero… I AM! : )
Social Net Lent Experiment
Golly I have been busy.
Lent ended on March 23rd and along with it my experiment in giving up social networks. Unlike 2007 when I gave up Google and Yahoo! for Lent and quickly returned to them, I have yet to really engage again with LinkedIn and Facebook. I deleted my MySpace account. I cheated with the social networking aspects of Twitter long before Lent was over.
I don’t miss LinkedIn or Facebook at all. At the moment I have 119 messages in my LinkedIn account and 49 messages in my Facebook box and 2 requests. I try to keep up with requests for joining the groups I created on Facebook but other than that interact little with either site. I did try to use LinkedIn to find a network engineer to create a network architecture for Piedmont Park (more on that later) and found their new layout a bit confusing.
When I did the blog redesign I removed my LinkedIn profile. Search works just fine for finding me and getting connected. Interested to know if you find yourself using broad based social nets more or less these days.
Quote of the Week
“We spend $6 billion a year on infrastructure for telephone networks. I think we need to move that to subsidized broadband.”
What Does Your Company Do?
I spent a good chunk of yesterday afternoon in a fun session with Scott Burkett, Melanie Leeth, and Ashish Mistry prepping the finalists in the GRA/TAG Business Launch Competition for their presentations next Wednesday. All good presentations from companies with potential. But several of them took well over four minutes to getting around to stating what their company does.
Guy Kawasaki has a pretty darn funny post over on the Sun small business blog on how to pick up a VC that addresses this issue. His primary point, explain what you do upfront. That is pretty much what we told the presenters and would say to any aspiring entrepreneur. You want VC to think about how they are going to make boatloads of money off of your concept. Tell them the concept and they can dream the rest.
Trust me, that happened a few times yesterday too.
FoG Redesign
I went offline for six days and returned to a brand new look to FoG. The work was done by Blake Perdue.
Blake read that I was looking to change a few things. He works with me at ATDC when he is not working on his MBA at Georgia Tech. He took it upon himself to come up with 14 different designs before presenting me with three. Made a few minor changes to the one I liked best. My major goals were to make the overall design a bit cleaner with better use of above the fold space. Mission accomplished.
I have enough confidence in Blake’s skills that we agreed to deploy via SMS while I was on the beach. Great work Blake!
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
Contact
The best way to contact me is via email at lance at weatherby dot net. Please be brief, direct, honest, and open and I’ll respond as quick as I can.
You can find me online at the following social networks.
I prefer not to use social network messaging systems to communicate. I do not respond to friend/network requests from individuals that I do not know unless a specific and compelling reason for making a connection is given.