Over One Billion Dollars Served

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Since 1999 ATDC companies have raised over $1 billion in venture capital. Last year alone ATDC companies raised $150 million including the two largest and 10 of the top 25 venture deals in the state. Not shabby.

In recognition of all this we are theming the annual ATDC Entrepreneur Showcase the “One Billion Dollar Celebration”. It is taking place on May 10. You can register here. We are expecting about 400 people.

It should be a potent mix of entrepreneurs, investors, and technology business leaders.

April 18, 2007  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in atdc

Al Gore: Convenient Certainty

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This afternoon Al Gore is taking the stage to present “Thinking Green: Economic Strategies for the 21st Century.” Part of the excellent IMPACT series put on by the Georgia Tech College of Management and the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship, I was not fortunate enough to get a ticket.

But, as my associates have voted that Al would be the most likely person to play me in “ATDC: The Movie” based on a picture taken while he was inventing the Internet, I am uniquely qualified to comment on Al’s speech. And while Al has not exactly been taking his own advice, his stance sure has gained some popularity.

A guy that seems to be losing a little popularity these days is Michael Crichton. He wrote Jurrasic Park. He also wrote State of Fear. Even though the latter book was a number one best seller, I don’t think they will be making a blockbuster movie based on it anytime soon. You see State of Fear is an anti-global warming techno-thriller that is loaded with graphs and footnotes as well as two appendices and a twenty page bibliography. It seems pretty well researched.

While I certainly think each of us should do as much as possible to reduce our impact on the environment and there is a need to address the energy issue in the world, I do think that Crichton is correct on some key conclusions in the author’s message portion of the book.

• We are in a global warming trend that began a long time ago and nobody knows how much of this trend is caused by man and how much is natural.

• There are many reasons to shift away from fossil fuels, and we will without legislation. No one banned horse transport.

• People are well intentioned.

• There is too much certainty in the world.

• Everybody has an agenda.

• Politicized science is dangerous.

The last point is extremely important. Science and politics is a bad combo. So if you have taken the time to see An Inconvenient Truth, take the time to read State of Fear to get a little balance.

You can also listen to the March 14 IQ2 debate on NPR.

You can also see Al’s 2006 Ted presentation.

  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Science

The Y Combinator Model

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I started a bit of chatter that led to a bit more in these parts for the need for a Y Combinator in Atlanta.  It dawned on me that lots of the FoG faithful may have no idea what this means.  On their web site it explains that Y Combinator
“is a new kind of venture firm specializing in funding early stage
startups. We help startups through what is for many the hardest step, from idea
to company.”

So what exactly does Y Combinator do?

1.  Focuses on Web apps:  Y Combinator focuses on software and Web
services.  Most of the companies that I have heard coming out of there are
Web apps.  Regardless they  focus.

2.  Has an application process:  Y Combinator has two application
processes.  One in the spring for a Boston summer session and one in the fall for a winter bay area session.  The app
is a straightforward web form. They do not ask for business plans.  The
most promising applicants are asked to travel to one of the above places to
make a presentation.  $500/person in travel expenses is reimbursed.  The
app process is about three weeks long.

3.  Requires relocation:  Astute readers will gather from the
above that the program requires relocation.

4.  Seed investments:  Y Combinator typically invests $5,000 plus
$5,000 for each founder.  A startup of 2 would get $15,000.  This is
an equity investment of between 1% and 10% of the company.  Typical is
6%.  If I am doing my VC math right that is $235,000 pre.  Not bad
for an idea.

5.  Offers no space.  Y Combinator is not an incubator and claims
that the startup can do anything it wants with the money it receives.
However, Y Combinator does strongly encourage companies to work out of wherever
they find to live.  It seems that lots of them end up renting in the same
place so they have what Paul Graham refers to as an exobator.

6.  Short programming.  The Y Combinator program lasts about 10
weeks.  There are weekly dinners on Tuesdays and open houses at Y
Combinator on Wednesdays for entrepreneurs that want to show off their stuff or
talk strategy.

7.  Product orientation.  Y Combinator wants their companies to
create a demo of their product.  The demo focuses on a problem the company
is trying to solve and shows how the product solves it.

8.  Not business plans.  Y Combinator does not care too much about
the business plan.  In the app process or while in the program.  They
rightly think that it is too early to have a solid business plan that is not
going to change.

9.  An investor day.  The program ends on Angel Day when Y
Combinator invites all the angel investors it knows to come in and see the demo
presentation.  I hear tell that Paul Graham knows lots of angels.

10.  Success.  At his talk at Startup School, Paul said Y Combinator had invested in 8 startups and 4 succeeded. Batting 50% thus far for early stage ain’t bad.  They expect this figure
to settle in the 25% range.

So there you have it.  So the question then becomes would it be possible to replicate this activity in Atlanta? That is the subject of a bit of research and a future post.

April 17, 2007  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Accelerators, Entrepreneurship, Internet, Venture Capital

Capital Connections

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The Startup Lounge gang is putting together an event on May 16 called Capital Connections that promises to be a bridge for entrepreneurs, angel investors, and early-stage venture capitalists looking for deals in Georgia.

I hope to grab one of the qualified “observer” slots.

If you have a hot concept or are poking around for the next big thing to invest in, be there or be square.

April 16, 2007  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Entrepreneurship

Keep Moving Forward

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I just got back from taking Jack to see “Meet the Robinsons”. Nice little movie that picks up some steam in the end. Watching this movie with your seven year old is almost enough to make a dad get a little emotional.

The mantra of the hero in the movie is “keep moving forward.”

At the very end the closing screen contains the following quote:

“Around here, however, we don’t look backwards for very long. We keep moving forward, opening up new doors and doing new things… and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths”. – Walt Disney

The closing screen led to a nice little life lession for Jack. One I think he will remember for awhile.

April 15, 2007  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Quotes

How Bad Is Yahoo! Alerts?

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This bad:

From: y-alerts@reply.yahoo.com
Date: April 13, 2007 1:04:27 PM EDT
To: my email address
Apple delays launch of operating system

Notice the time date stamp. Apple issued the press release announcing this at 4:30 PM EDT yesterday. It showed up via RSS very, very shortly thereafter. Yahoo! Alerts has over a 20 hour lag time. How alerty is that?

Not very. And it is the reason that I have been trying to cancel them. I have a little problem though. According to the Web interface I do not have any alerts.

Yahoo_alerts_4

Well I obviously do because they keep showing up every day. I have been going back and forth with Yahoo! customer support about this for about a month now. After blaming it on 1) me, 2) timing, 3) my browser, and 4) my Internet connection this was their final resolution:

From: alerts-feedback@cc.yahoo-inc.com
Subject: Re: Feedback – How to turn off my Alerts (KMM92622784V50476L0KM)
Date: April 8, 2007 12:41:35 PM EDT
To: my email address
Reply-To: alerts-feedback@cc.yahoo-inc.com

Hello,

Thank you for writing to Yahoo! Alerts.

We sincerely apologize for this issue you are having with Yahoo! Alerts.
At this time we would like to reassure you that we are doing everything
in our power to resolve the issue as quickly as possible. Although we
can not offer you an estimate as to when this problem will be fixed,
please be assured that we are aware that the problem exists and our
engineers are further investigating the issue. Unfortunately, we cannot
offer any further information regarding the problem

We appreciate your reporting it to us — your input helps us to identify
ways to constantly maintain and improve our service. We are always
striving to keep Yahoo! Alerts the best alert notification service on
the planet!

Thank you again for contacting Yahoo! Alerts.

Regards,

Jordan

Yahoo! Alerts Customer Care

So they know there is a problem, are basically telling me thanks for telling us about the problem, but that is all we can tell you. Yuck!

April 13, 2007  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Customer Focus, Internet

21 Business Days

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That is how long it took for me to receive a snail mail piece from The Wall Street Journal offering a subscrption for $99 after they refused to offer me anything lower the $270 as a current subscriber. And on top of that they are throwing in a year of the online edition for free!

They are willing to do this to get me to come back but not to keep me. Somewhere in here are some bad marketing metrics.

  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Marketing

Web 3.0 Part Two

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Previously I wrote about the need for Web app integration as one of the big, but hard to solve, opportunities of the next generation Internet. Another area closely related to this is one of online identity management.

My initial interest related to this area was based on the concept of user fatigue at social networking and other online areas. I have to put up the same information every time I want to join another community/application and it simply gets quite tiresome to have to do it over and over again. I have all those profiles and files all over the web that represent who I am. Where we were taking the Alele concept was to have a single interface that aggregates all of this stuff and enables one to manage it in one place.

Regardless, I became more keen with the opportunities with identity management after meeting Addy Lee at the GVU Spring Research Showcase. Addy did some interesting work on the “Analysis of Dating Behavior on Social Networking Sites,” that got us to talking. Addy is a smart young lady that is graduating in May and has accepted a job with Yahoo! She introduced me to the concept of identity leakage, the work of Fred Stutzman with ClaimID, and Susan Gov and her work on identity management in online communities.

My takeaway on all of this academic interaction is that something is changing in the way people engage with the Internet. There sure is a lot of twittering going on and a big reason why is some change in our psyche. To quote Fred, “we share our ideas in public via blogs or social networks, and the Internet is essentially a fully semantic read/write interconnected web of our thoughts.” When you combine this with Google becoming a reputation management system I think there is great opportunity in understanding this cultural shift and creating applications that enable users to effectively manage their online identities in such an environment. While ClaimID is interesting and I want to fully understand Fred’s thoughts behind it, it is not the complete answer. It is the beginning of the answer.

The complete answer is a vibrant application that know who you are, what you want to expose, where you want to expose it, and who you want to expose it too.

April 12, 2007  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Internet, Web/Tech

Technorati Support

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Part of the auto-reply from a Technorati support submission:

Dear Technorati User,

Thank you so much for taking the time to drop us a line. If you are reporting a problem you may be having you will be contacted by a support technician once we have had a chance to review your message.

If you don’t hear back from anyone within a week, please accept our apologies for the delay as we may be experiencing a backlog in Support. Please feel free to send us a reminder of your ticket.

Nice. Violates four of the deadly sins of providing good consumer Internet services.

Here’s a little advice for the yet to be named new Technorati CEO. Once you decide what you want to focus on as a business, focus on the customer. Or maybe, just maybe, it should be the other way around.

April 11, 2007  |  Comments  |  Tweet  |  Posted in Customer Focus, Internet