Notes from Jeff Haynie’s Talk at the Village

Jeff Haynie gave a passionate talk today at the Atlanta Tech Village about lessons learned growing his 170+ person company Appcelerator. Over the past six years, Jeff has raised over $75 million dollars, fought off a near-shutdown of his startup, and built one of the fastest growing mobile app development platforms in the world.

Here are a few notes from the talk:

• Investment capital is portable, so it doesn’t matter where the entrepreneur is located
• Entrepreneurs should raise as much money possible from anyone available and not worry about control
• Future growth in technology will come from wearable computing and mobile devices (Dell went private so that they could kill their PC business faster and reinvent themselves)
• Shift away from Nokia and Blackberry as the dominant platforms to Apple and Android were faster and more dramatic than people expected, making Appcelerator’s timing even better
• Almost went out a business when Apple changed their terms of service disallowing programs like Appcelerator to produce iOS apps, but two months later Apple reversed the change

A big thanks to Jeff for spending time with us today and sharing some of his lessons learned.

What else? What are some other takeaways from today’s talk with Jeff?