Category: Community

Everyone has ideas to improve the local startup community, myself included. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how many meetups there are, conferences, or co-working spaces. To the outside world, for better or worse, a startup community is defined by how much money is raised on an annual basis and the the dollar amounts of exits on an annual basis. Of course, the idea is that more activities, resources, and interactions will lead to more raising money and more exits.

Here are a few reasons why startup communities are defined by money raised and successful exits:

• Raising a $5M Series A or selling for $50M generates publicity, and publicity always affects perceptions (it’s too bad there isn’t more coverage of bootstrapped companies that clear $5M in revenue, but I don’t expect that to change)
• Organizations like PricewaterhouseCoopers publish the Money Tree Report regularly, making it easy to for regions to compare themselves to other regions, based on amount of venture investments, increasing awareness of money raised, and thus desire for the level of investment to increase
• Angel investors and venture capitalists pay significant attention to exits, resulting in startup communities with more exits to receive more interest and money from investors

Startup community evangelists, of which I’m one, need to remember that to the outside world, the quality of the community is defined simply by money. Money raised and the dollar value of exits drives national reputation.

What else? What are your thoughts on startup communities being defined by money raised and successful exits?

Recently I was talking with an entrepreneur that had toured a few of the big co-working spaces, including General Assembly, last month. It was great to hear about the energy and excitement in the air throughout the buildings. Behind the scenes, there was one conundrum that was tough to solve: a handful of startup were consistently slacking and not making any progress. This doesn’t seem like that big of a deal until you know that there’s a waiting list to get into the space. Ideally, all the startups in the facility would be making great progress and moving their ideas forward in a meaningful way.

Here are some ideas on the co-working conundrum for startups slacking and not making any progress:

• Have a finite period of time, say 12 months, that a startup can be there before they have to reapply or get on the waiting list
• Have a peer review system whereby once a month all the startups in the facility anonymously rank all the other startups there and the bottom 5% are asked to leave in 90 days
• Include a community interaction component where startups have to be involved in the community (e.g. attend at least one event per quarter) to continue using the facility
• Have a pricing plan such that prices for a startup increase automatically over time, making it an up or out proposition

One of the big values of a co-working space is being around like-minded peers pushing their startup forward. Inevitably, some aren’t as productive as others and start hanging out more and making little progress. Finding a good solution to this conundrum is a challenge for co-working facilities.

What else? What are some other ideas to address the co-working conundrum for startups slacking?

Most startups fail — it’s inevitable. What isn’t inevitable is that the talented people that learned lessons during the failure go back to normal, non startup jobs. In fact, people usually learn more from their failures than from their successes, and post failure is a great time to join another startup so that the lessons learned can be shared.

Startup communities need to embrace and help facilitate the recycling of talent.

Here are some ideas around recycling talent in a startup community:

• Creating an environment where many startups work in the same physical area, and thus have great startup density, naturally increases the recycling of talent
• Failing at a startup should be seen as part of the process, and a good time to recycle talent into other startups that are working
• Reducing the fear of startups poaching from other startups, knowing that talent should work on the best opportunity available, is an important philosophy for the community

Talent is the most scarce resource anywhere and needs to be recycled in the startup community to increase the odds of success.

What else? What are your thoughts on recycling talent in a startup community?

Tonight I was at a local awards ceremony for the top entrepreneurs in Atlanta. After an entrepreneur is nominated, they have to answer a number of questions and get their financials certified by a third-party accounting firm. Several of the questions are generic company stuff and several of the questions are around the entrepreneur’s specific philosophy and approach to business. At the awards ceremony, as part of introducing each winner, the announcer read some choice responses from the questionnaire.

Overwhelmingly, the entrepreneurs espoused the benefits of focusing on people. In real estate, the motto is location, location, location. For startups, the motto should be people, people, people. People are what drive everything about a business. People interface with customers. People build products. People sell goods and services.

The next time you’re talking to an entrepreneur, ask her what the most important thing is about her startup. Listen closely, because the response is everything you need to know about her philosophies for the business.

What else? What are your thoughts on startups being about people, people, and people?

Over the past month I’ve had the opportunity to talk with a number of people in the Atlanta tech startup community about what’s working and what they’d like to see improved. There’s no shortage of ideas across all categories on how to make the community stronger, more vibrant, and more successful. One thing I like to do is to set goals, with metrics, to work towards as well as work backwards from, in order to align and focus the community.

With the year 2020 slightly over seven years away, there’s plenty of time to do great things. Here are a few goals for the Atlanta tech startup community for 2020:

• Create 10,000 new tech company jobs
• Have a new billion dollar, acquisitive, publicly traded anchor tech company in town (AutoTrader? AirWatch?)
• Deliver over 100,000 square feet of startup-focused office space with 500+ people in them (ATDC currently has 40,000 square feet)
• Participate in $1 billion in exits annually
• Facilitate $300 million in institutional investments annually
• Increase the number of GA Tech engineer co-ops that work at tech companies by 50%
• Win three Inc. 500 awards annually

Many of these are big, round numbers that are readily trackable. Data is available for Georgia for most of these categories and it will take some effort to distill the Atlanta portion of the data. We’ve made major strides in the community over the last seven years and I’m excited about the next seven.

What else? What are some other Atlanta tech community goals for 2020?

Recently I’ve been exploring different buildings and areas for an Atlanta Startup Village (see Physical Atlanta Startup Village Idea and Physical Atlanta Startup Village Components). This is a nice-to-have type project that would be great to do but would have to be a no-brainer financially (e.g. a really good deal). So, assuming the area and building have the desired components, how would the actual structure work? Here are a few ideas:

• Large co-working space with one interior conference room and one phone booth room for every 15 desks
• Full event room that supports 100 attendees
• Complete training lab with laptops and large screen TVs
• Individual office pods with between 1,000 and 4,000 square feet per area including:
  – LED screen outside the pod entrance with company name and logo
  – Mini kitchen
  – Interior phone booths with glass walls (1 per 1,000 ft)
  – Interior conference room with glass wall and large LED screen (1 per 2,000 ft)
  – 5 desks on exterior windows
• Moveable, large sliding glass doors between pods with locks on each side that can be opened to combine pods as startups grow (see moveable glass walls)

Overall, the goal is to be a central village for the startup community as well as provide flexible space for startups to grow from one founder to dozens of employees, all with minimal effort and minimal customization. Too much money is wasted by startups on ill-fitting long term leases and heavy customization (most offices have traditional layouts that are inefficient and not startup friendly). The startup village building would have to be designed unlike any building currently available.

What else? What are some other considerations for a building to be startup friendly and efficient?

Midtown is the undisputed king of the Atlanta seed stage startup scene with the ATDC, Hypepotamus, and Georgia Tech (see Rob’s post). ATDC alone has dozens of startups in the building. With the seed stage being defined as under $1M in revenue and under 10 employees, it’s especially helpful to be in an area with great startup density. As startups grow from the seed stage to the early stage (10 or more employees with $1M or more in revenue), the ATDC becomes more difficult due to space constraints (there’s a waiting list for space) and the three year term limit (startups have to move out after three years) resulting in the startups that are most likely to be successful long term having to leave and move out.

Most ATDC startups that hit the early stage move north to the Buckhead, Vinings/Galleria, or Perimeter area — extremely large geographical areas with little startup density. Buckhead is the clear winner due to the central location between in-town neighborhoods and the northern suburbs. Here are some early stage and growth stage software companies in Buckhead:

• Pardot
• Hannon Hill
• Intellum
• Vendormate
• Preparis
• WhatCounts
• Signup4
• Many more

Unfortunately, even with those software companies and more, there’s little serendipitous interaction as there are so many office buildings and such little walking around. Buckhead has great resources like access to interstates, train stations, restaurants, retail, and residential that it should become the heart of the early and growth stage Atlanta startup scene. This is even more true since it is centrally located to the metro area, more accessible to the northern suburbs (tech professionals eventually get married, have kids, and want an affordable house in a good school district), and more affordable than Midtown (Buckhead has many buildings with free parking).

What else? How can we make Buckhead more cohesive as an early and growth stage startup community?

After reading about Denver’s new tech startup center called Galvanize today, I thought it was time to revisit the Physical Atlanta Startup Village Idea post from almost two months ago. If you talk to startups in town about office space, they’ll say they want creative, loft style office space that’s in a cool area. Two of the most popular creative lofts areas are The Stove Works in Inman Park (High Groove is there) and the Carriage Works buildings in West Midtown (ScoutMob is there). The Stove Works complex is completely full and Carriage Works is almost full, showing there’s serious demand for creative space in town.

Thinking more about a physical Atlanta Startup Village, here are a few components that would be nice to have:

• In-town on the Atlanta Beltline (22 miles of old train tracks that are being redeveloped into trails, public parks, and transit)
• Loft style offices with tall, 12-20 foot ceilings and ample natural light
• Within one mile of a MARTA train station
• Walkable to several restaurants
• Rooftop patio or other outdoor component
• Great coffee shop (see Octane Coffee)
• Plenty of free parking

A physical Atlanta Startup Village would need to be a amazing place that people people wanted to be a part of in order to be successful. As great as the facility might be, at the end of the day it’s the people involved.

What else? What are some other ideal components for an Atlanta Startup Village?

Venture Atlanta 2012 wrapped up today with another strong session of keynote speakers and startup pitches. Jonathan Bush of athenahealth gave the most entertaining talk of the show outlining many of the absurdities of the healthcare system in the U.S. as well as how health IT is progressing (Atlanta is the health IT capital of the world).

Here are the startups that pitched today:

Open Solutions for Education

• OpenSIS – student information systems software
• OpenIntel – academic analytics and reporting
• Open source model with a free core product and paid add-ons
• 55,000 downloads
• $8 per student per year for paid edition
• Raising $3M Series A

PMG.net

• Service catalog suite software
• End-to-end business process management software
• Imagine employee onboarding and the 25 steps that need to be completed — this software enforces the process across departments
• Customers include Wal Mart, Medo, and many more
• Works with multiple backend systems unlike many competitors

LSN Mobile

• Mobile marketing and commerce opportunity
• $9M in revenue for 2012
• Raised $1.2M
• Provides a mobile ad network
• Carriers are looking for additional revenue streams

Emcien

• What’s your data telling you?
• Patented solution that connects that dots of what’s going on
• Look for pattern detection to identify gangs, fraud, etc
• Boom in big data is a driver
• Customers across a number of verticals including classified government agencies
• Raised $5M
• Raising $10 – $15M

Kahua

• Platform to create applications and sell on the store
• Founders of Constructware and Compliance360
• Design, construction, and facility operations
• Intercompany data exchange and workflow
• kStore is where 3rd parties post applications for sale
• Raised $7.5M
• Raising $3 – $5M in Q1 2013

ScholarLab

• 50 customers
• Software to power required continuing education programs to associations
• Learning desktop that brings together multiple apps
• SaaS model at $25k/year with 2-3 year contracts
• Raising $3 – $5M to expand sales and marketing

AirSage

• The power of when and where
• Patented population analytics
• 15 billion location data points per day
• 25 employees in Atlanta
• Transportation planning, target marketing, site selection
• Raising $5 – $10M

Meeting Consultants

• Growing over 20% per year
• Optimize return on event marketing spend
• Software and services to put on marketing events
• Managed over 10,000 events and $260M in spend
• Raising $5M

Delta Data

• Solutions provider to mutual fund industry
• 50 employees
• Grew out of a CPA firm
• Solve inefficiencies around securities processing and data management
• Help meet compliance mandates and mitigate risk for mutual funds
• Raising $7 – $10M

Pretty in My Pocket

• Free, social, mobile app that enables brands and retailers to drive purchase decisions inside the store
• Consumer, brand, and retailer have pain points
• Beauty has 1/10th of the retail space in Walgreens
• Content, reviews, perks, redemption, analytics
• Raising $750k

Clinigence

• Pay for performance in healthcare is growing
• Difficult for healthcare providers to measure performance
• Declarative classification, semantic understanding, normalization
• Greater need for clinical analytics for outcomes analysis
• Raising seed round

Safely Locked

• SaaS tool for security of business data
• SafelySendIt -secure web-based “courier” service
• SafelyShareIt – secure “dropbox” for collaboration
• All browser based with no plugins
• Raising $3M Series A

Monocle Health Data

• Healthcare price and quality for chronic illness
• Lot of disparity in price and quality with healthcare
• 13.5% of hospital patients experience and adverse event
• Gold seal of joint commission doesn’t mean the hospital is good at a specific illness
• High deductible health plans are the fastest growing
• Aggregate multiple data sources and apply 72 quality indicators
• $4 per employee per month

Message Gears

• Hybrid email service provider
• Four employees
• On-premise power, cloud convenience
• Behind the firewall so it has the most complete access to company data
• Email sending is actually from the cloud after the emails have been
• assembled behind the firewall
• Raising $1M Series A

Sytheros

• Sensing the world
• Wireless system that’s cheap and able to send data a long distance
• Difficult to monitor and know where water is due to need to conserve water
• 55% of U.S. has a moderate to severe drought
• 200 billion gallons of water used every day
• Only 9% of farmers measure the water in the soil
• $150k in grants
• Raising $500k seed round

Rigor

• Web performance management software
• Help companies build more efficient and faster apps
• Slow loading sites are a real business problem
• Slow loading pages on an ecommerce result in potential customers leaving
• Amazon did a study that 1/10th of a second slow down results in a loss of 1% of revenue
• Tempur-Pedic used Rigor to increase average order size 14% by decreasing load time by 1.5 seconds

Lucena Research

• Scientific investment strategies
• Tech for hedge funds and other sophisticated investors
• Proprietary decision support technology
• Design and validate investment strategies
• QuantDesk for $1,000/seat/month
• Raised $400k
• Raising $1M

Apparity

• The enterprise of Excels
• Last great business process management challenge: spreadsheets
• Hybrid server that runs on premise or in the cloud
• Imposes workflow that’s specific to spreadsheets
• Apparity360 – enterprise visibility, process automation, content analytics, and user control

SalesLoft

• Sales people suffer from a lack of fundamental understanding of prospects
• Knowing the customer inside and out
• 30% of sales reps time spent looking for info
• Each sales reps gets custom stream of news and alerts on companies they sell to
• Like a digital newspaper about the contacts in the CRM
• Job changes are some of the best data for sales reps to act on
• 3 million sales professionals

Venture Atlanta 2012 was a big success again. Allyson Eman is the behind-the-scenes force and should be applauded for all her great work.

I’m looking forward to Venture Atlanta 2013.