Category: Community

In early 2010 I wrote a post titled Atlanta’s Online Marketing Software Cluster to bring awareness to the numerous startups in town. Well, I wanted to revisit the companies listed in that original post and add employee counts based on LinkedIn as of late October 2011. Here we go:

• Silverpop – Email marketing (416 employees)
• What Counts– Email marketing (70 employees)
• MailChimp – Email marketing (100 employees)
• Hannon Hill – Web content management (29 employees)
• Pardot – Marketing automation (53 employees)
• LoopFuse – Marketing automation (7 employees)
• LeadLife – Marketing automation (6 employees)
• CoreMotives – Marketing automation (7 employees)
• SalesFusion – Marketing automation (7 employees)
• ThePort – Private social networking (16 employees)
• Mobilization Labs – Private social networking (7 employees)
• Nimbus – Non-profit online marketing (10 employees)
• IgnitionOne – Search engine bid management software (89 employees)
• Vitrue – Facebook marketing (178 employees)
• BrightWhistle – Healthcare digital marketing platform (13 employees)

Total number of employees: 1,008.

Now, these are total employees listed online, and not all are in Atlanta. All of these companies are headquartered in Atlanta with the majority of their employees here. With 1,008 employees in these 15 companies, marketing software is one of the largest technology clusters in Atlanta.

During the second day of the Venture Atlanta conference this week I was talking to a very successful VC who, like me, had attended Austin’s Capital Factory Demo Day a couple months ago. We were comparing Capital Factory Demo Day and Venture Atlanta, which to be fair, are pretty different events but involve a number of startups and investors.

Here are my personal observations comparing the two events:

• The speakers for both events were good but the Capital Factory speakers were more startup-specific and amazing (Bob Metcalfe’s talk and Brian Sharples talk)
• Capital Factory cost $99 to attend and had 300 attendees while Venture Atlanta cost $495 to attend and had 650 attendees (Venture Atlanta is a non-profit)
• The Venture Atlanta startups were significantly further along, on average, when compared to the Capital Factory ones (Capital Factory had the five accelerator startups which were only a few months old and then 20 other startups from the community)
• Capital Factory had a much more laid back atmosphere with jeans and t-shirt most common as compared to Venture Atlanta where slacks and coat was most common
• The Georgia Aquarium venue and the University of Texas Executive Education center were equally great with the aquarium getting the edge
• The mix of B2B vs B2C startups was consistent at both events with B2B being much more prevalent

Overall, both events were great and represented their respective communities well.

What else? Did you attend either event? What were your thoughts?

At the Venture Atlanta 2011 conference this week I had the opportunity to talk with a number of investors. One of the things I asked several attendees was “which startup was your favorite and why” in order to look for trends, and more importantly what excited people. This led to some observations and lessons.

Here are 10 quick startup lessons from Venture Atlanta 2011:

1. Presentation coaching works (most pitches were great)
2. Comedy during a pitch works well, but needs to be performed at a high level
3. Slides shouldn’t have more than 20 words, especially with 650 people in the audience
4. If you’re pitching in place of the CEO don’t waste 20% of the time explaining why
5. Props, including nine-year-old daughters, really get the audience’s attention
6. Presentations from founders are more passionate than hired-gun CEOs
7. Make it easy for investors to follow up (e.g. give a short email address in your last slide)
8. Surprises, like a custom event app already approved in the AppStore, make an impact
9. There’s a fine line between confidence and cockiness (be cognizant of the two)
10. Pre-recorded video, including product demos and animations, are effective, but should only be a small part of the pitch

This was easily the best Venture Atlanta to date based on the quality of the startups and the number of attendees. I’m excited about the future of the event.

What else? What were some lessons learned from Venture Atlanta 2011?

The second day of Venture Atlanta was as exciting as the first. As expected, the startups were more mature and many had already raised institutional money. Here’s a quick run-down of the companies (I didn’t get to hear the second half so there aren’t as many details).

SimpleC

• In-room multi media display
• Content delivered by SaaS app
• Helps elderly live their lives at home
• $183B/year spent on dementia services
• No cure for dementia
• Currently have 10 operators and 20 communities
• Raised $3M
• Raising $2.8M

SalesFusion

• 200 paying customers
• Integrates with SFDC, MS Dynamics, SugarCRM, Sage, Saleslogix
• $9B market by 2015 (Forrester)
• 2-3% of market is penetrated
• $1M in rev in 2011
• $1.3M run rate
• $15,000 in new MRR each month
• 60 new clients since July
• 40% of revenue derived from channel partners outside the U.S.
• Raising $2M for sales
• Goal of $40M by 2015

Racemi

• Goal to use existing virtualized server images and migrate them into the cloud
• Moving a complex app to the cloud can take 12 months
• Sold direct and indirect
• 1200% growth this year
• Raising $7M for sales and marketing expansion as well as product dev to connect the top 50 clouds globally

VersionOne

• 95 employees
• Approx $15M in revenue in 2011
• Management software for agile software development
• 900 customers
• 25 of Fortune 100
• Salesforce.com for Software Organizations
• Raising $10M – $12M for expansion, including international

Mobile Active Defense

• Data confidentiality, integrity, and assurance for the enterprise
• Security software for the smartphone and tablet enterprise
• Solution is a cloud-based proxy server that monitors data going to and from the smartphones and tablets
• ASP of $70 – $100 per device / year
• Expected to do $3M in 2012
• Raising $4M to expand R&D, sales, and marketing

Wahoo Fitness

• Intersection of smartphone and fitness market
• App-enabled accessory that connects wirelessly to smartphone
• Connect smartphones to fitness sensors
• Previous challenge was getting data from the disparate sources
• Platform for the fitness industry
• $3.2M in revenue in 2011
• Raising $1M

Velocity Medical Solutions

• Cancer imaging software
• $2.8M in revenue in 2011
• FDA cleared
• Helps improve patient care, reduce cost of therapy
• Started with radiation oncology and will expand to other oncologies eventually
• Raising $2M

Contact At Once

• Industry specific SaaS chat software
• $6.3M in revenues in 2011
• Currently work with top online advertisers in car vertical
• Goal is to expand to the 9,000 car dealers
• Other vertical is apartment rentals
• General idea is that live chat converts better than phone numbers and forms on websites
• Raised $1.6M
• Raising $5M

Skitter

• Work with telephone company to provide paid TV service to their current subscribers
• 10 year agreements
• Provide equipment and service to the customer
• 10 employees
• Self-funded
• Charge $45/month to consumers for the service
• Raising $4M

Vertical Acuity

• (Un) Googling the web
• 55 cents of every dollar online goes to Google/Facebook/Twitter/Yahoo
• Companies can’t produce enough content to satisfy consumer demands
• Content logistics platform
• Combination of digital curation and partner management
• 100 publishers currently
• 500M pages viewed in network
• Raised $4M
• Raising $5M

SecureHealthPay

• SecureHealthPay is the one location where you can pay, manage, and track your family’s healthcare expenses online for free

My Dealer Lot

• RFID for retail automotive

FiPath

• Retirement advice portal

Reflex Systems

• Virtualization management software

NanoLumens

• Flexible lightweight video screens

IAS Software

• Wealth management software for financial advisors

Urjanet

• Energy data provider to better manage energy use for large companies with multiple locations

BrightWhistle

• Digital marketing platform for healthcare providers to attract customers

Global Take Off

• Provider of live and video on demand solutions

Snapfinger

• Online food ordering platform

The two day Venture Atlanta event finished as strong as it started.

Venture Atlanta had a great event today showcasing a number of promising startups in the area. Here are my notes on the companies:

OrcaTec

• Avg F500 spends $500M/yr on legal expenses
• Document decisioning suite
• Categorize, search, and cluster data
• Predictive coding of documents using machine learning
• Predictive analytics of unstructured data
• Raising $5M for sales, marketing, and additional development

Abundant Closet

• Changing the landscape of retail
• Drive revenue for retailers by allowing consumers to bring their closets into every purchase decision
• 150,000 US retailers with $200B in revenue
• $60B to be purchased online in the next few years
• Less than 3% of visitors to an ecommerce site results in a sale
• FashionAde.com – live lab launched 9/2010
• Three customers are embedding the product this quarter
• Raising $1M to build out sales team

Jigsaw Meeting

• Platform for change and learning in education and corporate training environments
• 44M students will move to online classes by 2015
• Education is $853.6B market
• Corporate training is $72.7B market
• Virtual classroom solution
• Raising $900k

Social Fortress

• Safeguards data regardless of where it resides
• Features: At-rest encryption and behavioral monitoring
• Enterprises are more reliant on cloud services and mobile devices
• Raising money to scale sales, operations, and engineering
• Raised money from ISS founder

Proximus Mobility

• Mobile proximity-based advertising
• Example walking into a casino and getting a text message offering a coupon
• Raised $2.25M in mid-2011
• Small device that plugs in and then talks to SaaS app via 3g for campaign rules
• Future integration with third parties like FourSquare and Facebook
• No app to download — based on phone WiFi or Bluetooth connection plus text messaging
• Raising $3M

ShapeStart

• Laser Fit Hearing
• In-ear scanning for hearing aids
• 60,000 clinicians with 15M impressions/year
• Capture a digital 3d representation of ear
• Much better patient experience
• Raised $1.25M
• Raising $1M for productization

Soneter

• Build meters that give real-time feedback on water usage
• Measure water footprint like carbon footprint
• 22 million unmetered apartments
• Device that clamps around existing pipes
• Full solution including consumer and enterprise monitoring solution
• Focus on multi-family residential real estate market
• Product enabled service company
• Raising $650k

Soket

• Social media marketing for local business
• 70% of revenue for restaurants come from returning customers
• 86% of SMB have a website
• Single place for local businesses to manage content and push it to places like Yelp, OpenTable, FourSquare, Facebook, etc
• Raised $460k
• Raising $500k

IdeaString

• Harness the thinking power of groups and help companies manage, socialize, and evaluate that information
• Average F1000 company spends over $100M/yr capturing ideas
• SaaS product for idea generation with enterprise tools to facilitate break-through thinking
• Raising money for sales and marketing as well as product development

Dinova

• Aggregate corporate purchases to get cash back for customers and deliver more business to restaurants, airlines, and hotels
• Negotiates discount with restaurants and get’s a piece of the discount as business model
• Goal is to get as many of corporate customers to use the partner restaurants
• Opportunities: data mining, proprietary market analytics, mobile apps, social media integration
• Raised $2.9M
• Raising $3M

NextInput

• Better, cheaper, faster, and less power
• Force sensitive instead of capacitive sensitive
• Provisional patent
• Raised $250k
• Launched 1st product using the technology
• Raising $1M

rappidApp

• Web-based app that generates iPhone app
• Live apps on the AppStore from the app
• $4500/year per customer
• Connects many of the smart phone functions
• Raising $500k

PinDrop

• Breakthrough caller ID solution that gives each call a fingerprint
• Core product is anti-fraud call analyzer deployed via cloud or appliance
• Stop phone fraud
• Focused on big banks
• Raising seed round

Verdeeco

• Data explosion from electrical meters – checked 12 times/year to 35,000/year
• Data visualization, analytics, and applications platform for utilities
• Huge explosion of data that needs to be analyzed
• Raised $800k from ATA
• Raising $2M

TripLingo

• Foreign language learning is a $1B market
• Trends in cultural travel and smartphone penetration
• Increase in laziness in travelers
• Customized phrase list for travelers
• Slang slider shows different ways to say something
• Currently offer 12 languages
• $10 per language per country
• 36,000 downloads already

LIFT

• Vision of a personalized retail experience
• Live on 120 check-out counters
• Has recommended 800k items with 40k upsells
• 3% increase in same store sales
• Loyalty programs on check-out
• Approx $300/mo per store
• Raising $1M

Merlin Mobility

• 82% struggle to make mental jump from instructions to physical object in front of them
• Augmented reality to help with learning and instructions (think yellow overlays during football games)
• Targeting chief learning and information officers as well as elearning companies
• Raising $1M

CodeGuard

• Website backup service for small businesses
• Time machine for the site
• Alerts whenever your site changes
• Shared hosting market growing from $4.2B to $5.8B

The startups today set the bar high and I’m looking forward to the event tomorrow.

Read about Day 2 of the event.

 

Venture Atlanta has its annual event October 25th and 26th this week at the world’s largest aquarium. The great event has been expanded from one day to two days so as to showcase more startups, especially early stage and seed stage ones (boat analogies for startups). This year, 40 startups based in the state of Georgia will present with several of them having already raised venture capital and looking for another round.

Here are a few questions to ask when hearing the companies pitch or from reading their website:

• Do I understand what they do?
• Do I understand how they make money?
• Do I believe there’s a large or growing market for what they do?
• Do I believe they’ll be successful?
• Would I invest in the business?

The goal for startups presenting at a conference like this isn’t to raise money on the spot but rather to gather enough interest to get a meeting with investors. Startups need to create a hook in the mind of the investor and desire for the investor to want to learn more.

What else? What other questions do you ask yourself when you listen to a startup pitch?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to be a panelist for the Georgetown Baker Scholars event on entrepreneurship in Atlanta. Baker Scholars is a prestigious program  for undergraduates interested in business. The event was attended by 25 junior and senior undergraduates that traveled down from Washington D.C. for two days of programs in the Capital of the South.

Four entrepreneurs including myself shared their career paths and stories of entrepreneurship. Here are a few notes from the event:

• Of the four entrepreneurs, two started companies during college and have never worked for anyone
• One entrepreneur knew they wanted to start a company but waited until they had eight years of real world experience
• One entrepreneur started making a product just to learn how to do it, enjoyed it, and built a great business from it
• Three of the entrepreneurs didn’t have co-founders
• Three of the entrepreneurs had immediate success within a year of starting while one required four years
• The common theme among the entrepreneurs was a desire to be their own boss

The event was a great way to expose some bright students in their early twenties to the entrepreneurship path and I was happy to be a part of it.

Peer groups are one of the many aspects of entrepreneurship and the startup world that took me years to appreciate. When I say peer groups I don’t mean networking groups. Rather, peer groups are small sets of people that often meet once a month, if not more, in an environment of trust and confidentiality. Peer-to-peer experience sharing and learning is incredibly powerful for entrepreneurs in all types of businesses.

Here are some benefits of peer groups for entrepreneurs:

• Most issues have already been tackled by someone else, so the same mistakes don’t need to be repeated
• No more being lonely at the top as there are many people out there in similar positions
• The emotional roller coaster of entrepreneurship has high highs and low lows that are best when shared with others
• Life’s a journey and these peer groups provide a special setting to develop deep relationships

The most common and popular non-profit for these peer groups is the Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) for companies greater than $1 million in revenue and EO Accelerator for companies between $250k and $1 million in revenue. I highly recommend these organizations as well as peer groups in general.

What else? What are some other benefits of peer groups?

Tonight I had the chance to attend the CapVenture 2011 program put on by the ATDC and TAG. The panel, startup presenters, and fireside chat participants did a great job.

YouFinity

• Gift giving site around preferences and tastes
• Gift recs based on site, age, gender, preferences
• Example: favorite clothing colors in size and see a selection of matching items (comes from the Amazon.com Product API)
• Not event or item based (e.g. no wish lists)
• Revenue model: affiliate commissions, greeting card sales, ads, partnerships
• Goal of 2.5 – 5 million users in five years
• Raising $500k for ongoing customer acquisition and feature enhancements

NextInput

• Gives devices the power to feel
• Focused on touch tech market opportunity
• Applications in automative, consumer electronics, and medical devices
• Benefits: lower cost, more durable, and more efficient
• Works in more environments like with gloves and fingernails
• Revenue model is OEM (approx $1 per device)
• Raising $1M

Blue Mammoth Games

• Casual action MMO for your browser
• Virtual characters in a shared world
• Founded in May of 2009
• Raised $300k
• Opportunity: 115 million play casual games and MMOs bring in $8 billion/year
• Dungeon Blitz – game built for casual gamer that rewards playing smaller chunks of the game
• Launched 3/25 and over 16,000 users
• Raising $700k
• Want to expand to console and tablet as well as more games
• http://www.dungeonblitz.com

CodeGuard

• Time machine for websites that automatically backs up the site on a regular basis
• Serves the 50M SMB companies on shared hosting platforms
• 95% of market is underserved
• SaaS recurring revenue at $10/mo/site
• Expanding development and marketing

GetOneRewards

• Digital version of customer loyalty cards for retailers
• Install an iPad at register and customers put their phone number in on the spot
• Product gives more insight into loyal customers
• Ability to more effectively segment customers
• Focus in on bringing repeat loyal customers to clients
• Email marketing and Facebook integration
• Target: Counter service restaurants and salons
• Started in April 2010
• 61 locations and 30,000 users
• Raising $250k

PinDrop Security

• Bringing trust back to the phone
• Won GRA/TAG 2011 business launch 2011
• Phone fraud is easy to do via caller ID spoofing
• Technology that shows every phone calls leaves a unique fingerprint based on the phone
• Anti-Fraud Call Analyzer – deployed on site at a bank
• Financial institutions, law enforcement, and time and attendance opps
• Caller ID verification market: $540 million in 2011
• Raised $255k
• Raising $500k angel round

Tom Noonan – Fireside Chat Notes

• Sold his condo in Boston and used his wife’s 401k to help fund ISS
• Had 35 credit cards with different variations of his name to help fund ISS
• “It’s hard to be an entrepreneur if you can’t sell”
• Mentors include John Imlay and Sam Nunn
• Sam helped get ISS in the center of the world policy debates about internet law
• “Boards are under-emphasized in early stage companies”
• “Board can’t have any friends (don’t recruit existing friends but rather find outsiders with good chemistry)”
• 50% of the connected network’s energy is waster
• $4 trillion a year total on electricity
• 112 term sheets in four weeks for JouleX
• 26 early stage investments not counting TechOperators
• People send signals of coachability
• “I find selfless people that are motivated — I’ll fund them all day long”
• ISS management team had great chemistry but weren’t friends
• 99% of the ISS success credit was to management team and employees
• Couldn’t raise VC money until they signed three big customers

The ATDC/TAG event was well done and it was great to see these new startups present.

Recently I was talking to an entrepreneur that is in the process of selling his business. His parents are getting older and he’d like to move his family to their hometown for five years so that his kids get a chance to build a deeper relationship with them while they can. Home is where his parents live, not where he currently lives. He lives where he does because it was the best place to build his business, and he’s executed well, creating a successful enterprise. Now, he’s ready to move on and go to his true home for the next phase of life.

I believe it’s important to approach a startup with a build-to-last mentality. The idea is that the company is created and decisions are made with the long-term in mind. This doesn’t mean that the entrepreneur has to be with the company forever, or even in the same city as the company indefinitely, but rather that the environment is one critical, and controllable, part of the equation.

Entrepreneurs that want to be in a different city from their business either while it is still going or after they sell it should be up-front with their co-founders and key stakeholders during the process. Ideally, there’s enough lead time to make for a smooth transition. With technology like Skype Video and Gchat combined with the right people on the bus and processes in place make it easy for entrepreneurs to work remotely.

Entrepreneurs that have the call of home in a different city from their own should embrace it and build aspects of their team and company with their personal goals in mind.

What else? What are your thoughts on entrepreneurs and the call of home in a different city?