Category: Entrepreneurship

So we’re exactly two months after our first Atlanta Shotput Ventures Demo Day. Let’s take a quick look at how things have played out so far:

• Three of the eight companies have stayed in Atlanta and five have moved out (almost all that left returned to where they came from)
• Two have raised a professional angel round or are about to close the round
• Two have raised money from friends and family
• One is trying to raise a Series A
• One has pseudo shutdown while evaluating next steps
• Two companies were put in part-time mode while the co-founders took consulting jobs unrelated to their startup
• Two are generating revenue

That’s all I have right now. Stay tuned for more updates in the future.

I was recently talking to an entrepreneur who’s been working on his company full-time for three years and is at the point where he’s no longer passionate about the business. Rather, he’s identified another business opportunity that is tangentially related but would require starting from scratch. How do you know when it is time to move on from your startup?

My advice to him was to figure out how to follow his dreams while taking care of his small number of employees (less than five). He believes the timing is right for the new business but needs to the day-to-day pay check to make ends meet. It is a tough situation, but when it is time to let go and change paths, you know in your gut what needs to be done.

The easy way is to do nothing. Or, to take the path of least resistance. Are you taking the easy way in your business? What’s the hard way? What direction can you take that’ll make you a little uneasy but will push the limits of your potential success?

We’re working on a new initiative in my company that is going to take some people out of their comfort zone. It will likely temporarily slow growth for a couple quarters, but will pay dividends down the road. I’m excited about taking the hard way.

There are three entrepreneurship blogs that I most look forward to reading new posts when I see them highlighted in my Google Reader. Here are my favorites:

• Chris Dixon
• infoChachkie
• Steve Blank

What are some other entrepreneurship blogs that you like?

We’re doing our last minute preparations for a User’s Conference that starts a week from Monday at the Georgia Tech Conference Center. User’s Conferences are one of the most fun things we do each year because it is a chance for us to meet face-to-face with over 100 customers. Due to our inside sales model, most employees never meet clients in person, but have spent many hours helping them as part of services, support, engineering, marketing, etc.

Our annual User’s Conference, now in its fourth year, also turns out to be a big morale boost each year. Once the conference finishes, everyone is so excited and jazzed up because there’s nothing like talking to a customer in person and hearing how much they like your product and company. It really is an amazing feeling.

I highly recommend putting on an annual User’s Conference if your company can justify it financially.

Charlie Goetz, a professor of entrepreneurship at Emory, had me over again yesterday to talk to a different MBA class he’s teaching this semester. Before class started, we had a great conversation about what questions we should ask a concept stage entrepreneur to get a feel for where he/she is in their thinking. We came up with some simple ones:

• What problem are you trying to solve?
• How are you different?
• How many prospects have you talked to about it?
• How far along are you with the concept?
• Where do you need the most help?

I’d encourage all entrepreneurs with a concept to answer these questions as part of reaching out to others for advice.

Continuing my recent meme of linking to high quality posts on other sites, I wanted to link to Mark Suster of GRP Ventures and his recent series on the site Both Sides of the Table. Mark has unique experience as both an entrepreneur and a VC, and has great war stories to tell. I recommend taking a look at the following:

• Start-up Lessons
• Pitching a VC
• Twitter Insights

I hope you find these resources useful.

On Tuesday of this week I met with an aspiring web entrepreneur who sought input on what he should do to better his skills. In addition to the five habits of a successful entrepreneur advice, I offered up the following items to be a habit as well:

• Pick 50 blogs related to technology, web development, web marketing, venture capital, and entrepreneurship and spend one hour per day skimming them
• Learn HTML and CSS and spend two hours per week using them
• Make a blog with your personal name as the domain name and write one post per day

Doing these tasks on a regular basis isn’t the easiest thing to do, but making it a habit and sticking to it can make the difference between success and failure.

Whenever people ask me the blanket question “What advice do you have for entrepreneurs?” I always hem and haw making up an answer on the spot. I spent a few minutes today thinking about the advice I’d tell myself if I knew what I know now when I started my company nine years ago. Here are the five habits of a successful first-time entrepreneur:

1. Read one of the Personal MBA books every other week until you’ve finished all of them, and then never stop reading a highly recommended book every other week
2. Have lunch with an entrepreneur you don’t know well every week and prepare a casual list of questions that you’d like to know his/her thoughts on
3. Join an EO-like organization immediately for peer-to-peer accountability groups and get actively involved on the board in a leadership role
4. Improve at least one thing in your business every week and don’t be afraid to try improvements that will fail
5. Actively re-evaluate your company corporate culture on a monthly basis and continually make it better knowing that your corporate culture is the most sacred thing you’ll spend time on as an entrepreneur

As you can see, success, in my opinion, comes from doing simple, but time intensive activities on a consistent basis. Notice that I didn’t say spend 100 hours per week on the business, develop a comprehensive business plan, or raise money from VCs. If you do the things outlined above, and apply your insights to your business, you will be successful.