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Last week, I had the opportunity to moderate a MAC panel of growth-stage entrepreneurs as part of Venture Atlanta. Whenever I moderate a panel, I like to approach it as a conversation. It usually takes a few minutes to find the flow and develop some rapport with the room, but once that connection is made, the discussion tends to unfold naturally—and this event was no different.

For growth-stage entrepreneurs, typically defined as those with at least $5–10 million in revenue, the conversation and topics are quite different from those of seed-stage founders who are still searching for or refining product–market fit. At the growth stage, there are more employees involved, more capital at play, and generally much greater complexity in the business.

To get a panel conversation going, I like to start with the basics: Who are you, and what’s your elevator pitch? Now, we’re talking about a short elevator ride. Entrepreneurs can easily go long when describing their company, so I like to frame the desired brevity by asking for a pitch that can be delivered in a single breath—if you have to stop to breathe, you’ve gone too long.

After that, I like to dive into deeper, more nuanced topics that reflect the experience level of the panelists. Here are a few of my favorite questions:

• What’s your corporate culture like? What do you do well, and where would you like to improve?
• What’s your personal leadership style? How would your team describe you?
• How has that leadership style evolved as your company has grown and scaled?
• Looking back, what would you have done differently—or what advice would you give your younger self, knowing what you know now?
• What are the top one or two projects you’re currently working on?
• How do you choose which projects to focus on?
• What’s been your biggest learning over the past 12 months?

Once we’ve covered those, I like to move into current and trending topics. Naturally, right now, that means AI. Some of the questions include:

• What role does AI play in your business today?
• What AI capabilities are customers asking for?
• What would you like AI to do that it can’t do yet?
• Can you share an example of how AI is already improving your operations?

To wrap things up, I finish with some “pay-it-forward” questions:

• How do you like to help other entrepreneurs?
• What do you do to continue learning and growing as an entrepreneur yourself?
• What can we do as a community to better support our startup ecosystem?

This format always gets the conversation flowing, and once we hit our stride, time just flies by. I really enjoy talking with entrepreneurs and learning from their perspectives and insights. This particular panel was excellent—special thanks to everyone involved.

Last week, I was talking with an entrepreneur about ensuring a business is set up for an exit. After a few minutes of discussing the pros and cons of thinking about an exit early in the startup journey, I pushed back and emphasized that the real goal is to build a great, enduring company. When you do that, plenty of exit opportunities will naturally present themselves.

It’s not that you can’t make strategic choices to make a business more attractive to acquirers, like cutting certain short-term costs to boost profitability or delaying investments that might help near-term numbers. You can definitely make a company look more desirable. The problem is that the best and most sophisticated acquirers will see right through it. They’ll know shortcuts were taken and that certain decisions were made to make the business appear stronger than it really is.

Instead of optimizing for an exit, the better approach is to optimize for building a great, enduring company. A great company has a strong culture, raving-fan customers, a healthy and growing market, and a defensible position that’s hard to unseat. By focusing on those elements and achieving them, your business will naturally become desirable to potential acquirers who are willing to pay top dollar for something truly exceptional.

Back in the day at Pardot, we focused on building the best company we could. We won awards for being the fastest-growing tech company in the region, for being one of the best places to work, and, most importantly, we built a culture where customers loved being customers. When we did sell the business, it wasn’t because we were seeking an exit. We sold because a great potential acquirer came along and recognized that we were the perfect B2B complement to their B2C offering. After several months of courtship, it was clear that our cultures and leadership aligned, and that the chance of success was high. We chose to exit because it was a great opportunity, not because it was our strategy.

For entrepreneurs thinking about an exit strategy, remember this: the best exits happen when you first build a great business and the market comes knocking. Once you’ve built something truly great, potential acquirers will notice and opportunities will emerge. Focus on greatness, not on the exit.

Last week, I had the opportunity to spend time with a group of executives working on a regional project. One phrase that came up repeatedly was: control your controllables.

Although this was said in the context of regional development, it’s incredibly applicable to startups as well. In startup land, it’s easy to worry about competitors, the government, or other external factors that may or may not happen. Of course, it’s human nature to do so. But if you take a step back and sort out what’s within your control and what’s outside of it, things become much clearer. You realize there are a tremendous number of actions you can take regardless of what happens around you.

Take sales as an example. Naturally, the sales team wants to close a certain amount of revenue each month or quarter to hit quota and move the startup forward. The challenge with measuring purely on output is that output is driven by inputs—many of which include factors outside of your control.

So let’s look at sales through the lens of control your controllables.

• Can we guarantee a certain amount of revenue? No.
• Can we guarantee a certain number of phone calls and prospect follow-ups? Absolutely.
• Can we guarantee that every inbound lead will be followed up on within a set amount of time? Absolutely.
• Can we guarantee consistent outreach to key partners so we stay top-of-mind in the market? Absolutely.

In this simple example, we know that sales has measurable inputs: the number of phone calls, follow-ups, demos, proposals sent, and deals won. The deeper you go into the funnel, the more outcomes are outside of your control. But by consistently executing the inputs, you significantly increase the likelihood of hitting the outputs.

Entrepreneurs would do well to remember this: control your controllables. What’s within your power? What’s outside of it? How can you keep your team focused on what they can control—and not distracted by what they can’t?

At the end of the day, entrepreneurs must control their controllables.

Last week, I was catching up with an entrepreneur who was lamenting how potential investors didn’t like his market. It reminded me of the early days at Pardot. We were about three years into the business, had over $1 million in annual recurring revenue, and were growing 200% year over year. By all accounts, especially in that era of SaaS, we were onto something special.

Wanting to grow even faster and capture an unvented market, we set out to raise a venture round. After trips to Boston, Washington D.C., and California multiple times, we kept hearing the same feedback: investors liked our progress, but they didn’t like the market.

At the time, we were selling marketing automation software to small and midsize companies, delivering a clear ROI in the form of increased revenue through a variety of business tools for managing and executing online campaigns. But in the eyes of investors, there was a big problem: they couldn’t point to any other prominent success stories in marketing technology. No publicly traded companies. No recent high-flyers with great exits. There was no context for marketers buying software products.

Of course, we did our best to provide analogies. If you looked across the common departments in a company—sales, accounting, HR—every department had a platform of record. For sales, it was Salesforce. For accounting, it was QuickBooks or Oracle Financials. And so on. But marketing? Marketing had no platform of record. Marketers at the time were using a hodgepodge of tools like Mailchimp and Google Analytics. These worked fine as siloed solutions for consumer marketers, but business marketers had different needs.

By offering one comprehensive solution that integrated well with other products, performance and results were dramatically better. We tried to frame it for investors like this: if you look at Salesforce and the number of CRM seats they were selling, our product as a business marketing automation platform was the ultimate complement. Every company using a CRM in the future would also use marketing automation. We argued that marketing automation would become a material percentage of the size of the CRM market, and since the CRM market was growing fast, marketing automation would grow even faster.

In hindsight, we weren’t successful at convincing investors of the market opportunity. But through a fortunate combination of luck and timing, the market exploded anyway. We were able to dramatically grow the business without raising a round of funding.

For entrepreneurs pitching investors who don’t buy into the market opportunity, it can be incredibly difficult. The best approach is to find an analogous market or a complementary product and make the case that what happened “over there” is going to happen “over here.” Even if investors aren’t convinced, the one thing within your control is to provide tremendous value to your customers and grow at least as fast as the market itself so that when the opportunity arises, you’re in the best position to raise capital and scale even faster.

Once or twice a month, I’m introduced to someone who wants to plug into the local startup community. Sometimes it’s a person new to town. Other times it’s someone who has been here for a few years, heads down in their work, and is now at a career crossroads. And occasionally, it’s someone who’s simply curious about startups.

When I meet with them, I always start by trying to understand their intentions. Why do they want to connect with other entrepreneurs? Are they looking to make money? To give back? To become an entrepreneur themselves and start building a peer group? Or do they have other motives? You can never be entirely sure, but after doing this for years, I usually get a pretty good sense of someone’s intentions.

Once I understand the why, I like to dig into their areas of interest. This could be specific industries or technologies—software, hardware, robotics, cloud, AI—or even the size and stage of startups they’re drawn to. Some people love the energy of the idea and seed stage, when things are the messiest. Most, however, prefer companies that are a little further along—likely post–product-market fit, with $1–10 million in revenue. There’s no right or wrong answer, but it’s a helpful data point in understanding where their curiosity lies.

Next, I ask about their process so far. Who have they talked to? What events have they attended? Which organizations are they curious about? What startups seem most interesting to them? Part of this is my own curiosity about how people find their way into a community, and part of it is to gauge their current progress so I can offer relevant advice or introductions.

Finally, after all the questions and conversation, I share recommendations. Usually it’s a mix of checking out the websites of local coworking spaces and incubators, attending venture conferences or meetups, and connecting with specific entrepreneurs and executives I know. I try to introduce them to people who enjoy meeting newcomers and who would be a good fit based on what I’ve learned.

Plugging into a local startup community should be relatively easy with the right amount of effort. Entrepreneurs are, by nature, glass-half-full types who enjoy paying it forward. In fact, that’s one of the things I love most about them: they see potential in the world and choose to create, build, and persist in the face of adversity. That same “can-do” attitude extends beyond their own ventures and into helping others along the way.

Last week I was talking to an entrepreneur who had built a solid business, growing modestly with plenty of room to run. During the conversation, the question came up about whether or not to raise institutional capital.

Over the past several years, the startup has raised a few angel rounds and some debt from angel investors. That capital provided the necessary resources and team to get the product to market, develop strong distribution channels, and scale to millions of dollars in revenue. However, the investor base doesn’t have the financial capacity to continue funding losses, so the business has been mostly self-sustaining.

The idea, of course, is to grow faster and enter new markets. But without more capital, growth will be limited.

Benefits of Not Raising Institutional Capital

Some of the benefits of not raising institutional capital include:

• Liquidity flexibility. If the company continues to grow and becomes highly profitable, investors would welcome dividends. The current capital is patient and has no exit timeline.
• Longer-term decision making. Without pressure from institutional investors, the entrepreneur feels freer to make decisions that benefit the company long-term, rather than hitting short-term, potentially artificial milestones.
• Strategy changes. If a new strategy or idea comes along, it’s easier to shift the business and go a different direction. Most investors, when something is working, don’t want to avoid new risk.

Benefits of Raising Institutional Capital

On the other hand, raising institutional capital offers significant advantages:

• Limitless capital. Assuming the business performs well, there’s abundant capital available for companies at scale with strong growth prospects. Despite the perception that capital is scarce, at the right stage it actually becomes plentiful.
• Fuel for growth. Additional capital allows for new hires, product development, geographic expansion, acquisitions, and more aggressive growth. While some markets pull you in naturally, many require pushing hard to build share quickly.
• Credibility and visibility. Once you’re in the system, there are conferences, summits, speaking opportunities, and broader recognition that come from having institutional investors’ stamp of approval. Even raising a small amount gets you on the radar of larger investors down the road.

The Entrepreneur’s Choice

There’s no right or wrong answer when it comes to raising institutional capital. The best approach for an entrepreneur is to be intentional and consider personal and team goals and aspirations.

Some want to swing for the fences and build the biggest company possible. Others want to balance lifestyle, flexibility, and control.

The next time an entrepreneur says they’re going to raise institutional capital, encourage them to carefully enumerate the pros and cons, and make sure the decision is thoughtful.

Last week I was catching up with an entrepreneur who was thinking about doing some angel investing, and he asked me what I look for in other entrepreneurs. Over the years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with many great people and learn from their experiences. Entrepreneurship is not a one-size-fits-all journey, but I’ve found some common characteristics that show up again and again in successful entrepreneurs.

1. A Desire to Improve

There are constant ups and downs in entrepreneurship. One moment you’re high-fiving your co-founder after signing a new customer, and the next a key employee leaves and you just want to curl up and cry. The entrepreneurs who succeed have a deep desire to improve. They want to learn, grow, figure out what works and what doesn’t, and take lessons from others who have gone before them. This thirst for learning is a key trait.

2. A Unique View on Risk

Many people see starting a new venture as too risky. Entrepreneurs, on the other hand, often have enthusiasm for calculated risk, especially risks that look uncertain or unlikely to succeed to the average person. They either have a unique angle or an unusually strong belief that they can overcome the challenges. This different perspective on what is and isn’t risky is a defining characteristic.

3. A Chip on the Shoulder

Almost every entrepreneur I’ve worked with has had some compelling drive or unusual background that pushes them to prove themselves in an extreme way. The old saying holds true: chips on shoulders equal chips in pockets. In other words, entrepreneurs with something to prove often end up creating significant value for themselves and their investors.

4. MacGyver-Level Resourcefulness

Resourcefulness is another common trait. The best entrepreneurs love to “MacGyver” their way into opportunities, finagling introductions, connecting seemingly unrelated dots, and figuring out how to make progress when others would stop. Whether it’s landing a first customer, solving a daunting problem, or raising a round of funding after many rejections, this tenacity and creativity greatly increase their chances of success.

5. A Glass-Half-Full Outlook

Finally, successful entrepreneurs tend to believe they can change the world, an industry, or even a city. This optimism, sometimes born from blissful ignorance, helps sustain them when progress is slow, opportunities are scarce, or things are going wrong. A positive outlook creates space for unexpected magic, where unexplainable good outcomes seem to come together at just the right time.

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These five characteristics—desire to improve, unique view on risk, chip on the shoulder, resourcefulness, and optimism—are some of my favorites when it comes to entrepreneurial success. There’s no guaranteed formula and no single path, but these traits consistently show up in entrepreneurs who make it.

If you’re thinking of becoming an entrepreneur, or considering partnering with or investing in one, keep these characteristics in mind. Evaluate them against the entrepreneurs you’ve met in the past. You’ll likely see these traits reflected in those who have succeeded.

Last week, I was talking to an entrepreneur who is building a new business. The company has some decent traction, and he’s deciding what to do next on the fundraising side. As part of the discussion, one important consideration that came up was how to think about a competitor recently raising a large round of funding.

Historically, in startups, funding is often used to achieve a new milestone. For example, going from $5 million of revenue to $10 million of revenue in a short period, fueled by outside capital. Once that milestone is hit, another round is raised, and the cycle continues as the business scales. But in the age of AI, scaling certain startups has become dramatically faster, and the perceived market opportunity is much larger. As a result, startups that previously would have raised amounts more in line with their run rate and growth rate are now raising many multiples of what used to be normal at valuations dramatically higher than in the past.

For entrepreneurs, especially in the context of competition, my recommendation is to always be market-aware and customer-focused. It’s easy to get distracted by competitor announcements, product launches, or flashy initiatives. But the most important thing is to listen closely to customers and build an opinionated vision of the future that you believe is right. That said, when you’re thinking about raising X dollars for the next round and you see a competitor raise 10X what you were considering, it naturally creates some consternation.

The Pros of Raising a Large Round

On the benefit side, the obvious one is having cash in the bank. A strong balance sheet enables more experiments, funds more initiatives, and gives the company breathing room. There’s a lot of advice out there about not needing to spend the money just because you raised it. But in practice, human nature pushes toward deploying that capital quickly, usually within 12 to 24 months, because it feels better to be aggressive and proactive rather than conservative and reactive.

Another major benefit of raising at a high valuation is the perceived value of equity for recruiting. For example, if you have an employee option pool of 10% and your last round valued the company at $50 million, that pool is worth $5 million on paper. If instead the last round valued the business at $200 million, even with identical metrics, that same pool is now worth $20 million. That makes it far easier to recruit top talent when you can offer an engineer $500,000 in paper equity value instead of $125,000, while giving up the same ownership percentage. The last round’s valuation acts as a powerful marker in the recruiting process.

The Cons of Raising a Large Round

On the downside, the higher the valuation, the higher the expectations. Growth investors typically want 3–5x their money, and elite VCs are often looking for 100x outcomes. Raising at an inflated valuation means the eventual exit or IPO must be correspondingly larger for everyone to be satisfied.

Another challenge is that the bar for the next round is dramatically higher. If you raise at an unusually high valuation and then need more money in 12–24 months, it can be demoralizing to face a down round. Down rounds often trigger negative side effects such as pay-to-play provisions or liquidation preferences, which can cause real pain inside the business.

Final Thoughts

When competitors raise large rounds, entrepreneurs should take the time to do some soul-searching about their own level of ambition. Do you want to “go big or go home,” or are you comfortable being the number two or three player in the market? Many markets are not true winner-take-all environments. More often, they resemble oligopolies or are divided into valuable niches where multiple players can thrive.

Just because a competitor raises a massive round doesn’t mean you need to. But it is prudent to carefully weigh the pros and cons instead of reacting impulsively. There are many paths to building a successful business, and not all of them require raising huge sums of money.

Last week I was talking with an entrepreneur about financing options and the current fundraising climate. One of the topics that came up was customer value financing, an idea I first explored a couple of years ago.

Customer value financing works like this: an investment company provides capital for sales and marketing efforts to acquire new customers. In exchange, the company receives a percentage of that new revenue until they are paid back, plus an equivalent of an interest rate. It is a form of non-dilutive financing that is not debt. Instead, it is essentially buying the right to a percentage of new revenue generated until a formula representing the desired return on investment is reached. Unlike traditional revenue financing, it is not a loan against the entire business and it does not claim existing revenue.

General Catalyst first popularized the idea a few years ago and has since raised and deployed capital using this model.

When I shared the concept with the entrepreneur, he had never heard of it. That prompted me to do some research, and what I found was surprising: the industry around customer value financing is basically nonexistent. I could be using the wrong terminology, and there may be capital providers offering similar structures under different names, but I was not able to find them.

That led me to ask why a market has not emerged to meet this need. After thinking about it, my conclusion is that startups already have access to traditional venture debt from banks and private credit providers like Conductor Capital. For entrepreneurs who qualify, venture debt works well. It is also much simpler to explain: “Here is a loan for X million dollars, and here are the terms.” You take the money and run your business.

By contrast, customer value financing, while arguably more aligned with growth-stage entrepreneurs’ goals, requires additional overhead. Defining, negotiating, auditing, and tracking incremental customer acquisition costs and resulting revenue adds a layer of complexity that does not necessarily change what entrepreneurs want to accomplish.

That said, seeing General Catalyst continue to announce new customers for its customer value financing program shows that at the high end of the market, with larger deal sizes, the model does fill a gap and attract demand.

Hopefully, over time, more providers will enter the space with variations of customer value financing. Entrepreneurs deserve more options and potentially better-aligned solutions for their growth. For now, there are still plenty of venture debt opportunities available, and entrepreneurs should evaluate them carefully in the context of their financing goals.

It’s that time of year again. The new 2025 Inc. 5000 awards list is out, and once more, a number of great Atlanta companies are represented. I always enjoy digging through the list, both to see the local standouts and to explore companies from across the country. It’s a great way to spot trends, spark new ideas, and understand what’s gaining momentum. The Inc. 5000 offers a broad perspective on where the economy is headed and what’s hot right now. Every entrepreneur looking for their next idea should pore over it.

Here are the Atlanta tech companies on the 2025 Inc. 5000 list.

No.166 Anaptyss 

Enabling financial institutions worldwide through full life cycle evolution of tasks and processes.

https://www.anaptyss.com/

No.293 Centegix 

Provider of incident response solutions, creating safer public spaces to protect people.

http://centegix.com

No.375 Financial Cents 

Company offering a practice management software built for accounting and bookkeeping firms.

http://financial-cents.com

No.424 Viva Finance 

Lending platform providing overlooked consumers credit based on metrics beyond their FICO scores.

http://viva-finance.com

No.474 ElastiFlow 

Network performance and security company developing open data platforms with monitoring tools.

https://www.elastiflow.com/

No.488 Flock Safety 

Hardware and software suite helping communities with crime prevention and security.

http://flocksafety.com

No.490 Ratings MD 

A platform helping patients find doctors by making verified ratings and reviews easy to find.

http://ratings.md

No.808 Cognosos 

A cloud-based real-time location systems company offering effective and inexpensive solutions in the health care, automotive, logistics, and manufacturing industries.

http://cognosos.com

No.851 adtechnacity 

Offers a fully managed native advertising platform that runs campaigns across the native advertising space to maximize both reach and ROI without being beholden to a single publisher network and limitations.

https://www.adtechnacity.com/

No.1,045 PadSplit 

A creator of a co-living market platform enabling workers to live in the communities they serve.

http://padsplit.com

No.1,163 SmartPM Technologies 

Provides data management and analytics software to construction stakeholders to help them interpret their data, improve performance, and minimize risks.

https://smartpm.com/

No.1334 Katalon 

Provides a comprehensive quality management platform, enabling teams to deliver world-class customer experiences faster.

https://katalon.com/

No.1,501 Mile Auto 

A B2B2C pay-per-mile insurance provider that provides lower mileage drivers with insurance based miles driven.

http://mileauto.com

No.1,579 Verusen 

An MRO intelligence provider helping manufacturers streamline their supply and materials management strategy to reduce risk, optimize capital, and ensure uptime.

http://verusen.com

No.1,590 Brightwell Payments 

A financial technology company solving payroll challenges in the cruise industry and enabling embedded cross-border payments.

http://brightwell.com

No.1,795 Polygon.io 

Develops a real-time financial data platform that displays stocks, forex, and cryptocurrency data, enabling clients to build APIs efficiently.

http://polygon.io

No.1,802 SingleOps 

Offers business management software for outdoor services from landscaping to tree care that grows revenue, increases profitability, and improves customer satisfaction.

http://singleops.com

No.2,033 SafelyStay 

Protects short-term home rentals with rigorous guest screening and comprehensive commercial insurance coverage embedded directly into the booking process.

http://safely.com

No.2,155 Voxie 

Offers an SMS platform purpose-built for franchises, empowering brands to connect directly with their customers and drive meaningful, measurable growth.

No.2,316 Wick 

A technology company whose mission is to accelerate the transition to AI-powered solutions in the B2C marketing ecosystem.

http://wick.io

No.2,449 Cogitate 

A software company that digitizes insurance processes, helping carriers and program administrators transition to cloud-native core policy, billing, and claim applications.

http://cogitate.com

No.2,540 RoadSync 

Offers payment products for warehouses, carriers, brokers, repair/tow merchants, and drivers, integrating and automating the financial systems fueling the logistics industry.

http://roadsync.com

No.2,681 IRONSCALES 

An email security solutions provider integrating AI and human insights to address phishing threats and advanced attacks like impersonation.

http://ironscales.com

No.2,965 Groundfloor 

A wealthtech company making real estate investing easy, known for its regulatory prowess and developing new financial products for retail investors.

http://groundfloor.com

No.3,276 Trella Health 

A data analytics software company focused on performance visibility, enabling health care organizations to improve outcomes and reduce costs.

http://trellahealth.com

No.3,615 Gain Servicing

Offers an AI-enhanced LOP servicing platform, integrating financial solutions for health care providers, personal injury attorneys, and plaintiffs.

http://gainservicing.com

No.3,819 FullStory 

A digital experience intelligence platform that enables businesses to improve their digital products and experiences across sites and apps.

http://fullstory.com

No.3,955 FinQuery 

Empowers experts with tools for smarter fiscal decisions on leases, software subscriptions, and financial contracts.

http://finquery.com

No.4,011 OncoLens 

A clinical decision support company connecting data and care teams for better cancer treatment plans.

http://oncolens.com

And many more Atlanta tech companies.

Congratulations to all the Inc. 5000 award winners!