I’m not entirely sure what the goal is here although the tag line implies that this conference’s goal will be to introduce (Georgia?) startups to venture investors. From the looks of the sponsorship package, the group is looking to raise a bit of money ($5k, $10k, and $20k sponsorships are available) - probably to pay for the facilities (it’s being held at the OMNI Hotel downtown).
As a little bit of a pre-announce, I’m hoping to organize a somewhat similar event this year. Some of the goals of this event will be the same as Venture Atlanta, but some will be vastly different. I’ll post additional details here as this develops.
Regardless, this increasing focus on the community and community building is certainly a great development and hopefully it’ll help spawn some great companies in Atlanta, the Southeast, and the East Coast.
After reading one of my early posts on Bilgistic, Lanceinvited me down to ATDC to talk about my findings and see if we could start some discussion about creating awareness for startups. So last Wednesday I did the brown bag session at ATDC (my third talk at ATDC overall - I mentioned the previous one here). The discussion was interesting and insightful for me and I hope it was the same for the attendees.
I will say I think my talk wasn’t as smooth as I would have hoped (and definitely not as good as my previous two brown bags) but since I’ve never given a talk about PR and awareness, I blame my lack of practice for any lack of coherence or structure. Also, I wasn’t quite expecting the very different levels of understanding in current social media technologies. Again, that probably goes back to my lack of practice and preparation.
I’ve uploaded my slides to Scribd although for some reason they didn’t publish totally right (I had to convert them to PDF and upload them since Scribd doesn’t deal with Powerpoint 2007 formats yet). Fell free to take a look although the slides lack quite a bit without my commentary. Thanks Lance for the opportunity to come down and gab!
Also, I got a note from Mitch Free at MFG.com pointing me to this YouTube video they created to celebrate their 8 year anniversary. This is actually a perfect example of what I was trying to convey at the session. Use tools available to you to highlight the great things your startup is doing. After watching the video I gotta think that MFG.com is a great place to work. The people in the video seem genuinely happy to work there. What a great piece of promotional content for future employee recruiting. Good job guys!
Wow, that title is a mouthful. On February 21, 2008 Georgia Tech is hosting an exhibition with business plan participants to show off their ideas. The event is free, as far as I can tell. Should be interesting and I plan to head down there to check out what is going on.
Most of you have probably seen this news but I thought I’d mention it. Sig Moseley, the head of Imlay Investments, is going to be inducted into the Technology Hall of Fame of Georgia (is there really no website for the hall of fame?). Under Sig’s watch, Imlay did a phenomenal investment into ISS which is probably their most well known exit. Sig has been fairly well involved in the local community and I must say one of the few local investors who has a Facebook account. The award will happen at TAG’s annual technology summit on February 27th. Congratulations Sig!
Last night was the inaugural Startup Dinner in Atlanta. As I mentioned in a previous post, Startup Dinner had a previous life as a series of networking dinners that Coty and I ran. We lost steam about a year and a half ago. I’ve decided to start these dinners off again and move forward with a regular schedule (probably monthly). Many of you who signed up for the dinner probably didn’t realize it was last night. That was intentional due to the high demand I’ve seen. I started inviting folks until we had the number we needed.
Our first dinner was pretty interesting. In attendance was (in left-right order in the picture above):
Yeah, the number of invites was pretty small. I wanted to keep the kick off dinner small so we didn’t spin out of control. Next month I’m hoping to do 2 tables of 6-8 people. Based on how many people have signed up for the dinner, we’ll need to keep this pace so that everyone has a shot of coming to dinner at least 2-3 times a year.
Already from this first event I’ve learned some things that we’ll institute next time. At the opening of dinner will be a 2-3 minute intro of each person around the table. We tried to do this last night but everyone’s company/activities were so interesting that we started digging right into them. Curse of the entrepreneur, I suppose.
If you’re interested in attending a dinner, sign up here but only if you are an entrepreneur or an investor of some sort (angel or VC). Other folks (vendors, service providers, etc.) are strictly banned from this event. Nothing against you folks but I’m working on startup/entrepreneurial community building and not creating a venue to sell your products/services. There are already plenty of venues for that.
Also, if you attend dinner this isn’t a venue for you to do sales (like what happened after SoCon) and it isn’t a venue to raise money. So don’t come to dinner prepared to pitch. Instead, come to dinner expecting to meet great folks and see if there is an opportunity for you to help out a fellow entrepreneur. By having a stronger local community, we’ll all have an easier time starting up companies.
At a conference last December that I attended for a few minutes, I heard Tino Mantella mention a Venture Atlanta conference that they (they being the Atlanta CEO Council, the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, and TAG I think) were planning to hold this year. I held off discussing this event until they had a website which they now have.
Wow, that title is a mouthful. On February 21, 2008 
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