Scott Burkett did a good post on the Atlanta Business Chronicle today in which he talked about how Justin Rubner has left the ABC and there are no plans on replacing him. I heard about this as possible a few weeks ago but it looks like Scott has outside confirmation. The funniest comment though comes from Stephen Fleming:
Q: Does the Atlanta Business Chronicle care?
A: No.
See, wasn’t that simple?
Honestly, I don’t really care if the ABC continues to report ion startups. In my opinion, a weekly newspaper can’t really report fast moving news of startups effectively. Granted the reason why they decided not to cover this area of news probably has more to do with advertising dollars than journalistic effectiveness. If you talk to anyone who has started their company in the last year or two, they’ll likely not have even heard of the Atlanta Business Chronicle but they sure have heard of TechCrunch or Mashable or Read Write Web. Of course, if you haven’t heard of these sites, you just might be an Internet dinosaur.
This blog has been eerily quiet since I announced and started ramping up for Startup Riot. Everyone seems to be very enthusiastic about the event and I’m hurriedly seeing venues and trying to figure out a cost effective way of doing this. As I mentioned before this is going to be an event focused on getting pitches from startups (Atlanta or not) in 3 minute chunks. Of the initial projection of 45 slots, I’ve already got about half of them filled with companies who have pre-registered. I may expand this number based on demand (which will then require reconfiguring either the schedule or the venue or both) but the initial 45 companies have the best shot of pitching at the event.
I’ve also started reaching out to investors (both angels and venture capitalists) to introduce the event. Everyone so far seems interested in attending (even without a firm date set). My next round of introductory invites is going to go out to large local corporations and non-profits. The large corporations are a good chance to land paying customers (or potential acquirers!). My hope is that startups at the event will see non-profits as a way to get name recognized pilot customers who can provide valuable feedback while non-profits get to use bleeding edge technology for free/cheap. If you view non-profit folks in that capacity I think it’ll be a win/win.
So what do I need from you? A few things. I’ve already got a handful of people who have volunteered their time and help for this event. I need more of those people - people who volunteer to work the registration table, help with presentations, move people from area to area, etc. Also, if you have contacts with venture capitalists, angel investors, large companies, or non-profits who you think would come to this event, contact me and I’ll introduce the event to them with your help. This will help get them to register for the event once details are set.
So how do you contact me? Well, you can email me, DM me on twitter, or send a message through LinkedIn.
Big funding news this morning. Clearleap just announced a $9 million first round of funding that they’ve closed. Who is Clearleap? Well, they’re pretty new to the scene since they just started back in mid-2007. They were founded by a bunch of ex-N2 Broadband folks. N2 Broadband was previously acquired by Tandberg Television (Tandberg was itself acquired by Ericsson after they received a buyout offer from Suwanee based Arris Group).
So the things that are interesting to me is the time since they’ve been around (7 months according to Braxton Jarratt - Clearleap’s CEO - his photo on the left), the size of the round they got (especially for a first round of funding), and the funders themselves. On the first two points I don’t have much to add so let’s talk about the funders.
The lead funder seems to be Trinity Ventures which is based in Silicon Valley (Noro-Moseley also invested in this round as did Imlay Investments and the former CTO of Time Warner Cable). Trinity is a pretty large fund overall with about $1.2 billion under management and their last fund (Trinity IX) closed in 2005 with $300 million. Given the age of the fund, they’ll probably start raising another fund in a few years. But more importantly, Clearleap is Trinity’s first investment in the Atlanta area. They’ve had interesting investments like Speedera (disclosure: they were a partner of mine at Digital Envoy before they were acquired by Akamai) and scanR but also companies like Starbucks and P.F. Chang’s (not sure if this means that Clearleap’s offices will be stocked with Starbucks). Hopefully with this initially foray into an Atlanta area startup, Trinity will start looking at other opportunities in the Atlanta area. Also, I hope I can entice them to attend the upcoming Startup Riot event. Same goes for the folks from Clearleap (you reading this Braxton?).
As for what they’re doing, Clearleap is working on a way to expand the ways that television content is delivered to consumers. Instead of doing something like Joost, Clearleap is focused on working with satellite and cable providers to deliver a cohesive experience for the consumer. From the little I know it sounds interesting although the path to adoption is a lot harder since it takes agreement and coordination from entrenched players. That being said, I haven’t heard of many people talking about using Joost (I tried Joost and gave up on it - I should probably revisit it at some point) so perhaps the issues aren’t that unique and Clearleap’s approach will provider a better user experience and thus lead to wider adoption.
By the way, this is also a huge win for ATDC as well since Clearleap was recently added as an ATDC company.
So congratulations to Braxton and the rest of the folks at Clearleap! We’re all looking forward to hearing about some interesting developments from you guys and seeing you involved in the local community! By the way, Clearleap is hiring.
Published on March 14, 2008
in Events.
This last week we had our second Startup Dinner with a much larger crew than last month. In total, 16 entrepreneurs/investors joined up for an evening of meeting new folks and talking about local issues. I’ve written enough about Startup Dinner in the past so I won’t go into the gory details again. If you’re interested, feel free to signup as long as you meet the qualifications (must be an entrepreneur or investor of some sort and cannot be a service provider). Remember that Startup Dinner isn’t a venue to pitch for business or for money.
I’ll arrange another dinner next month. In the meantime, those of you who have attended so far need to reach out to your dinner companions and see if there is something you can do to help them. By building a stronger local entrepreneurial community you’ll not only help others but you’ll help yourself in the long run.
Photos of the dinner have been uploaded to Flickr and join the photos from the previous dinner.
Published on March 12, 2008
in Startups.
I’m not sure if I’m supposed to be giving publicity to Servinity just yet. In fact, I didn’t even bother to ask. They’re a new startup and they haven’t launched anything yet but I’ve been keeping up with their blog. Man, talk about a pretty well done startup blog (way better than this one).
The blog has covered all kinds of mundane, but important, aspects of starting a company. They’ve posted all the different logo revisions they chose from (I think they chose the best one of the batch) as well as how they came up with the name (ConnectedSpoons isn’t all that bad).
You don’t often get entrepreneurs who talk about all of these aspects of their business. Usually this is because of a lack of time instead of a lack of willingness. I’m sure glad these guys thought to do this and engage folks early in their lifecycle. And Josh, don’t worry I don’t mind the long blog posts. They’re pretty interesting - at least to me.
So for now, all I can say is - Servinity Now… Insanity Later! (if you don’t get that, go watch some Seinfeld).
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