I got the heads up on a press release coming out tomorrow from ATDC (thanks Lance!). If you haven’t heard, ATDC and VentureLab is doing an Entrepreneurs Showcase on May 15, 2008. This will be a chance to mix and mingle with a lot of entrepreneurs as well as folks from ATDC and VentureLab.
Of the six companies that are graduating ATDC, I think I know three of them decently well. It’s good to see these companies get moved out of ATDC so that space (and more importantly, attention) can be focused on the new companies that are already moving in (folks like Suniva and Clearleap among the many others announced recently). None of these companies strikes me as being as huge as MindSpring yet (MindSpring was also an ATDC graduate prior to merging with EarthLink). But then, MindSpring wasn’t a huge success right when they graduated either (although they were definitely on the right path). If even one of the graduating companies goes on to make it big, then this year’s class will have been a success.
There are also five companies that are graduating from VentureLab - three of which have already moved to ATDC. Personally I’m surprised this number wasn’t all five of the companies but perhaps the other two (Verco Materials and Zenda Technologies) are in a space that doesn’t make sense for them to be at ATDC. On a quick glance, this seems to be the case with Verco working in materials technology and Zenda in neurological testing. Given ATDC’s company composition as of late, these don’t seem to be a good fit.
Once registration opens up for the showcase, I know I’ll be signing up to go. It’s being held at the Biltmore (just down the street from ATDC) which was in the running to host Startup Riot this year. Speaking of which, I just hope I’m not too frazzled from planning Startup Riot which will be four days later. Make sure you go to that too!
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.
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.
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!
I heard an interesting PR related tidbit at SoCon this last weekend. Someone mentioned that Justin Rubner left the Atlanta Business Chronicle as their technology reporter. You can verify this by looking at Justin’s LinkedIn profile. This same person (whose name I’m intentionally avoiding) also mentioned that their PR firm said PR and the press in Atlanta are dead. I’d say that statement is probably pretty accurate. Of the two major papers we have (ABC and AJC), neither has really committed significant resources to covering the local startup scene. Yeah, we could get back to complaining about no awareness but instead I think our collective energy would be better spent in figuring out how to overcome this hurdle.
So what’s my contribution? Starting this blog for one. Getting into arguments about the local funding environment for another (there was a bit of this during SoCon as well). And for the third, I’m heading down to ATDC this Wednesday to do a brown bag discussion on PR and raising the awareness of your startup. I’ve worked up some analysis that I published before that I’ve updated and added to for this presentation. I think the brown bag is only open to ATDC companies but I’m not the one in control of that. If you really want to come, let me know and I can see if there are open spots for non-ATDC folks.
Oh yeah, if you want to get PR on this blog - it’s pretty easy. Just drop me a note and we can chat about what you’re doing and see if it fits with what I’ve been writing about.
This week is shaping up to be pretty busy in Atlanta. On Wednesday, StartupLounge is hosting its quarterly Capital Connections event. In the past there have been about 200 or so folks there.
I just heard that David Ratajczak is arranging a YnR gathering in the evening. YnR gatherings range in size but usually there seems to be around 30 or 40 entrepreneurs. I suspect this YnR will be larger just because its been a while since the last one.
Finally, the week winds down with SoCon 08 on Friday evening and all day Saturday (registration for this event has closed).
Unfortunately, I’m going to miss all of the events except for SoCon on Saturday. I’ve got a fun trip scheduled which I’ll probably document on my personal blog in the next week or so. Everyone have fun this week and get out and meet some interesting people who you don’t already know!
I got the heads up on a press release coming out tomorrow from ATDC (thanks Lance!). If you haven’t heard, ATDC and VentureLab is doing an Entrepreneurs Showcase on May 15, 2008. This will be a chance to mix and mingle with a lot of entrepreneurs as well as folks from ATDC and VentureLab.
So the things that are interesting to me is the time since they’ve been around (
I heard an interesting PR related tidbit at 
This week is shaping up to be pretty busy in Atlanta. On Wednesday, StartupLounge is hosting its quarterly 
On Thursday, TAG and ATDC have an 
Finally, the week winds down with 
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