Tag Archive for ‘fundraising’

Tag Archive for 'fundraising'

Startup Riot Update

Published on March 30, 2008 in Events, Jobs, Startups and Venture Capital. 0 Comments

So someone posted a request on my Skribit widget for an update on Startup Riot. So here we go.

A new site is in development (what, you don’t like my manual HTML hacked site?) and should go up in the next day or two. Along with that you’ll see all the details for the event which I’m pre-announcing here. Namely, it is going to be held on Monday May 19, 2008 from 9am until 5pm at Twelve Hotel in Atlantic Station. The goal is to get 45 startups on stage to present their three minute pitch on themselves. Already half of those slots are taken by companies who have pre-registered to pitch for the event. If you want to pitch, better act fast and sign up quickly. Companies may be from anywhere (not just Atlanta), may be in any industry (not just technology), and may be at any funding stage (or may not even be raising money). The audience will be made up of job seekers (potential co-founders, fresh grads, and others), potential clients (large companies and non-profits), and investors (angel investors and venture capitalists).

There are a couple of sponsors who have already agreed to support this event. I’m still looking for a few more to help pay for the overhead of doing this. After I secure those final sponsors, the event will be closed off to new sponsors or attendance by service providers. I’m going to manually approve each and every attendee to the event. Yes, it’ll be tedious but I’m willing to do that to ensure a high quality mix of attendees. Each group of attendees will have a controlled number of slots available so that there is a good mix of folks for the event. And yes, I will turn away folks based solely on my judgment as to their suitability for this event.

Finally, I’ve mentioned this to a few people but haven’t made a public announcement. We are going to have a keynote speaker at the start of the day’s events. That keynote speaker is now fully confirmed and will be Drew Curtis of Fark.com. Although a lot of people know Drew as the guy that has caused a lot of commotion, he’s also a serial entrepreneur. His talk will likely be an interesting and funny take on doing a startup. If you don’t know of Drew or Fark.com, just go read some stuff about him. Oh yeah, Drew also owns Fark TV which is hosted by SuperDeluxe.com which is a part of TBS.

I’m still working out the fees for registration but don’t worry - they’ll be far more reasonable than other events that supposedly cater to startups. There will be an option to pre-pay for a box lunch at the event as well. There are plenty of local restaurants that you can walk to if you want to do that instead. My goal is to have as few sponsors for this event as possible and one way to do that is to have each of you pay for your own lunch.

This is going to be a fun event and I’m definitely looking forward to seeing all the startups come out and do their three minute pitches. You can help by spreading the word about this event. The more high quality people that show up to the event means a better event for everyone.

ShopVisible Sees the Money

Published on January 28, 2008 in Startups and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

ShopVisible, an Atlanta startup that you probably haven’t heard of yet, has just raised an angel funding round of less than $1 million. The company is selling a platform that allows e-commerce to occur in a search engine optimized manner. Websites that use generic software for their storefronts are often hindered by the lack of search engine friendliness.

Consider that even blogging software will default to cryptic URLs, which are definitely search engine and user unfriendly, and you’ll quickly understand why this type of service is necessary. The goal here appears to be to reduce the amount spent on online advertising and instead spend some of the savings on a better designed site. If a site is better designed and optimized for relevant search terms, the site should fare much better in organic search results. Most users, myself included, trust organic search results way more than paid advertising. Truth be told, I use Adblock Plus in Firefox so I don’t even see most ads.

As an example, take a look at one of their clients - Serv-U. They are highly ranked for the search terms bar equipment (currently Serv-U has the top spot on Google), bar supply (#3), bar decor (#4), bar refrigeration (#1), bar glassware (#2), and restaurant glassware (#1). If that doesn’t tell you these guys have something going on, I’m not sure what will.

ShopVisible started as an idea in 2001 but it took on a new dimension in 2005 when inventor Josh Lloyd teamed up with Bryan Kujawski. Bryan was formerly a co-founder of 360i which also does ad management and search engine optimization. Sean Cook joined them as CEO in 2007. By the way, Bryan and Sean you need to make your LinkedIn profile URL more search engine friendly. :-)

Interesting in the funding round is that it seems to have been done through individual angels and without the engagement of an angel group. This is definitely a more time consuming way to raise money but if your deal is worthy of being funded, things get done quickly. I’ll talk more about the angels who were involved in this deal in a future post.

So congratulations to these guys for raising a good chunk of money to help launch their company. I’m looking forward to seeing the progress here and seeing if the ShopVisible platform can gain enough traction with customers.

Wrapup From Starting An Angel Organization

Published on January 24, 2008 in Events and Venture Capital. 0 Comments

Today I went to the Angel Capital Education Foundation’s event Starting An Angel Organization which was graciously hosted by the folks from the Georgia Centers of Innovation. The event was pretty interesting although I think it was more useful to the folks from Augusta, Gainesville, and Valdosta who are trying to start up angel groups in their cities.

During the event, I heard one interesting confirmation. During a conversation one of the participants agreed with my assessment of fund raising in Atlanta and said:

Yeah, the [fund raising] atmosphere in Atlanta has stagnated.

Wow. People from outside of Atlanta clearly see the situation here has stagnated but there are many folks here who just refuse to believe it. I’ve gotten numerous emails from local investors who say they just don’t agree with my assessment of the local fund raising atmosphere.

Am I crazy? What do you think of the Atlanta fund raising atmosphere?

Event: Starting an Angel Organization

Published on January 15, 2008 in Events. 2 Comments

Angel Capital Education Foundation Knox Massey made a mention on his blog for an event called “Starting an Angel Organization” (yes, even after all that I’m still willing to make this reference). The idea with the event is to help folks who might want to start a new angel group or join an existing angel group. Like I’ve discussed many times, more access to capital will help improve the ability for local entrepreneurs to focus on value creation instead of fund raising. Also, if entrepreneurs believe they can raise money and be based here, they won’t be tempted to leave.

Unfortunately, I heard about this event too late. The deadline to apply for this event is today. I’ve sent in my materials and should be good to go but if you’re at all interested (the event is on January 24th and it runs all day) go and register right away!

Value+ Ventures: What’s the Plus About?

Published on January 9, 2008 in Startups and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

After seeing this article about a new venture firm in town, I got excited. Before I got ahead of myself I thought I’d reach out to Steve Nussrallah and get some direct scoop and see if the story was, in fact, reality. Well, as it turns out not quite. It’s still a good story but not exactly as reported.

Steve Nussrallah Steve has left Noro-Moseley Partners, but it sounds like it’s on good terms. Steve and his crew (more on the crew in a minute) are occupying the same office space that was Noro-Moseley’s Mansell Office (it’s still on their web site, in fact). Heck, Steve is still getting email at his Noro-Moseley address. If he had left to start a competing venture firm, I don’t think that would have been the case.

There are three principals in the company. Steve Nussrallah, Jeff Neppl, and Christopher Demetree.

Steve Nussrallah just left Noro-Moseley. But before that he was the CEO of Concurrent Computer Corp. and remains the Chairman there. He spent quite a bit of time at Scientific Atlanta and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering (University of Cincinnati) and a M.S. in Electrical Engineering (University of Michigan).

Jeff Neppl and Chrisopher Demetree were both recently at Recordant. I’ll cover the company in a future post but it’s important to note that Recordant’s two fundraising rounds ($12m total) came from Pequot Ventures (New York), Kodiak Venture Partners (Boston), and Aurora Funds (Durham, North Carolina). Yes, that’s right - no local investors.

Looking at these guys, I note that none of them have an MBA. That’s probably a good thing. People with MBAs (like myself) and no real experience (unlike myself) tend to suck.

The one important thing to note about this group is that they don’t have a fund. They aren’t raising a fund and they don’t plan on raising a fund. They may make individual investments (from the partner’s pocket) or tap a network of high net-worth individuals for investments into startups. The original article implies that the firm is going to make investments through a fund, that just isn’t true.

So what exactly are these guys doing if they aren’t really doing investments? They are going to work with teams that may not be ready (because of the team, the product, or whatever) to raise money yet. These folks will come in and work for the CEO of the startup in whatever role is necessary and help them perfect their pitch and raise money. Steve was very clear on one point - they do not intend to take on a CEO role of any company they work with. Two big reasons for this. First, this is threatening to company CEOs. I’d agree with this statement. Second, if they raised money with one of their guys as CEO, they could get “stuck” running the company. Again, I’d agree with this statement. These guys are looking to ramp up a number of companies and hope that some become very successful.

So how do you know that this will work? Aren’t these guys just a bunch of consultants? Well, yes they are. But the way Steve described it to me was that their fees are deferred until fund raising and therefore any payment they receive is strictly success based. If they don’t help you raise money, they don’t get anything. Plus like I mentioned above, they may provide bridge or seed funding. Bridge money may convert into preferred shares with additional common shares paid for performance (at least this is how I understood it). Obviously, every deal will be negotiable and entrepreneurs should negotiate as much as possible with these guys and investors in the future.

When Steve told me the premise behind the firm, the immediate thought I had was “oh, this is garage.com all over again”. A long time ago, I was a garage.com client. Back in those days (2000), Garage.com didn’t have a fund and their tag line was “we start up startups” (in fact, I think I still have some pens with their old logo and tag line on it). That came to an end sometime in 2001 when they realized that they weren’t making enough money on startups to keep themselves going (plus the bubble imploded on them).

So is this a sign of a new bubble? Maybe. But I think there is real value in this model. I know the help we received by signing up as garage.com clients was tremendous (Digital Envoy was a Garage.com client before they had a fund). Perhaps the best help came from Chris Melching who was my speaking and presentation coach. After two days I was much more polished and I’ve carried Chris’ presentation tips with me ever since.

So if you’re a technology oriented entrepreneur, this might be a winner for you. Steve mentioned that their strengths are in the areas of financial advice, business development, sales, marketing, and operations. If you’re weak in those areas or are a first time entrepreneur, it may be useful to give them a call. Their website isn’t functional yet, but if you’re really an entrepreneur you’ll figure out a way to get a hold of them.

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