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.
Tag Archive for 'Georgia Tech'
Lance mentioned that this might be the biggest raise (for Georgia) for 2008. He might just be right. Suniva announced a raise of $50m from NEA, Goldman Sachs, and HIG Ventures. They’re also looking to pick one of three manufacturing facilities which are located in Gwinnett or Cobb counties (woot! OTP baby!). Good new for Georgia and for Georgia Tech grads who might want to work in the energy and solar industries. It also makes me wonder if Suniva might be a good acquisition at some point for Siemens whose Energy & Automation unit is based in Alpharetta.
It looks like the GOOG is starting to add onto its Atlanta staff by opening up seven new positions in its Atlanta data center. I hadn’t realized that the Google data center in Atlanta was down on 10th street but once you see how close that is to Georgia Tech, you can see why since it’s ideally suited to attract PhD candidates as they graduate from school.
I just stumbled onto the fact that someone at Georgia Tech is sending sports updates via Twitter. How cool is that? They even took the time to update the background layout of their profile on Twitter. With only 19 followers clearly they haven’t gotten the word out on this. How about a link on some Georgia Tech website?
I wasn’t going to write anything about this but when I got stared down by the double Knox, I knew it was a sign.
In the first article, I found it interesting that VentureLab has launched 19 companies in 6 years. So I went looking on VentureLab’s site to find out who that was and they list 11 graduate companies raising $42 million. Huh? Then I saw the fine print - “as of May 2006″. What?!?! This goes back to my previous post about accessibility of information and promoting our own good successes. If I were a part of the 8 companies since May 2006, I’d be a little upset that I’m not getting some link love from VentureLab.
The second article was more disappointing. To the question “How long does it take you [Atlanta Technology Angels] to decide to invest?”, Knox Massey answers (emphasis is mine):
The quickest we made an investment was two weeks. More typical is two to three months from when we meet them. We’ve worked with companies that may not be ready for up to a year. We don’t want put somebody who is not ready in front of the group.
Holy cow. Maybe it’s been too long since I raised money (1999 and 2000-1), but that time frame sounds ridiculously long to me. Maybe I’m not hip with the current fund raising time frames. When we started raising our angel round of money, it took us two months to raise $1.5 million. Sure, that fits in Knox’s time frame above but I’d be willing to bet the dollar amount we raised is a factor of five to ten more than what ATA invests. By comparison, when we raised our venture round it took us 10 months to raise $10.5 million in venture capital (I’ve posted more about this experience on my personal blog here and here).
This is one of the reasons I was so stoked to hear about the Edison Fund at Georgia Tech. The time that an entrepreneur spends on fund raising is time he/she isn’t spending creating value in their enterprise. I think angels and VCs should be more aware of this and avoid wasting entrepreneurs’ time. The Edison Fund is fairly new but my hope and expectation is that investments will move fairly quickly from application to funding or rejection. I think this will be beneficial to all involved parties.
Which leads me to TheFunded.com. Knox has dished on the site but I think it’s a great resource for entrepreneurs. The comments on ATA are fair based on what I know. Nothing outrageously negative but pretty informative to entrepreneurs before they pitch to ATA (yes, I’m a TheFunded.com member but I never ranked ATA because I don’t have any tangible experience with the group). Knox thinks the site instills fear. I’d say it only instills fear in those who need to be worried. Worried your terms aren’t competitive? That’ll get exposed. Worried you aren’t responsive? That’ll get exposed. Are you rude to entrepreneurs? That’ll get exposed. More than anything, I’d use The Funded to weed out the absolute worst investors when you raise money.
So have you raised money recently? How did it go and how long did it take for you to raise your round?