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!
I was going to write a long post about what I thought was right and wrong with the event. Fortunately both Lance Weatherby and Scott Burkett did that job for me. I will chime in on the whole video thing (Lance railed on this last year as well). I think it’s really silly to have a videotaped intro done by someone who is in the audience. Not only that, this same person will come up to the podium after the video shows. Generally, people use video for including individuals that can’t make it to the event. And if you are going to do something silly like this, the presenter should be well rehearsed and have a smooth presentation. One can forgive a presenter stumbling when they present in person but you can re-record a video as many times as is necessary to get a smooth presentation.
Speaking of in-person presentations, John Imlay was an outstanding speaker. Of course, if I were European I’m not sure I would have appreciated a number of his jokes but for us Americans the talk was great. This talk alone made the trip to the Summit worthwhile. As an added bonus I can now say that John Imlay is in fact a real person since so few people have ever seen the man. He does exist and he is absolutely hilarious.
Personally this was a great event for me because it shows what should and shouldn’t be done at a pitch event. I’m taking these lessons and will incorporate them in the event I’m working on. More details soon!
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’d heard rumblings of this before but now the news is out. Tony Antoniades is leaving ATDC to join Autotrader. I don’t have many more details than what is in this blog post by Lance. Good luck Tony in the new position!
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.
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