Tag Archive for 'Startup Weekend'

Gifts for the VC You Love

Published on February 20, 2008 in Other, Startups and Venture Capital. 1 Comment

So if you thought coming up with a company over a weekend was extreme, Andrew Hyde is upping the ante. During a plane flight they launched Startup Plane and came up with a new company - VCwear.com. They’ve even racked up a few sales apparently at $100/shirt. I told Andrew that I thought they could actually sell a bunch if they dropped the price but heck, what do I know.

Below are some of my favorite VCwear.com shirts. The first cause I like Snoop, the second would be better by changing “with” to “to”, and the third cause, well, it’s true. If they were cheaper I’d probably buy a few of the last one and send it to some “friends” of mine.




Appcelerator Has The Pedal To The Metal

Published on January 13, 2008 in Startups and Technology. 4 Comments

Appcelerator LogoBack in December Jeff Haynie and Nolan Wright scored a big PR boost for their company, Appcelerator, by getting Marc Fleury to join their advisory board.

Most people would be happy and then take it easy based on this. Yeah, not these guys. From Jeff’s tweets, I learned that there was an article written about them and they were a finalist for an award.

Geek note: when you look at Jeff’s Twitter page, you’ll see he has customized it with the Appcelerator logo. He’s serving that logo off of Amazon’s S3 web service. Cool. It’s costing him .114 cents each time that image is served. Yeah, I did the math. Yeah, I’m a geek.

The article is a pretty nice writeup in Information Week. I hadn’t realized that their efforts might be causing issues at Adobe but it sure seems that way. It’s a good thing to disrupt the status quo. That’s what startups are all about.

Jolt AwardsOn top of that, they are a finalist in the Jolt Awards. Honestly, I don’t know anything about these awards but the fact that they’re from Dr. Dobb’s Journal must mean they are pretty legitimate. By the way, Appcelerator’s competition for the award includes Adobe and Sun. Not bad company to be in.

They’re pretty secretive about who is using the Appcelerator platform so I thought I’d go trolling. One I know is the Startup Weekend Atlanta company Skribit. I know this because Jeff and crew were involved in the development and they were able to get that going very quickly. The only other site I could find (honestly, I didn’t spend much time trolling) was Team One Eye which seems to be run by one of Appcelerator’s employees. I’d say it’s a a good vote of confidence if Appcelerator’s own employees are using their stuff for their non-work projects.

Appcelerator has been around for less than 2 years (including the time under the previous name - Hakano). I count eleven people on LinkedIn that say they work at Appcelerator (although Nolan’s profile still lists him as being at Vocalocity). Pretty sizeable and I think they’re growing fast. This will be a fun one to watch and could be another smashing Atlanta hit. By the way, they are self funded and have grown through revenue. That makes this an even better story!

Skribit Added

Published on January 8, 2008 in Startups and Technology. 0 Comments

If you hadn’t heard, Startup Weekend came to Atlanta a few months ago.  That event birthed Skribit, a social blog suggestion widget.  I’ll write more about the idea and company in a future post but for now I just wanted everyone to be aware that I’ve added the widget to the blog.  Feel free to go in and suggest topics or companies for coverage and I’ll try to start knocking them off as quickly as possible.

Lawyers (or others) Taking Equity

Published on January 1, 2008 in Startups. 0 Comments

Venture Hacks has a good article on how to approach the issue of lawyers asking for equity in your startup in exchange for their effort or deferred fees.  I must admit, I haven’t heard of this happening in Atlanta or the East Coast so this may be a West Coast phenomenon.  In my old company (Digital Envoy), I don’t think we ever did this (as far as I know) although we ended up having nearly every law firm in Atlanta on the payroll at one time or another.

I also wanted to take a moment and commend one great law firm in town.  Morris Manning and Martin used to do work for Digital Envoy but I became really impressed with them when they agreed to present to the co-founders of Skribit, the Atlanta Startup Weekend 2007 startup.  Scott Allen came down to ATDC - on a Saturday, no less! - and helped get all of the incorporation papers in order.  Big kudos to MMM for doing their part in helping out the local entrepreneurial community.