Purewire has some startup money and is one of many examples that Atlanta’s Internet security industry is thriving despite a sour economy. New technologie s combined with a growing group of cyberthieves continue to create opportunities for new research and new companies.

“Atlanta is a good place to start a security company,” Judge said. It has enough companies and educational assets to attract talent, but not as many companies as in Silicon Valley, where job-hopping can be excessive. “There’s more loyalty, and you can focus on building a company.”

Atlanta is rising star in field of Internet security | ajc.com

Guy Kawasaki:

1. Focus on cash flow.
2. Make a little progress every day.
3. Try stuff.
4. Ignore schmexperts. (Schmexperts are the totally bad combination of schmucks who are experts -- or experts who are schmucks.)
5. Never ask anyone to do something that you wouldn't do.

The five most important lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur

When you launch an Atlanta startup, contact Paul Freet and have it added to atllogos.com

Twitter / pfreet: added Star Caller to atllog...

I'll call this technique the Gmail Launch, since it's based on what Gmail did. Gmail is probably one of the biggest Web 2.0 success stories, so there's an argument in its favor right there. Here's how it works:

1.

Have users from day one. Obviously at the very beginning it'll just be yourself and your co-workers, but as soon as you have something that you don't cringe while using, you give it to your friends and family. Keep improving it based on their feedback and once you have something that's tolerable, let them invite their friends to use it too.
2.

Try to get lots of feedback from these new invitees, figuring out what doesn't make sense, what needs to be fixed, and what things don't work on their bizarre use case combination. Once these are all straightened out, and they're using it happily, you let them invite their friends. Repeat until things get big enough that you need to...
3.

Automate the process, giving everyone some invite codes to share. By requiring codes, you protect against a premature slashdotting and force your users to think carefully about who actually would want to use it (getting them to do your marketing for you). Plus, you make everyone feel special for using your product. (You can also start (slowly!) sending invite codes to any email lists you might have.)
4.

Iterate: give out invite codes, fix bugs, make sure things are stable. Stay in this phase until the number of users you're willing to invite is about the same as the number you expect will initially sign up if you make the site public. For Gmail, this was a long time, since a lot of people who wanted invites. You can probably safely do it sooner.
5.

Take off the invite code requirement, so that people can use the product just by visiting its front page. Soon enough, random people will come across it from Google or various blogs and become real users.
6.

If all this works -- if random people are actually happy with your product and you're ready to grow even larger -- then you can start building buzz and getting press and blog attention. The best way to do this is to have some kind of news hook -- some gimmick or controversial thing that everyone will want to talk about. (With reddit, the big thing was that we switched from Lisp to Python, which was discussed endlessly in the Lisp and Python communities and gave us our first big userbase.)
7.

Start marketing. Once you start using up all the growth you can get my word-of-mouth (and this can take a while -- Google is only getting to this stage now), you can start doing advertising and other marketing-type things to provide the next big boost in growth.

How To Launch Software (Aaron Swartz's Raw Thought)

Despite his mistaking equity for revenue, he essentially summarizes decision you make any time you take any money, which is that you give up something for it. With Y Combinator, you do it at a lower price than you would a normal angel or VC round, but you also do it at an earlier stage and you get more value add for it. That’s clearly the standard in investing. Earlier stage = higher risk = lower valuations.

So it’s an exercise for the startup to determine if it’s worth it. What shocks me about a lot of the coverage about Y Combinator is that people seem to think that this is any different than any other investment round. It isn’t. It’s the same decision a startup essentially makes every day. They also seem to think the 6% average for the somewhere over $15k they get on average (making the valuation in excess of a quarter million) is a noteworthy amount. Maybe it’s my own naivety, but when I was in that position, my thought was something like “these guys are giving me a valuation of over $300k and we didn’t even have a PowerPoint to show them.”

Matt’s Homepage » Blog Archive » 6% Ain’t Really That Much

Star Caller provides a fun and fresh way to promote an assortment of products ranging from entertainment to hard goods. Star Caller utilizes celebrity fan bases to promote our clients products. Our marketing is successful because it not only reaches the target demographic, it also provides leads for our clients that would normally be unattainable.

What is it? Fun, dynamic phone calls, in the voice of stars and customized to the individual characteristics of each fan. Our technology allows you to speak directly to your fans - and have your brand go viral so that fans market you to others.

My new startup, Star Caller.

Star Caller - Home Page

Russell Jurney suggested yesterday via Skribit that I write an article about "ATDC Sponsored Coworking Space" and it was quickly voted up as a popular topic. So I gotta say something.

But before I do I need to point out something else. This is my personal blog. As it clearly states in the disclaimer in the lower right, the opinions expressed here are mine, not those of my employer. You want the official ATDC word venture over to PeachSeedz. Everything I say here does adhere to my personal values, which can be summed up in two words. Be good.

So with that out of the way, here goes.null

Man, I need to update my linkedin.

ATDC & Coworking: Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby

The plan I pitched to STARTech WAS unfundable. I didn’t have a clue how to pitch. I didn’t have the answers investors were looking for. It took me 100 pitches to learn how to do pitch (I can be a slow learner sometimes). By the time I was ready the STARTech guys were interested, too bad they couldn’t have helped me ‘perfect my pitch’ 99 pitches earlier. There is a need for a group to help entrepreneurs ‘perfect their pitches’ in Dallas. Ironically the North Texas investment community is already helping entrepreneurs ‘perfect their pitches’ without realizing it. The only problem is that investors outside of Dallas are getting the fruit of that work. While we turn up our noses at naive and inexperienced entrepreneurs pitching their startups those same entrepreneurs are learning from their mistakes. By the time they run out of investors to pitch right here in our own backyard their pitches are getting pretty good. Of course there are even more entrepreneurs who simply give up, who don’t get on a plane and keep trying. They, wrongly, assume that it must be their deal that is bad, when it is really the market.

What if we had an angel group that instead of spending time on the frontend ’screening’ out the bad/unfundable startups, they spent time helping entrepreneurs learn how to pitch their ideas to investors? What if that were the ONLY cost of admission? My goal with the SpringStage angel/entrepreneur group is to become the FIRST place entrepreneurs from North Texas come. You may not raise the money you need, but hopefully you will learn the skills necessary to raise it right here in our backyard. I am holding our first organizational meeting on Monday at 4PM. If you are interested in helping build a more friendly entrepreneurial community in Dallas I invite you to attend.

Perhaps why Dallas doesn’t have many startups! : Texas Startup Blog

If the startup ecosystem in Atlanta wants to grow we need to support some experience building and experience sharing. The next generation of startup veterans will come from the rookies of today. We need to support these individuals with both time and money. Look around at the host of companies that are leading the web 2.0 revolution - many of them were started by young unprovens.

Success isn’t predicated by age, experience, or even the level of investment an individual can raise. Intelligence, hard work, ability to adapt to change, and singular vision - these are the traits of individuals who build successful startups and return not only to investors, but to the community that helped them out along the way.

I charge Atlanta, investors, mentors, and advisors to look beyond gray hairs and resumes to find great ideas with driven founders and support them in their quest to build the next great startup. I for one will be watching as the next generation of entrepreneurs matures, learns and develops. I hope that one day I might even be considered one of them.

Solid post from a first-time Atlanta technology entrepreneur.

Why the unprovens matter : Wrangling the nerds

Pricing

I just put up some thoughts on pricing for a coworking space in Atlanta. As a disclaimer none of this is set in stone but merely a foundation to get some conversations started.

Over the coming weeks we should be scheduling a meeting of the community to further grow the idea of the space and the membership levels. I am calling out Mike Schinkel to organize this as he said he would. Plus he’s a great guy and has experience with organizing the masses.

So go check out the pricing page and leave some feedback.

Jeff Gombala outlines pricing for the Atlanta Co-working Space, and challenges Mike Schinkel to run it.

Atlanta Workspace