My collection of southeast/Atlanta entrepreneur/startup/VC blogs.

Bloglines | rjurney's Blogs | Atlanta Startups

I said, “Fred deserves a shot. Let’s invest.”

Yellow Flag 6: When you feel your heart taking over by shutting off the blood to your brain, call a time out, shut up, and make no investment decisions for 24 hours.

Well we did invest. The plan we signed off on showed minimal revenue for the first five months. Although Fred would continue to make calls on the current prospect base the investors gave him, he was also to hire the key people, find office space, build the product and build the marketing materials. He did everything he said he would. As we looked to the sixth month we realized the sales were not coming through.

Red Flag: No traction…no company.

That’s the story. I now look back and see all the yellow flags I just blew right by. I kick myself because I know better than to get ahead of my experience-based investment criteria. I made rookie mistakes and I didn’t do any favors for the entrepreneur, my fellow investors or myself. Good intentions, enthusiasm, and money are not the formula for a successful startup.

Paparelli Community Cafe: Six Yellow Flags...An Angel Investment Story

Welcome to SL #14! In keeping with the StartupLounge way of tearing down barriers and artificial walls, we were pleased to be joined by Jason Caplain, a co-founder and General Partner with Southern Capitol Ventures out of Raleigh, NC. Jason is a guy that breaks the stereotypical VC mold in a lot of ways (i.e. we think he’s a part of the solution, not the problem.)

In this show (recorded just hours before our first Capital Connections event), we chat with Jason about their fund strategy, some of the things that they are doing differently to engage entrepreneurs, as well as what he thinks about the Atlanta market. And a nice batch of your emails as well. Good stuff!

As an added bonus we have our first “Look who gets it!” segment.

Jason is a very nice guy. And a VC too. Who woulda thought?

StartupLounge.com » SL #14: A VC That is Part of the Solution

Hot deal on RAM!

scaryideas | Extensys: 64k for $1495

About

Typeface was built from the necessity of needing a good well rounded weblog that is feature-full yet nimble enough to take on peak web traffic. There are already various other weblog applications such as WordPress, MT , Typo , Blosxom , and Angerwhale. All the above are excellent pieces of software, however, I wanted to take the best ideas of each application and integrate into a single entity - Typeface. Typeface benefits from the vast resources of CPAN and the excellent Catalyst community.

Neat thing I dunno much about for Catalyst/Perl.

Typeface Project - Elegant Blog Tool and Weblog Platform

Which is more likely to lead to a successful startup business?

* I have a brilliant idea for an awesome new technology It rocks!.
* I work in the … industry and our biggest challenge is … And I have a simple solution to solve it.

When we ‘relaunched’ Racemi in 2002, we had a terrific technology roadmap and were going to bring Utility Computing to the world. Nobody wanted it. It did not solve any specific need. Only when Racemi re-engineered and then targeted the software at solving specific data center problems did their business take off.

Are you waiting to be an entrepreneur because you don’t have any brilliant ideas? Great ideas can sometimes be a bad thing. They prevent you from focusing on what your customers want. Customers don’t care how wonderful your technology is. They just want to solve a problem.

Find a significant un-met need in a growing, referencable market. And solve that need in a way that is easy for your customers to buy and deploy.

Big Thinkr » Blog Archive » Focus on a market need

Martin serves as Managing Partner to Burr & Forman’s Atlanta Office. Martin’s areas of practice include Corporate Law, Intellectual Property & Technology, Mergers & Acquisitions, Healthcare and Telecommunications & Media. His business advisory experience ranges from growth companies to middle market and Fortune 500 companies in digital commerce, information technology, software, electronics, media, communications, healthcare and life sciences. Martin is licensed to practice in both Georgia (1993) and Alabama (1978).

Run the communications group?

Martin R. Tilson, Jr. - Attorney Information - Burr & Forman LLP - Results Matter

We continue to improve eMpower Lite Reporting based on customer feedback. Here’s a little shot of how we integrated trend lines with our application.

Really easy to use trend analysis for slot machines from Lucision. And web based!

Lucision Company Blog » Trend Lines

Giving Up

I haven't posted in awhile because I've been busy. Busy is good. As we continue to build out the team at Bloglines, I was reminded of something that first occured to me during ONElist's early days about starting a company.

As an employee climbing the corporate ladder at a company, it's all about getting more. More responsibility, more control, a larger salary, a bigger title. However, the exact opposite is true when you start a company. A big part of starting and building a company is about giving up. A founder is in a weird position. When you first start a company, everything is yours. You own all the stock, you make all the decisions. This point of creation is the only time this will be the case, however. Forever after, the founder must give up more and more control to other people and more and more ownership to employees, investors, etc. The founder must do this for the company to be successful, but at the same time this is the opposite of what many people are used to doing.

Anyways, it's just one more thing to consider when deciding whether to start a company. I've found that hiring and working with exceptional people and wanting to see them succeed makes the process much easier. Besides, running a company can be a lot of work, especially for us lazy folks. We need all the help we can get!

Tough lesson.

Wingedpig.com - Mark Fletcher's Blog: Giving Up

Start testing your web site right now! (Please install Ascertia's root CA certificate so that Internet Explorer can install the required Active X control.) You don't need to give us your email address or create an account. If you decide you like Blue Violin, you can create an account in about 30 seconds so you can save your scripts. Also, we'll never give or sell your name or email address to anyone; we hate spammers as much as you do.

We hope you enjoy Blue Violin - a new tune for testing your website.

Is Blue Violin the best thing since jell-o cups or do you think it's a steaming pile of recycled electrons? Either way, send me an email at josh.watts at blue-violin.com.

This is a cool product. It is similar to something I did for slot machines at one point. I dig.

Blue Violin: Record and Play Back Web Page Interaction: QA Automation for Web 2.0