Startup Drinks at Fado Irish Pub!
{ July 30th, 2008 }

It’s the middle of Summer and great time to meet up with your fellow startup entrepreneurs and enjoy a proper pint. Join us for Startup Drinks Atlanta on Wednesday, August 13 at Fado Irish Pub in Buckhead. We’ll be there from 5:30PM until the drinks and/or conversation run out!

Startup Drinks - get together, talk about startups, form drunken companies.

Atlanta Startup Drinks

A Venture Capitalist search engine. Linked from the shyster.

punctuative! by Matt Winn - Venture Capital Database

NexentaStor is optimized for use in 2nd-tier NAS and iSCSI applications requiring open, low cost, high performance storage as well as dramatically simplified provisioning, expansion, backup, replication and archiving. NexentaStor is also used as a primary NAS in businesses that wish to expand at closer to commodity pricing.

ZFS storage appliance - kiss RAID goodbye.

Nexenta Systems - ZFS-based software storage solutions - Products

112 Early Stage Technology Companies in Atlanta

Atlanta technology companies - startups, new technology, investment opportunitities

I will be speaking at the ATDC this Thursday. I will be sharing lots of stories, experiences and HOT TIPS for entrepreneurs raising money.

When: August 7th, 2008 7:30am - 9:00am

Where: Advanced Technology Development Center - 3rd Floor Community Room (Directions)

Who should attend: Entrepreneurs, Angel Investors, VC's and anyone interesting in learning more about early stage investing.

Here is the write-up from the Technology Association of Georgia Announcement.

Charlie Paparelli invested in close to 20 companies in the last 15 years. Each week is met with entrepreneurs seeking meetings with him and presenting their opportunities. Very few get to the second meeting. There is no funding unless there is a second meeting. So, the first meeting has to bring the Angel or VC back to the table. In this session we will focus on the first meeting - how to get it and how to make it the meeting of your dreams. Charlie will share what he has observed as an angel investor in the Atlanta technology community. He will reveal his seven steps to a guaranteed second investor meeting. These steps include everything from preparation, qualifying the investor, presenting yourself and presenting your opportunity. This session is based on experience and will be both informative and entertaining. Hope to see you there. charliep

I think I'm going to burn some miles and fly to the ATL to catch this. Fellow attendees will have the opportunity to behold the glory of my present beard in all its glorious glory.

Charlie Paparelli: Getting to the Second Investor Meeting

Who Wants Seed Money?
Aug 03, 08 in Angels, Entrepreneurship, Startups 4 Comments

The comment stream generated by the word "discuss" in my quote of the week Friday is simply amazing. The quotes are not that important. Read the comments. Some really good stuff in there.

Several of the comments pointed out the need for a seed stage investment company like Y Combinator in the Southeast. I was a bit surprised that no one mentioned the previous efforts to create such entities in Atlanta. There are two. Boostphase, which Stephen Fleming, Wayt King, Keith McGreggor, myself, and others attempted to form last fall. And Profounder (that has a slightly different model) which was put together by Merrick Furst this year and in which I am involved.

So the comments got me thinking. Is it time to try and wind up Boostphase again from an angel perspective and do we have enough entrepreneurs in the Southeast, to quote Wei, to take a shotgun approach. So I am interested in knowing how many of you entrepreneurs out there believe you can answer the following questions, pulled straight from the YC application, in a compelling way.

What is your company going to make?

Please tell us about an interesting project, preferably outside of class or work, that two or more of you created together. Include urls if possible.

How long have the founders known one another and how did you meet?

What's new about what you're doing? What are people forced to do now because what you plan to make doesn't exist yet?

What do you understand about your business that other companies in it just don't get?

How will you make money?

How long will it take before you have a prototype? A beta? A version you can charge for?

If we fund you, which of the founders will commit to working exclusively (no school, no other jobs) on this project for the next year?

And if you can answer the questions in a compelling way, would you accept a deal where you got $25K and some expertise on how to get your concept to the angel/VC/buyout stage for 5 - 10% of your company?

I am going to try this one more time.null

Lance Weatherby steps up to the plate and tries to relaunch Boostphase, a YCombinator style fund that failed to launch last year. If you have a startup, step up ATLiens.

Force of Good: a blog by Lance Weatherby

What struck me, however, was this little tidbit from the notes section:

The name dsw is a carryover from the ancient past. Its

etymology is amusing but the name is nonetheless ill—

advised.

Well, obviously, that's a mystery in need of solving. I'll admit that not all Unix commands are clearly named, but this one was obscure even by those standards.

...

The original version of 'dsw' didn't have much of a user interface. Modern interactive file deletion commands do something like the following:

* Get a list of files in the directory.
* For each file, print out its name.
* Wait for the user to confirm deletion of the file.
* Repeat until there are no more files in the list.

'dsw' eschewed this obviously over-complicated interface by using the aforementioned woefully underutilized console switches.

TippingPoint | DVLabs | A Bit of History

Haynie is moving his software startup Appcelerator Inc., which had $1 million in revenue last year, to Mountain View, Calif., lured by $4 million in funding and the prospect of operating out of the tech industry’s Shangri-La.

...

Adding it all up leaves Haynie to conclude: “If you’re just a guy coming out of college, you’ve got a dream, you’ve got a really good idea, it’s impossible to be able to raise money and create a community around what you’re doing.”

Appcelerator isn't really my thing, but it does seem to have a lot of value for large companies developing rich internet apps. Anyway, its not surprising to see that Jeff is leaving town.

Frankly, I don't know what the startup scene is like in Munich, but Atlanta is hosed one way or the other. For a tech startup, there is no advantage to being in Atlanta as compared to any bumfuck part of the United States. I honestly believe that for my startup(s), the personal edge I gain from swimming or surfing in the ocean every day in a small town in Florida is larger than any advantage I got by living in Atlanta.

Sanjay Parekh's comments here. Lance Weatherby's comments here.

Haynie’s move to California makes local tech quake - Atlanta Business Chronicle:

About

WebShell screenshot (actual size on a 100 dpi computer screen)

WebShell is a web-based ssh shell.

It runs on any browser capable of JavaScript and AJAX. You can use it from any computer or iPhone/smartphone.

The server is written in Python and is very easy to set up on Linux, Mac OS X, *BSD, Solaris, and any Unix that runs python 2.3.

WebShell is based on Ajaxterm.

If you have any questions, use the forum.

WebShell

Course Description
This class will study the behavior of photovoltaic solar energy systems, focusing on the behavior of "stand-alone" systems. The design of stand-alone photovoltaic systems will be covered. This will include estimation of costs and benefits, taking into account any available government subsidies. Introduction to the hardware elements and their behavior will be included.

MIT OpenCourseWare | Special Programs | SP.769 Photovoltaic Solar Energy Systems, Fall 2004 | Home