|
Archives
Latest Entries
Links
  |
Atlanta native, academic capitalist, technology professional, spaceflight amateur. Stephen Fleming's blog is at home at http://academicvc.blogspot.com/
March 2008
Sunday March 30, 2008
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 5:29PM EST on March 30, 2008
Okay, I'm going to talk about local politics for a bit. Those of you reading this outside of the state of Georgia can skip this post.
Georgia is a fabulous place to call home, but trying to grow high-tech businesses in the Deep South has a few challenges that you just don't encounter elsewhere in the country. One is the lack of local venture capital, which has been discussed ad nauseum elsewhere on the Web (and which I'm going to do again soon as part of my Raising Capital series on this blog). What did Deep Throat say? "Follow the money." Why don't we have a lot of venture investors locally? Several reasons, but one is that we don't have a lot of institutions locally who invest in venture funds. (See here for a discussion of how that works.) Why don't local institutions invest in venture capital funds? Well, for some of the very biggest, it's illegal. Not "against their policy." Not "doesn't meet their current investment objectives." Not "something they've tried and didn't like." Illegal. Requiring a change to state law. Specifically, I'm talking about the state Teacher's Retirement System and Employee's Retirement Systems, which together have tens of billions of dollars of assets under management. All of it in stocks, bonds, and money-market funds. None of it is currently invested in what's popularly known as "alternative assets"—a broad family that includes a wide variety of investments that are "alternatives" to traditional stocks, bonds, and money funds. Notably for our purposes, alt-assets include venture capital funds. Forty-nine states in the Union permit state pension funds to be invested in these "alternative assets" to allow portfolio diversity and to provide fund managers with opportunities to generate increased returns for retirees. Georgia is the only one which forbids it. Personal anecdote: Obviously, with 49 role models out there, we can learn what has worked well and what has led to problems. The amount invested in alt-assets should be a small fraction of the overall fund, probably a single-digit percentage of the total. There should be oversight requirements, and disclosure rules, and ethics rules, and conflict-of-interest rules. And since we're new to this, we might not want Georgia to be the first institutional investor in a new fund—we should probably follow more experienced investors. Unfortunately, there is a well-organized group of teachers, retired teachers, and others who oppose any expansion of the state's pension investment profile. You can visit their home page here and see what you think of their arguments. Basically, they seem to be allergic to the word "risk." Since these are the same teachers who routinely lead Georgia's elementary and high school students to the Bottom Five ranking in national mathematics scores, you can make your own decisions about their statistical skills. The local investment and technology communities have crafted a bill that provides all of the safeguards above—it's called Senate Bill 80. It explicitly excludes the Teachers Retirement System from any reform, so nothing would change for the teachers. (Which makes you wonder why they're making so many phone calls in opposition.) It would not require the state to invest a single dollar in any alternative asset fund, but would simply make it legal if the fund managers choose to do so. And it would cap any alt-asset investments to a total of 1% a year and 5% overall. SB 80 passed the Georgia Senate in 2007, which means it needs to get past the Georgia House in this year's session, or we have to start over from zero in 2009. It made it out of the House Retirement Committee last week on a 7-6 vote. Now it's in the House Rules Committee, and it probably needs to pass that tomorrow or Tuesday if the bill is to make it to the floor of the House before the session ends on Friday. Late last week, Shirley Franklin sent a staffer to the Capitol to request that, with caveats, city of Atlanta pension funds should be included in the language of SB 80. This request is huge, since it supports our contention that alt-asset investing will be good for all retirees, and it's not just a tool to shovel money into the pockets of Republican fat cats. (Thanks, Shirley!) So now it's up to the House Rules Committee and to individual House representatives. The membership of the House Rules Committee is online here. Do you know any of these people? In any case, you have a local representative in the Georgia House. I'm embarrassed to admit that, since we moved since the last election, I had to go online to look up my own representative. It's easy to do here. Then I called her and left a brief voicemail explaining that I was supporting SB 80 and hoped she'd take that into consideration when the bill came up for a vote. (I made it clear I was wearing my constituent hat, not my Georgia Tech hat.) I was shocked when she called me back, and spent fifteen minutes talking about the bill. Maybe this idea of local representative government has something to be said for it! She said:
The fact that I was the first of her actual constituents to contact her and that I was in favor of the bill carried a lot of weight with her. The Republican leadership in both houses supports SB 80. If Shirley has actually put the Atlanta Democrat representatives in play, we can pass this bill next week! You can read the full text of Senate Bill 80 here. Read the talking points that TAG has prepared about the bill here. Then, if you agree that Georgia should join the other 49 states in permitting investment flexibility, pick up the phone and call your House representative on Monday! Constituent service is going to play a major role in whether this bill lives or dies in this year's session... and, if my experience is any guide, most legislators are hearing from pressure groups opposed to SB 80, but aren't hearing from individual constituents who support it. Let's change that. Tomorrow. Friday March 28, 2008
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 9:55AM EST on March 28, 2008
This is a continuation of a previous set of posts and is tenth in a series.
 Earlier I said "Your business plan is a marketing document as much as it is anything else." As several of us have discussed on Lance Weatherby's blog, some investors today may not actually read your entire business plan. (They probably will have an associate scrub it, though.) As I commented there, Writing the business plan is good discipline for the entrepreneur (and good entrepreneurs frequently have a problem with discipline). If you've done it right, you should have no trouble getting meetings scheduled with venture capitalists. (Really. Trust me. These folks get paid to make investments. If they don't make investments then, eventually, they don't get paid.) You need to make sure you have scheduled meetings with the right venture capitalists, and you may have to buy some plane tickets, but all you have to do is demonstrate your ability to create a business plan that's in the top 10% of your peers, and you'll get meetings. So, first off, congratulations. You've done a lot of hard work. Now do more. Remember the bit about targeting your investors carefully? If not, go read it. Because now that makes a huge difference. You're going to go to a meeting, chewing up valuable time for both you and for the VC... it'd better be a good match. You already learned a lot about the VC firm before you networked your way into sending them a plan. Now you have to learn more about the individual(s), and the current status of their fund. Individual You're not going to go meet with "XYZ Ventures." You're going to meet with Joe Tightpockets, or Sally Webtragic, or whoever. Find out who else is going to be in the room beforehand. And now the Google Machine is your friend. Learn everything you can about the individuals... where they went to school, where they worked before they became a VC, which deals they've done, which boards they sit on, which non-profits they contribute to, etc. Make some phone calls, explore connections in LinkedIn. Don't worry about feeling like a stalker. Privacy is overrated.  Current status of fund In the process of stalking researching your prey potential investor, you have found out a lot about his or her firm. A lot of it looks repetitive and deadly dull. But you need to know this stuff. You can never step in the same river twice. And XYZ Ventures is never the same investment firm twice. Existing portfolio They're always adding portfolio companies. That's a two-edged sword for you. VC firms love having synergies between their portfolio companies. That's because we're all trying to emulate the glory days of KPCB and their "keiretsu" investing model. So if you can become a part of the supply chain of an existing XYZ portfolio company -- or vice versa -- you score points. But, if they've already invested in a company that's "too close to your space," you can see their eyes glaze over pretty quickly. Be aware that their definition of "too close" and yours may be very different. Stage of fund You don't get a check from "XYZ Ventures." You will get a check from an entity with a name like "XYZ Ventures IV, L.P." I talked about limited partners earlier... they're the ones with the money. As the venture firm goes through the cycle, the general partners raise distinct funds, usually distinguished by Roman numerals. If things are going well, the GPs will be managing multiple overlapping funds... in this example, XYZ Ventures III, IV, and V. There are really good reasons to not allow cross-investments between funds, so you're going to have to match your capital needs to the capital reserves of one of those funds. Let's say that XYZ Ventures III is ten years old, IV is six years old, and V is two years old (a typical spacing). Fund III is in "harvest mode"... with luck, they've made their numbers with some good IPOs or M&A activity, they're not making any new investments from this fund, and they're reserving any remaining capital for follow-on investments to get the stragglers sold off at any acceptable price. Fund IV is nearing the end of its investment cycle, but there likely some capital still available for new investments. And Fund V is wide open, with lots of uncommitted capital. So, you would be happy with an investment from either Fund IV or Fund V, right? Wrong. It depends on your stage of development. If you're raising a Series C round, and you expect that to be the last round of capital you need before IPO or M&A in a couple of years, then you're a good match for Fund IV. In fact, they're probably looking for a few deals just like you, with lower return potential but lower risk, to fill out the portfolio and keep the numbers looking good. If, on the other hand, you're just starting off with your Series A fundraising, Fund IV would be a terrible investor for you. Because in a year or two, you're going to need your Series B... and XYZ Ventures IV will now be in its eighth year, and they will be stingy with capital... and by the time you need your Series C, Fund IV will be shutting down, with the last few deals (you!!!) being herded to the auction block, bleating and mooing. On the gripping hand (you need three hands in this business), Fund III is hungry for good deals, but they haven't made their numbers yet, so they're still swinging for the fences. If you come to them with a potential base hit, they may look right past you at the next bright shiny object to come their way. So, you want to raise Series A money from a young fund, of an appropriate size that your returns will be material in making good returns for the overall fund. It may be Roman numeral XIV, but as long as it's only a year or two old, they'll be able to keep investing their pro rata in every round until you get profitable, get sold, or get dumped. It gets confusing, because all of these funds are "XYZ Ventures" and they're all represented by the same set of blue-buttoned-down khaki-clad Stanford MBAs, but it's the sort of thing that you really don't want to get surprised with down the line. Internal industry model. Remember that you've been doing your homework, so you've probably been able to establish some common threads behind your targeted venture firm. They might have done a bunch of SaaS deals, or maybe they've gotten into open-source. You don't have to fit that model, but you have to understand it... and explain either how you do fit, or how you're a useful counterbalancing bet. If you're not prepared, then the VC can make some stupid sweeping comment like "But all computing is going to move to the cloud, leaving your rich client orphaned" and you wind up gaping like a fish. If you're prepared, you can have an intelligent reply and actually lead the VC into a discussion rather than ex cathedra pronouncements. Why all this homework? It's to prevent you from making an incredibly common, yet incredibly stupid, error. Let's say you and your team (bring one or two other people... don't go alone, and don't bring a crowd) have a meeting scheduled in the VC's office at 2:00 pm. You're going to be there at 1:50 to allow for getting lost, to scope out the conference room, and to pre-flight the technology. (If you are using a laptop, it should already be booted. If you're using a projector, it should already be powered on with your first slide on the wall. Even if you still use a PC, you might think about getting a Mac for your presentation work to reduce the possibilities of embarrassing fumbling in front of your audience.) So a pair of associates are on time at 2:00, and your target VC waltzes in at 2:04. You chit-chat for three minutes about the traffic, if you got your parking validated, and yes, the view from the window is spectacular. It's now 2:07 pm. The meeting will end at 3:00. And now you open your mouth and say something suicidally stupid. "Tell me about XYZ Ventures." VCs have egos as big as all outdoors; it's in the requirements spec. So he (or she; ego is genderless) will start telling you about XYZ Ventures. Their history, their investment philosophy, their portfolio companies, their IPOs, their value-added service, their limited partners, their special limited partners, their double-secret extra-special limited partners, their entrepreneurs-in-residence, their Ferraris, their yachts... it'll probably take 25 minutes until they have to stop for air. It's now 2:32 pm. The meeting is still going to end at 3:00. And you have just wasted half of your allotted time listing to this blowhard natter on about information that is all on their Web page! Imagine a different scenario. You have chit-chatted. It's now 2:07 pm. Now you say, "I've done a lot of reading about XYZ Ventures. I know you've invested in three SaaS companies, and that you personally are on the boards of Bloxrog and PurpleGroovy.com. I went to school with Ramit over at Bloxrog, he's a great guy and I know you like working with him. Let me show you how my company can fit just upstream of PurpleGroovy.com, and why we'd love for XYZ to lead our Series A round." That took fifteen seconds. It's still 2:07 pm, but you now have my full and undivided attention. My Treo stays in its holster, I'm gesturing to my associates to take copious notes, and now you can swing into your 10-20-30 presentation (more on that soon). I'm 1600 words into this blog post, and I haven't yet touched on the most important part of this chart, so I'm going to leave that to the next post! Wednesday March 26, 2008
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 4:27PM EST on March 26, 2008
Today has just been insanely busy (which is why I'm not in L.A. for the announcement), and this is my first spare moment at my desk, but a lot of people have noticed that XCOR made the Drudge Report today! I've also been told via Twitter that we were on CNBC.
So, finally, we're able to talk about the Air Force contract and the Lynx spaceplane. If a picture is worth 1000 words, what is a video worth? And, before you ask... yes, I am 6'4" and, yes, I fit in the cockpit. I've checked. :-) Press release here; good articles here and here. Sunday March 23, 2008
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 10:49PM EST on March 23, 2008
Someone on Skribit asked "How has Google changed your workflow?"
Two ways to interpret that question: what impact has Google in particular had on my workflow, and what about "cloud computing" in general? I have to admit, I've handed over the keys of my personal privacy to Google. As Scott McNealy says, "Privacy is dead, deal with it." Of course, David Brin beat him to that by a number of years with The Transparent Society. Just another bit of evidence that science fiction authors are the advanced planning department for the human race. So I use a Gmail address as my primary email. (I still have a Georgia Tech email account on our local Exchange server, but it's buggy and unreliable. I actively discourage people from using it. Once we get Zimbra spun up later this year and unplug Exchange, I'll try focusing on my GT account again.) I also have a Mindspring address that I keep for nostalgic reasons (I have a 3-digit account number from 1994) but, honestly, I've begun wondering why I bother anymore. I have to keep manually rummaging through spam there, and Gmail figures it out automagically. Moreover, I have other email addresses that I've handed over to Google using Google Apps for Your (My) Domain. (Hereafter "Google AFYD", since Google couldn't come up with a decent name for the service.) My 'digitaldixie.com' domain is hosted by Google; other than a couple of trivial Web pages, I keep multiple accounts active there, as well as multiple mailing lists that I use for internal and external use. (If anyone knows of a decent mailing list manager in the cloud, please tell me, because Google's is minimal to the point of foolishness.) CalendarWhen I stopped using Exchange, I unplugged from the campus calendar, going 100% Google Calendar. I use a combination of SpanningSync and Mark/Space's MissingSync to keep that synchronized with my Palm Treo 680. (No, I don't have an iPhone. Yet.) My admin and my wife have read/write access, certain other people have read-only access, and the entire world has read-only access to "free/busy" information. It works. Someday I'd like to see better Exchange synchronization (I have multiple calendars, but Google will only sync one with Exchange), so I haven't fiddled with that yet. BloggingObviously, I use Google for blogging, given where you are reading this. Web hostingMuch of my Web site hosting for www.stephen.fleming.name is done with Google AFYD. When I used to run my own server, I hosted several friend's sites out of my living room. When I permanently shut down my server (anybody want to buy a copy of Mac OS X Server 10.3?), I transitioned them all to Google AFYD, and they all seem happy enough.DocumentsI have mixed feelings about Google Docs. I have been collaboratively editing a business plan for one of my companies with people scattered across the country using Google Docs (the old Writely), and it's adequate, but I find PBwiki to be friendlier and more flexible. And Google Presentations was just a mess when I tried it; apparently, it's gotten better, but if I needed something like this, I'd use Slideshare.net. But Google Spreadsheets is priceless. I keep budgets and grant request information in that, where multiple members of my group can edit it, and we each always have the current version. Bliss. When we had a dozen scattered/busy people reviewing nearly 200 applications for the TAG Top 10/Top 40, we survived by keeping everything in a Google Spreadsheet. Next year, I want to pipe information from Wufoo directly into the Google Spreadsheet without manual cut-and-paste... if any Wufoo ninjas are reading this, email me! ChatMeh. I can't use GoogleTalk without booting Parallels on my Mac, and I don't care enough to bother. I'm of the age where I live on email, not IM. Moving to the CloudSo I use Google services a lot. More generally, the question can be interpreted as "How are you moving to cloud computing?" And the answer is "As quickly as possible!" PBwikiThe core of much of my daily activity is now on a collection of PBwiki sites. Interactive collaboration sites that you can set up in 30 seconds, and your colleagues can start using immediately with zero training. Hosted securely and redundantly so that I don't have to play sysadmin. Fabulous. We're beginning to keep all our VentureLab documents in PBwiki, and it was invaluable when having to go through 66 shared projects to develop an annual report last month. But it's not just for business, though. I have used free sites for personal projects... when we were going through the complexity of downsizing from a 6000 sq. ft. house to our new 3000 sq. ft. home, my wife and I shared a simple PBwiki with our realtor, our home stager, our house painter, and a few other people to make sure that the myriads of things to do got appropriately divided and conquered. We pulled BarCamp Atlanta together with a PBwiki. And our neighborhood book club uses PBwiki to share ideas about new books, as well as a calendar of meeting times and locations. I tested Google Sites (former JotSpot) when it was released last month, and basically yawned. PBwiki is faster, more capable, and more accessible outside the "walled garden" of your Google AFYD domain. And we are site-licensed for SharePoint 2007, but I still find it horribly clunky and painful to use. The only reason I publish anything at all on SharePoint is the CorasWorks plug-ins which make it possible to extract a subset of structured data and publish it to the world. Amazon S3I started using Amazon S3 a couple of years ago (whenever it was released) via Interarchy. I use it for the Web hosting tasks that are not a good match for Google AFYD -- primarily my filesharing site at http://www.stephenfleming.net/filesharing.html. I experimented with selected S3 offsite backup with Interarchy's NetDisk option. That was adequate, but the world really changed when I discovered JungleDisk. Now my S3 bill has gone up dramatically, but I figure that my data is safe unless Amazon disappears. If Amazon goes away permanently, it means that the Internet (and the U.S. economy) has experienced a catastrophic event so terrible that I no longer *care* about my backups. Or, possibly, about breathing. Mint and Quicken OnlineI'm currently experimenting with both Mint and Quicken Online, running them in parallel since the first of the year. I don't want to have to remember which computer I last used (or my wife last used) to update our Quicken file. Again, pushing stuff into the cloud, in this case with services that Google doesn't provide (yet). ConclusionI guess I've surprised myself in writing this post with all the stuff I'm doing with the "cloud" in general and Google in particular. I realized just how important connectivity had become a few weeks ago when Comcast broke Internet access for a big chunk of Atlanta. No mail, no blogs, no wiki, no calendar, no Twitter... heck, my wife and I both found ourselves connecting through our Treos just to get our connectivity fix. Maybe I should worry...
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 3:45PM EST on March 23, 2008
This is a continuation of a previous set of posts and is ninth in a series.
 So it's always nice to talk about "Seven Deadly Sins"... there are probably more when it comes to business plans, but these are pretty basic. Yes, I have seen plans that commit all seven! 1) Insist on a non-disclosure agreement up front. Venture capitalists don't sign NDAs. At this point (2008), neither will many angel investors. Get over it. If the first page behind your cover page is an NDA, most investors will close the cover and toss the document in the trash. (If you're into saving trees and don't actually print your business plan, that's fine. Update metaphor accordingly.) Why? Brad Feld gives as good a summary as I have ever seen, and further quotes Guy Kawasaki: Before you even start addressing the hard stuff, never ask a venture capitalist to sign a non-disclosure agreement (NDA). They never do. This is because at any given moment, they are looking at three or four similar deals. They're not about to create legal issues because they sign a NDA and then fund another, similar company--thereby making the paranoid entrepreneur believe the venture capitalist stole his idea. If you even ask them to sign one, you might as well tattoo "I'm clueless!" on your forehead. 2) Focus on the technology—not the market, the competition, and the customers. This one is common. Founders of startups tend to be passionate about their technology, and that passion leaks out all over. Including into their business plans. As I said last month... Cut out almost everything related to your neato-keen technology. Out of the twenty pages, you can have two on technology. Not three. Two. Because I want you to spend the remaining sixteen pages (two more got chewed up by the executive summary, remember?) talking about your team, your company history, your customers (if any), your revenue (if any), your competitors (you definitely have some), your channel strategy, your potential acquirors... you know, all that stuff that might actually make me want to invest in your company! There will be plenty of time to talk about your technology later. For now, I just need enough of a taste to get hooked. 3) Practice top-down sales forecasting. Again, an amateur mistake. It's a red flag when I see "The market is a billion dollars a year, so all we need is 2% and we're a $20M/year company." Bzzzt. Wrong! Not because the math is wrong (it's not). But because mature markets tend to shake out into a 50% player, an 30% player, a 15% player, and a bunch of losers. If you're targeting 2% share, you're saying "I want to be a loser!" (Or you want to be Apple. Great; I respect that. But I probably wouldn't invest in it as a startup strategy today.) That's top-down sales forecasting, and it's useless. Professionals do bottoms-up sales forecasting: Example: "Our average sales cycle is XX days. We have XX sales professionals on board now, and are hiring XX over the next quarter. The new ones will take XX weeks to come fully online. At steady state, each salesperson can handle XX accounts simultaneously while chasing XX prospects. Our conversion rate from prospects to sales is XX% per month. This translates into a sell rate of XX widgets per month starting in Q4. Average selling price will be reduced to $X to allow for anticipated competition, so Q4 sales are anticipated to be $XX0,000."Okay, now you have my attention. We may disagree on the assumptions, and we can have interesting fights over sensitivity analysis, but at least I know I'm not dealing with an amateur. Note that you will back into a market share calculation here that actually has meaning, rather than sticking your fingers into the wind and making a wild guess. If your share isn't 15% or better, perhaps you need to re-scope your market—not "share of wiki sites," but "share of SaaS wiki sites hosted for SMBs." Does it still sound interesting? Compelling? 4) Use four significant digits everywhere. I touched this one in passing two paragraphs back. If you say your sales forecasts for the fourth quarter are $320,000, then I may be happy or sad about that number, but at least you're not advertising that you're an idiot. If you say your forecasts are $321,783.45", then I know you're an idiot. I don't invest in idiots. Don't just regurgitate numbers because Excel calculated them for you. Excel has a ROUND() function. Use it, early and often, and establish reasonable error bars on your forecasts. Two significant figures everywhere is about right. Three should be backed up by some historical experience. Four or more is silly. (This is about the only place where I miss slide rules. Yes, I had one. No, you couldn't get arbitrary precision out of it... you had to learn to live with two significant figures, plus a third which you estimated and which was frankly questionable. False precision is another red flag for sloppy thought processes.)  5) Position investors as necessary-but-unpleasant "mushrooms." You know how to raise mushrooms: keep them in the dark and feed them plenty of... um, manure. Investors hate that. If you're smart enough to run the company without any advice from anybody, I hope you're rich enough to run it without any money from anybody, too. Every VC claims to be "value-added." A pleasingly-high percentage actually are. When you do your diligence on the firm (yes, you should do diligence on them, just like they are going to do diligence on you!), figure out which is which... and you should only be targeting the ones that really do add value to your company. Once you've picked value-added investors, let add value! Bring them in to your thought processes and decision-making! Otherwise, you run the risk of surprising them. Investors hate surprises. (Even good ones.)(Really!) 6) Fill your plan with typos, errors, chartjunk, 3D graphs, and repetition. I touched on this in the previous post but let me emphasize it here. If you make mistakes in your plan, I'm going to assume that you are stupid, sloppy, lazy, or incapable of getting help. None of these make me want to invest in you as an entrepreneur. For "chartjunk," see Tufte. Reminder: Edward Tufte is in town tomorrow and Tuesday (24-25 March 2008). If you're in Atlanta, you should go. And, for crying out loud, if you're not displaying three dimensions of information, don't use a three-dimensional chart. The only reason to use the 3D charts in Excel are to intentionally obscure your data and try to hide something you're not happy about. Red flag! As Jorge Aranda says, "Excel must be the most powerful enabler of graphic disasters in the world. Most people don’t have the time, or the dedication, or the skill, to improve Excel’s default graphic settings." Set yourself apart: Learn. Or hire someone who knows already. (As you might expect, the graphics defaults for Apple Numbers, their spreadsheet package, are infinitely more attractive than for Excel. But the principle remains... if you're just prettying up the numbers, stop. Is this really what you want to be doing in a business plan?) 7) Expect to be acquired by Cisco or Google. This slide used to say "Microsoft," but the boys in Redmond have had a rough decade (and their proposed acquisition of Yahoo is just sad). Google and Cisco are still hanging in there, and continually building value by acquiring bright young startup teams. But there's a limit to how many companies Google and Cisco can buy, and there are a lot of great startups out there... more than that limit. Don't set your focus so narrowly that there are only one or two or a handful of potential acquirors. Build enough value that lots of companies will want to assimilate your team, your customers, your product, and you (probably in that order). That's what leads to bidding wars. Cha-ching! Repeating a comment to my previous post—if I'd seen this earlier, I'd have linked to it more visibly: http://www.scottburkett.com/index.php/atlanta-business-scene/2008-02-16/having-fun-down-at-tech.html Good advice there from another member of Haynie's Atlanta Startup Posse. Wednesday March 12, 2008
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 1:31PM EST on March 12, 2008
Met this morning with Allyson Eman, who is the newly-hired Executive Director for VentureAtlanta, a major VC event being held 15-16 October, 2008. (Their Website is pretty minimal so far, but you can read about it here.)
I told Allyson she needs to start blogging to reach the new generation of entrepreneurs who don't read the Atlanta Business Chronicle. She's willing, but a complete novice in the blogosphere. She needs someone to set up a decent-looking template for her and do a little bit of training. In exchange, she's offering a free membership to the conference ($500 value). Anyone interested? Contact Allyson directly at aeman@ventureatlanta.org. (Yeah, I've just exposed her email address to spam harvesters, but her Website did that already, so the bots have already found her...) Monday March 10, 2008
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 2:00PM EST on March 10, 2008
As most people reading this blog (at least the ones in Atlanta) are aware, Tony Antoniades left Georgia Tech last month to take a position with Cox Enterprises. Tony did a great job for nine years, and we wish him nothing but the best in the private sector.
The job posting for his replacement is up at <http://tinyurl.com/3c3m4b>. This person would be Director of ATDC as well as Director of Entrepreneurial Services for Georgia Tech. ATDC is the country's oldest and most successful university-based technology incubator, and this will be a high-profile position in Atlanta, in the Southeast, and nationally. Georgia Tech is conducting an internal and external search for the position. If you think you might be the right person, follow the link and fill out the form! Monday March 3, 2008
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 9:57PM EST on March 3, 2008
I've just discovered that the Technique printed my letter to the editor in their February 29 edition. Unfortunately, they printed my original letter with an atrocious error (of mine) in it, and my hastily-emailed correction didn't make it into either the printed or online edition. Oops.
Just to prove I can do simple arithmetic, here's a corrected version. To the editors: In your February 22 issue, you printed an editorial from the University of Connecticut titled “Electoral College an outdated institution.” The article claims that “in a time where there were not even light bulbs,” our candidates for President “crisscrossed the country” to campaign in elections. This is inaccurate; the modern tradition of cross-country campaigning is a 20th century invention. Earlier candidates stayed home and talked to newspaper reporters; party officials and surrogates in each city led local campaign rallies. But the premise of the article is that, since we have TV, YouTube, and the Internet, that we should do away with the Electoral College as a mechanism that has “outlived its purpose.” Nothing could be further from the truth. Precisely because we have 24/7 campaign coverage is why the Electoral College is more valuable than ever. If we scrapped the Electoral College, a successful candidate could focus just on densely-populated media-saturated areas and collect enough votes to become President. Do we really think such a candidate would reflect the needs of Montana? Or, closer to home, rural Georgia? For those who claim that it’s “unfair” that a candidate (like Al Gore) can “win the popular vote” and still lose in the Electoral College... Al Gore knew the rules on the day he entered the race in 2000. And precisely that situation happened three times before in American history (1824, 1876, and 1888); the Republic did not fall. You have to win by the rules; complaining about the rules later is just sour grapes. Imagine a best-of-three playoff series in baseball. Team One wins the first game 2-1, loses the second game 5-2, and wins the third and deciding game 2-1. Sure, the fans of Team Two can claim that their team “won the runs count” by outscoring Team One by 7 runs to 6. But any Team Two fans who claim that their team should be the champion look selfish and small. Kind of like the author of your guest editorial.
Posted by: Stephen Fleming at 4:15PM EST on March 3, 2008
Save the date! The annual ATDC/VentureLab graduation ceremony and entrepreneur's showcase will be on May 15, 2008, at the Biltmore Hotel.
More details when they're available, but anyone interested in being a sponsor, please contact me or Melissa Zbeeb before the slots are all gone...  Add it to your calendar now!
|
