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

This evidence offers three important lessons.

First, widespread conservative complaints about “liberal judicial activism” should be taken with many grains of salt. If we ask how often the justices vote to strike down agency decisions, Scalia and Thomas, the most conservative members of the Supreme Court, show the most activist voting patterns. By contrast, the justices commonly described as “liberal” are the least activist.

Of course, there are other measures of what makes a judge “activist,” and I do not claim that our method cannot be challenged, but it is useful to offer some statistical tests, which can ensure that critics are not building their conclusions into their definitions.

Second, partisan voting is a serious problem in the federal judiciary. If the EPA issues a regulation that is aggressive in cleaning the air, or if the National Labor Relations Board resolves a dispute in favor of a union, a panel that consists solely of Republican appointees is unusually inclined to strike it down. That’s indefensible. No one should approve of a situation in which the fate of an environmental regulation depends on whether a lower court panel consists of one, two or three Republican appointees.

Third and perhaps most important, federal agencies in an Obama or McCain administration are likely to make a number of decisions that are more liberal than those of the Bush administration. Many decisions will ultimately be challenged in federal court -- and the Republican-appointed judges who dominate the federal bench could well prove to be a big obstacle. On the Supreme Court, for example, Scalia and Thomas might be joined, much of the time, by Roberts and Alito. On key occasions, Kennedy might probably join them as well.

The lower federal courts could prove an even more serious barrier. Those courts have been stocked with appointees of Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush. The voting behavior of appointees has been clear: They show a distinctive tendency to strike down agency decisions that do not follow a conservative line.

Here, then, is a major warning for the next administration – and a potential problem for democracy itself.null

Judicial Partisanship Awards - The Washington Independent - U.S. news and politics - washingtonindependent.com

The fact that, under the gold standard, the value of each currency was fixed in terms of gold implied that the rate of exchange between any two currencies within the gold standard system was likewise fixed. As with any system of fixed exchange rates, the gold standard was subject to speculative attack if investors doubted the ability of a country to maintain the value of its currency at the legally specified parity. In September 1931, following a period of financial upheaval in Europe that created concerns about British investments on the Continent, speculators attacked the British pound, presenting pounds to the Bank of England and demanding gold in return. Faced with the heavy demands of speculators for gold and a widespread loss of confidence in the pound, the Bank of England quickly depleted its gold reserves. Unable to continue supporting the pound at its official value, Great Britain was forced to leave the gold standard, allowing the pound to float freely, its value determined by market forces.

With the collapse of the pound, speculators turned their attention to the U.S. dollar, which (given the economic difficulties the United States was experiencing in the fall of 1931) looked to many to be the next currency in line for devaluation. Central banks as well as private investors converted a substantial quantity of dollar assets to gold in September and October of 1931, reducing the Federal Reserve's gold reserves. The speculative attack on the dollar also helped to create a panic in the U.S. banking system. Fearing imminent devaluation of the dollar, many foreign and domestic depositors withdrew their funds from U.S. banks in order to convert them into gold or other assets. The worsening economic situation also made depositors increasingly distrustful of banks as a place to keep their savings. During this period, deposit insurance was virtually nonexistent, so that the failure of a bank might cause depositors to lose all or most of their savings. Thus, depositors who feared that a bank might fail rushed to withdraw their funds. Banking panics, if severe enough, could become self-confirming prophecies. During the 1930s, thousands of U.S. banks experienced runs by depositors and subsequently failed.

FRB: Speech, Bernanke--Money, Gold, and the Great Depression --March 2, 2004

Undeterred, the firm simply dumped what seemed to work in America into this country. When Starbucks opened an outlet in Lygon Street — a store that has since sat empty surrounded by bustling cafes — it became an amazing example of just how comprehensively a company could fail to understand its target market.

The inability of Starbucks to adjust its product to local conditions is illustrated even more clearly when we compare it to the international strategy of that other evil American behemoth — McDonald's. Where Starbucks offers almost the same products around the world, McDonald's varies its menu depending on local culture and local tastes. In India, they sell the McCurry Pan. In Japan, the "Ebi Filet-O" is available — a shrimp burger. In Turkey, McDonald's offers kebabs. Some of these products may sound stupid — and Canada's "McLobster" sounds filthy — but their existence shows that McDonald's understands the importance of understanding its regional markets, and tries to understand the peculiarities of local culture.

The failure of Starbucks in Australia tells us a lot about globalisation too. It isn't enough — as some anti-globalisation activists seem to assume — for an American company just to blanket a foreign market with a mediocre product.nullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnullnull

Memo Starbucks: next time try selling ice to Eskimos | theage.com.au

The crossroads — a place where two roads cross at or about at right angles, otherwise known as “the forks of the road” — is a metaphor used in religious and folkloric belief all around the world. From the legend of the delta blues guitarist Tommy Johnson (no, not Robert Johnson, as some believe), who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads, in exchange for other-worldly guitar playing skills, to the ancient Mayans to Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, the concept of the crossroads has been used to depict a “deciding moment” or “turning point” in life.

I think we’ve arrived at the crossroads in Atlanta, as it pertains to the early-stage venture scene. This is probably going to be a long post, so be forewarned.

The Appcelerator “Thing”

Unless you have been under a rock for the past few weeks, you are no doubt aware of the whole Appcelerator “thing”. Short version: Jeff Haynie founded the company, reached the $1M revenue mark, and poked around for venture capital funding here. He ended up heading west to Silicon Valley, pitched his deal there, and accepted a term sheet from some Valley VCs. Of course, as most VCs like to have the founders within “strangling distance”, the company is relocating corporate operations to Mountain View as part of the deal.

Scott Burkett’s Pothole on the Infobahn » Standing at the Crossroads in the ATL

Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness.

The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man’s land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.

Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip.

Far away, so close:

"Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are."

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea--"cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

... What does a man need---really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in---and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all---in the material sense.

... Where, then, lies the answer? In choice. Which shall it be: bankruptcy of purse or bankruptcy of life?

From earlier today:

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.

Diary, by Jenny Diski | LRB

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:

July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said falling U.S. home prices are ``nowhere near the bottom'' and the resulting market turmoil isn't showing signs of abating.

Oh fuxor. Maybe I can save a down payment in a year or so, though, and take advantage!

Greenspan Says Housing Prices Not Yet Near Bottom