Episodios

  • EP52 | Paul Judge | Gridline | Atlanta Startup Convos | Hook Security | Fabrice Grinda

    EP52 | Paul Judge | Gridline | Atlanta Startup Convos | Hook Security | Fabrice Grinda
    May 26 2023

    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

    My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures.

    When we set out to do a five minute podcast over a year ago, said said we’ll need 6 months to get enough data and adjust strategy if needed. Not only did we do six months, we consistently put something out weekly for a year. As we start our 52nd podcast, I’m here to say this will be our last one. In one year, there have been thousands upon thousands of downloads with days worth of listening around each episode. The numbers are good but, I also think we can make an even bigger impact with storytelling and startups, therefore, we’re going to take some time to ruminate on the several ideas brewing around media, podcasting, content, and more. We have seen the power and leverage of short-form content and are hooked, however we can be even better, bigger, and more impactful. If you really miss us, we’re stacking up guests on the Atlanta Story Podcast throughout the summer so follow along with more stories of building and creating over there as well. The next guest is a good one. With all that said, buckle in for our 52nd and final Five and Thrive and thank you, the several thousands of you, who have listened to an episode over the past year. We’re closing this chapter but the next one will be even better, I promise       

    Major Announcement of the Week: Major news coming out of Soft Bank’s Open Opportunity Fund, local investor and entrepreneur, Paul Judge is taking the lead as Chairman to invest $150M into minority entrepreneurs. Last year, black founders received 1% of venture capital investment and the Open Opportunity fund is a major step and resource to invest in the best. Congratulations to Paul on this fantastic opportunity and focus. We put a link in the show notes to his interview with TechCrunch.    

    Companies Coming Up: Gridline, out of Atlanta, is the company coming up. Gridline helps any accredited investor gain access and insight to alternative assets quickly and easily. Their software provides the individual investor with access to funds typically reserved for institutions and large family offices all while ensuring compliance. Check out Gridline if you’re looking to access more alternative investment opportunities which is led by CEO Logan Henderson. 

    Event of the Week: Atlanta Startup Convos passed 3000 members this past week and they keep getting better and better. The next one is on Wednesday, June 21st. The three companies are Ubiquitous, Novel, and Turbine. All of them are products worth taking a look at and putting a save the date on the calendar.  

    Raise a Glass: Congrats to Zack Eikenberry of HookSecurity for closing a $5.5M round led by Tampa Bay Ventures. If y’all remember, Hook Security provides modern and engaging approaches to cybersecurity. Their team of 21 is growing and they are tackling the market. Keep an eye on them as the Tampa startup scene is bustling.  

    Blog Post of the Week: We have a long blogroll of entrepreneurs and investors we subscribe to and one of my favorites, Fabrice Grinda. He just came out with a great post titled: Timing is Everything. He analyzes how great entrepreneurs and investors are excellent predictors of what will happen in the future. However, what many folks get wrong is the timing. He brings in some examples of the dot com bust including Pets.com and Webvan, both of those markets have created mult-billion dollar businesses today, it was just back in the late 90’s, they were just too early. However, Fabrice goes into a laundry list of markets, ideas, and products he is excited about for any entrepreneur to go build the next great business. I highly recommend it as the opportunities out there are limitless! 

    And on that note, that is 5 minutes. 

    Major Announcement of the Week: Paul Judge 

    Company Coming Up: Gridline

    Event of the Week: Atlanta Startup Convos

    Raise a Glass: Hook Security

    Blog Post of the Week: Fabrice Grinda: Timing is Everything
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    6 m
  • EP51 | SDR’s Needed | Grep-a-palooza | Volantio | Seth Radman | Flock | Eskuad

    EP51 | SDR’s Needed | Grep-a-palooza | Volantio | Seth Radman | Flock | Eskuad
    May 19 2023
    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. Companies Worth Applying To: There are several companies looking for SDR’s including Greenzie, AdPipe, and Copient Health. If you or any of your network know a talented recent graduate looking to break into sales, I cannot recommend these options enough. SDR’s are needed across many companies and these three are ones I know that will cultivate them into a valuable, qualified, and efficient sales professional.   Event of the Week: Last week I was on the Friday Nooner with Pete, Jackie, and Joe of GrepBeat and through our wonderful conversation, was reminded that Grep-a-palooza is coming up on June 1st. It is being held in Raleigh and has a great set of topics and discussion points. We put the link to the entire agenda in the show notes.  Company Coming Up: I came across a unique and fast growing company out of Decatur this week called Volanto. Founded in 2014,. Volantio frees airlines from the constraints of fixed capacity and they do this through a dynamic platform that moves select customers on popular services to alternate off-peak choices post-booking (with compensation).  This is fully automated self-service process which allows airlines to secure more prime capacity, improved guest satisfaction, all while significantly improving their bottom line.  Volantio’s customers include 15+ airlines globally.. Volantio was founded by Azim Barodawala and Fenn Bailey and they just raised their Series A last September which includes customer, Alaska Airlines. Impressive progress.  LinkedIn Post of the Week: I follow several thought leaders whether it’s on LInkedIn or Twitter and every now and then one post just blows me away with its simplicity and timeliness and that happened with a recent post from Seth Radman. Seth is the CTO of Infinite Giving and has built dozens and dozens of products and one of his most recent posts just struck such a wonderful chord was around MVP’s and pushing out a product. He writes: “If your MVP doesn’t immediately drive word of mouth growth, improving the product won’t help. Adding more features to something that didn’t get people excited on Day 1 won’t make it better.” The simplicity in this message makes it resonate so well. If future customers in your market are not getting excited about the value prop of your product, it will never matter that the degree of it’s robustness or functionality. At Atlanta Ventures, we call this authentic demand and it is required for a market – even if it is initially a niche market – to build something successful. Great thought leadership Seth and keep creating.  Platform Announcement of the Week: FlockSafety, which helped secure a dangerous shooter in Atlanta two weeks ago, announced a major product and really platform evolution in the business. Their 4 major products which includes their license plate reader (LPR), now incorporate the Flock Safety Raven product, their FlockOS product and the FlockSafety Condor. This mix of software around audio, video, and streaming services makes up for their full suite of services to fight crime in communities and I can tell you, as my kid’s school was locked down two weeks ago, I’m very glad these advancements are being made.   Flock Safety currently serves 3,000 communities across the U.S. The company’s devices and software provide the evidence for police to solve about 7% of reported crime in the U.S.   Raise a Glass: This week, Eskuad out of the Atlanta Tech Village raised $1.6M led by Outlander VC. Eskuad is a mobile-first data platform built specifically for field operations. You don’t even need wireless access. Their products help you build forms, enter data, manage tasks and teams, with world-class offline function. Customers are saving 20% in operational costs and getting reports delivered 20x faster. Congrats to Eskuad on the round and the future ahead.  Annnnnd that’s five minutes! Companies Worth Applying To: SDR’s need at AdPipe, Greenzie, and Copient Event of the Week: Grep-a-palooza Company Coming Up: Volantio  LinkedIn Post of the Week: Seth Radman’s Post Platform Release of the Week: FlockSafety Raise a Glass: Eskuad
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    5 m
  • EP50 | ViewFi | Florence Healthcare | LVMH | DataSeers | Intown Golf Club | Cloverly

    EP50 | ViewFi | Florence Healthcare | LVMH | DataSeers | Intown Golf Club | Cloverly
    May 12 2023

    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

    My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures.

    Companies Worth Applying To: We have two companies worth applying to right now that are worth taking a serious look. 

    First is ViewFi, the telemedicine company out of Atlanta led by CEO, Michael Williamson. ViewFi connects you with the world’s top medical experts to get your pain or injury diagnosed, without the wait. They are hiring for a Sports Medicine Physician. The process for ViewFi helps you connect, diagnose, plan, and recover all through a simple application alongside a trusted and premier medical professional. 

    Next up, this past week, A.T. Gimbel and team hosted another fantastic Atlanta Healthcare Meetup with Ryan Jones, the CEO of Florence Healthcare. Florence frees clinical trials from bottlenecks, so they can accelerate and scale. Sites are drowning under the demands of today’s clinical research trials, slowing clinical trials, increasing costs, and delaying cures. Florence’s Site Enablement Platform helps sites streamline operations, enable remote monitoring, and integrate study workflows. They are hiring for several roles including a Senior Sales Executive, Salesforce Admin, and several others. We put the link in the show notes and if you didn’t watch the live interview with Ryan, I highly recommend listening to our events page.

    Podcast of the Week: I have not listened to the entire episode because it is 3 and half hours in length and my bike ride is a crisp 30 minutes, but I’m well into it and it comes highly recommended from a trusted source. This podcast comes from the show Acquired and it is the full history of LVMH, and how Bernard Arnault turned a $15m investment in a bankrupt French textile company into the world’s largest individual fortune. This story is equal parts Berkshire Hathaway, Barbarians at the Gate, Steve Jobs / Ted Turner etc and worth any entrepreneur’s time. We put the link in the show notes.

    Quiet Giant: One of the Top 10 Most Innovative companies that piqued my interest last week from the TAG Summit was DataSeers. They have over 80 employees.  This is an enterprise solution for fintech and banking operations that helps with onboarding, ACH processing, anti-fraud, compliance, reconciliation, and Analytics. FinanSeer® converts raw transaction data to meaningful information that financial institutions can use to optimize their processes and protect their customers. It cleans data and automates workflows to increase operational efficiency across several aspects of the business. .

    Feature Release of the Week: Major major release and put I “release” in air quotes as this is a release of physical space, but Intown Golf Club in Charlotte opened their doors this week to the initial Founding 100 members and it was a spectacular event. If you are in Charlotte and love to play golf, socialize, and like good food and spirits, Intown Golf Club is the place for you. The outdoor patio, putting green, and firepit is just the beginning before you head indoors to 8 simulators, private dining, a massive bar and much more. Shout out to the team on creating another special location.  

    Raise a Glass: You know was I putting together this week’s Five and Thrive and was a little surprised there had not been a funding announcement this week of any sort, and then all of sudden, right before I hit send on this bad boy, I see an update that Jason Rubbotom’s Clovery just raised a very impressive $19M let by GroTech Ventures. Cloverly built the first API in the world for carbon credits and the company has grown to become the leading digital infrastructure powering the voluntary carbon market. Their software is helping any company scale their impact by providing the infrastructure to supply or buy carbon credits with the click of a few buttons.  

    Congratulations to Cloverly and team on the next phase of growt! 

    Annnnnd that’s five minutes!

    Companies Worth Applying To: ViewFi, Florence Healthcare 

    Podcast of the Week: Acquired: LVMH

    Feature Release of the Week: Intown Golf Club

    Raise a Glass: Cloverly

     
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    5 m
  • EP49 | YOKE | TAG Summit | Women + Tech | Pinz | AnyDistance | Mi Alma | MakeSwift

    EP49 | YOKE | TAG Summit | Women + Tech | Pinz | AnyDistance | Mi Alma | MakeSwift
    May 5 2023
    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. Companies Coming Up: A new logo is up at TechRise and this one represents a company in the NIL community building space. YOKE is leveraging the transformative shift in college sports occurring with the new name, image, and likeness legislation. Now universities and athletic departments have powerful software enabling teams to grow a business through building community and engaging with fans. YOKE’s software simplifies the process of launching and maintaining an online community while also handling automated payments and reporting for tax and compliance purposes. Led by CEO Mick Assaf, YOKE is growing fast. We put their link: Yoketeam.com in the show notes. Event of the Week: This past Wednesday, the Technology Association of Georgia host their annual TAG Summit at the behemoth Georgia World Congress Center. 800 folks engaged with startups panelists and award winners. Two items of note. Kyle Porter was inducted into the Georgia Technology Hall of Fame and AdPipe, at Top 10 Most Innovative startup was awarded the People’s Choice award. Shout out to Andrew Levy on his presentation. This week, on May 10th Women + Tech Meetup takes place at the Atlanta Tech Village. The title of the presentation: Pitching the Best You led by Jacey Cadet, a dynamic and talented colleague of mine. Jacey leads Pitch Practice every Friday at 1:00 p.m. in the ATV  and has helped countless startups not only hone their pitch but strategize around their message, storytelling, brand, and overall comms. The event goes from 12-1:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the ATV. Sign up link is in the show notes.  Product of the Week: With our experience through Intown Golf Club and the renovate of The Killearn Club down in Tallahassee, some interesting golf applications come across our desk and this is one of them and it’s called Pinz (Pinz). This product of the week comes out of Mobile, Alabama from a proven entrepreneur. Mike Stashik, who is solving the problem of the complexity of on course competition. For the golfers listening, how many time have you played in a large group or outing and keeping tabs on the game is too much effort. Games either have to be kept simple or there is a calculator used at the end after you’ve thrown your $20 dollars in. Pinz seeks to bring even more fun to the game by providing software that integrates in the USGA’s handicap system and makes game creation, scoring, and competition that much more simple and livelier. If you’re in a weekly golf game, check out Pinz.   Feature Release of the Week: Our friends at AnyDistance have launched their 4.0 version of the product this week and it’s big. This update is all around enhancing your community. The feature is called Active Clubs through AnyDistance and it’s designed to empower and support individuals on their active life journey while fostering a close-knit community of like-minded friends. If you’re looking to lead a healthier, happier life by embracing various activities and lifestyles with friends, we put the link to the Product Hunt launch in the show notes. Raise a Glass: Two fantastic raises this week. First is from one we covered not that long ago called Mi Alma. The Arogeti’s Jordan and Scott, started a company to support families in need after a lost one. Mi Alma provides the tools and documentation methods to memorialize legacies of lost ones. They raised $1.5M. Congrats to the Arogeti’s on taking the next financial step in the Mi Alma journey.  Second, Alan Pledger, the CEO of MakeSwift, announced they raised $3M led by Active Capital. MakeSwift removes the technical barriers marketers face when managing a complex enterprise website. They’ve done this by creating a visual builder for Next.js which empowers marketers to build and manage these sites using React components that act as custom building blocks in our no-code editor. The technical bar has been lowered so marketers can push copy, landing pages, and make swift changes. Congrats to Alan and team on the raise!  Annnnnd that’s five minutes! Companies Coming Up: Yoke Event of the Week: Women + Tech Meetup - Jacey Cadet Podcast of the Week: Pinz Golf Product Feature Launch of the Week: AnyDistance Raise a Glass: : Mi Alma and MakeSwift
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    6 m
  • EP48 | Keyfactor | Black Founders Forum | Cal Newport on ChatGPT | FlowPath | ScopeStack | Levitate

    EP48 | Keyfactor | Black Founders Forum | Cal Newport on ChatGPT | FlowPath | ScopeStack | Levitate
    Apr 28 2023

    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

    My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures

    Companies Worth Applying To: Keyfactor, headquartered out of Independence, Ohio has a large and strong presence in Atlanta starting with their CEO Jordan Rackie and they are hiring. Keyfactor is hiring a remote sales manager among several roles. Keyfactor issues, manages, and protects machine identities across 1500+ businesses to ensure digital trust throughout every machine and transaction. We have put a link to their jobs.

    Event of the Week: Mark your calendars for June 15th. Jim Stallings of PS27 out of Jacksonville is hosting the Black Founders Forum at the University of North Florida. It is a full day event with keynote speakers, a pitch competition, panels, networking and more. Who should attend? Investors, angels, African American entrepreneurs, and professional services providers as well. Jim and the PS27 team are top notch so mark your calendars today.  

    Podcasts of the Week: If you are trying to wrap your head around AI and more specifically ChatGPT, Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, has a fantastic episode on his Deep Questions podcast. Some of the questions asked and explored include:  How does ChatGPT work? (And should we worry about it?) Is there anything AI won’t do better than humans? How will AI end up disrupting knowledge work? Should I quit web development before AI eliminates the industry? Will AI create mass job loss in the next five years? The TLDR in all of these is no, it’s not coming for all of our jobs…at least for awhile. All of these questions and more are discussed and explored in this highly recommended podcast. We put the link in the show notes. 

    Feature Launch of the Week: While some of the specific feature launches are less headline worthy, I love them. Here’s why, because these are the mini-milestones that lead to the headlines. It’s fun to highlight raises, exits, and events, but the day to day grind is demonstrated through mini-milestones and one of those include features launched. We covered FlowPath a few weeks ago and here they are again with a major product enhancement around mapping and layouts. As a quick reminder, FlowPath makes facilities management software simple and this enhancement now allows their customers to visualize their work orders and upload floor plans, images, and more to create detailed maps of their facilities. Check out the extensive blog post with product demo in the show notes.  

    Raise a Glass: We have two of them this week out of the Carolinas. The first comes out of Greenville, South Carolina with the company called ScopeStack led by COO Andy Vanasse and CEO Jon Scott. Cultivation Capital, co-founded by Cliff Holekamp, led the $1.5M round. ScopeStack was founded in 2018 and ScopeStack provides a B2B platform that manages scoping and pricing for IT services. Likely a company hiring very soon as well. Congratulations to all involved on the next chapter of the story. 

    The next raise of the week comes out of the Raleigh-Durham triangle with Levitate raising $14M in their Series C. This round was led by Bull City Venture Partners. Levitate is a communications platform that streamlines anything from email, texting, calendars, notes, and more into one platform to manage it all. They have 4000 customers and $10M in ARR. Congrats to founder, Jesse Lipson on the next phase of the business.  

    Annnnnd that’s five minutes!

    Companies Worth Applying To: Keyfactor 

    Event of the Week: Black Founders Forum

    Podcast of the Week: Cal Newport’s Deep Questions: Thoughts on ChatGPT

    Product Feature Launch of the Week: FlowPath’s Mapping and Building Layouts

    Raise of the Week: ScopeStack, Levitate
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    5 m
  • EP47 | Intown Golf Club | Greenzie | ResultId | How to Build an MVP | A Smart Bear | Braemont Capital | Axle

    EP47 | Intown Golf Club | Greenzie | ResultId | How to Build an MVP | A Smart Bear | Braemont Capital | Axle
    Apr 21 2023
    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. Companies Worth Applying To: The market is on fire with Greenzie, an Atlanta Ventures company. Greenzie adds autonomous operation to commercial zero-turn mowers which reduces labor costs, increases productivity, and enhances safety. Clients range from universities like Texas A&M, Georgia Southern University, and Purdue to traditional lawn maintenance crews. They are hiring two business development reps. If you are, or you know someone self-starting and eager to drive revenue, apply right now - the job description is in the link below!  Another company hiring today is Intown Golf Club. There are two roles open and these roles do not avail themselves often. First is an Operations Manager of Interior Design. This role is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of the design team and ensuring the team runs smoothly and efficiently. It will include working with leadership to negotiate, buy, and store all the interior design assets and collateral. The other role at Intown Golf Club is a Development Associate. This role will assist the Development leadership on building out new locations and ensure all existing locations are up to the IGC standards.  Company Coming Up: This company coming up is out of Raleigh-Durham and is called ResultId. Continuing on the AI theme from last week, ResultId works with companies to leverage their proprietary data by applying AI to it and generating insights that would take a data scientist weeks. The data they focus on ranges from product data, to customers success data, to research data. Insights from their analysis help craft narratives so you can build, market, and sell better. And I just love how they have the domain name resulted.com (as it sounds) but then redirects to their company name which is spelled as ResultId Podcasts of the Week:  The podcast of the week comes from YCombinator titled How to Build An MVP with Michael Seibel. This podcast is only 17 minutes long but it succinctly describes the iterative process required to build an MVP. It reminds much of how much a different skill uncovering a market niche, building a first prototype, gaining your first 100 raving customers and iterating on the process is so much different than operating a business post product market fit on towards scale. MVP’s don’t start with customer surveys or market research. They start with one raving fan, then another, and then another, and it’s way better to have 100 people who crave your product than 1000 who are lukewarm fans. If you are thinking about starting a company or building a product or community, this is a must listen to. Blog Post of the Week: Jason Cohen, aka A Smart Bear, published a banger of a blog post titled “Excuse me, is there a problem?” He wrote around 8000 words about how to dissect a problem you’ve uncovered from a business perspective. He brings in TAM equations, flow charts, and qualifications and more. I can’t recommend this post enough and quite frankly, I’m still digesting it. We put the link in the show notes.    New Fund Announcement: Big news coming out of Atlanta, Dallas, and New York this week. Braemont Capital closed their inaugural fund with $525M of committed capital. Well done for the team and their Managing Partner, Robert Covington, and local leader, Beau Allen. Braemont invests in technology and software companies across the country. We covered a deal they did not too long ago with Orlando based RedTeam software acquiring Nashville-based Paskr. Raise of the Week: Three Emory graduates are building Axle, the API for insurance companies and they just closed a $4M round. They are taking the playbook from Plaid – which was also co-founded by an Emory alum – and running with it in the insurance space. Imagine a user connecting their insurance account through Axle and immediately seeing if someone is up-to-date and to the extent of the insured. Before Axle, fleet managers, lenders, and gig services relied on legacy systems, paper, and long phone calls to verify personal insurance information. Today, it’s one simple API call. Congrats to the team on their raise and success out of  YCombinator!  Annnnnd that’s five minutes! Companies Worth Applying To: Greenzie and Intown Golf Club Product of the Week: ResultId Podcast of the Week: How to Build an MVP with Michael Seibel Blog Post of the Week: Excuse me, is there a problem?  New Fund Annoucement: Braemont Capital Raise of the Week: Axle, a Universal API for Insurance
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    5 m
  • EP46 | MakeMine | Novel | Cory Hewett | Keynote of the Week | Teamworks

    EP46 | MakeMine | Novel | Cory Hewett | Keynote of the Week | Teamworks
    Apr 14 2023
    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.  My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures.  Products of the Week: This product of the week comes out of Charlotte, NC and it is called MakeMine. It has become increasingly difficult to manage supplychain especially if you are a popular Direct to Consumer brand or Wholesale brand. Keeping up with the emails, PDF’s, calls, and more with customers is overwhelming, not to mention the lack of visibility into where the product stands in the process. Well, MakeMine is a one-stop platform that allows brands to build, manage, and scale their supply chain without increasing operational overhead. This is done with MakeMine’s software which syncs products, onboards all your manufacturers, and monitors production cycles all in an effort to streamline efficiency. I came across another fascinating product recently called Novel. We all know and likely spend time looking at short term videos via Instagram, Youtube, or TikTok. Well this company is bringing the experience of short-form, shoppable video to the ecommerce world. Grant Kerwit is the co-Founder and COO and they have built a product that integrates into your Shopify store and allows you to connect with your Instagram, TikTok, or Youtube short to the front page of your website. This extends your content ROI, improves site conversion by 63%. They have freemium models and scales upwards from there. If you’re looking to leverage short-term  Job Change Alert: Big news this week on the Gimme CEO front. After 8 years, Cory Hewett, Founder and CEO is transitioning from CEO. Long time friend and co-Founder, Evan Jareki taking the CEO reigns from this point on. Cory is pursuing new opportunities in electrification initiatives, emerging tech (like AI and computer vision), and community development. He’s looking to connect with companies and founders in those industries so reach out to him! LinkedIN is in bio.  Congratulations to a great Cory on an amazing run and best of luck to Evan as he continues to push the business forward!  Keynote of the Week: This past week, we had our first Atlanta AI Meetup with much success. One of the keynotes we highlighted came from Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures. Some of the highlights include a Goldman Sachs report that AI will increase GDP 300x more than that PC. So the importance of AI and its projected impact is nothing to ignore. Then Tunguz goes into a compelling framework that had me contemplating several aspects to this iPhone-like innovation. The four areas of focus for startups include: layer, markets, moats, and AI depth. The layer revolves around how your AI startup approaches AI: is it an application, a platform, or infrastructure? Each one of these could be a whole presentation within itself. The second area of focus is the market. With all of the major players: Salesforce, Adobe, and Microsoft launching AI products weekly, time is of the essence. The third area of focus revolves around your moat and the competitive advantage one is able to create. Examples include access to proprietary data, a better algorithm, distribution (although that is tough against the incumbents). I believe an early MOAT can be around focus. There are so many applications and avenues that companies can take on AI, if you are the best at one thing and iterate on it better than anyone else, a tremendous advantage will be had. Lastly, the final area of focus revolves around the depth of technology you bring to the problem being solved. From plug-ins to agents to your model on top of other models, exploring the technical depth of an AI solution is essential to how disruptive a startup can be. There is going to be so much tire kicking with the latest AI plug-in or prompt over the next decade and we’ve already seen so much of it already, yet a product with strong technical depth in conjunction with a deep product-market fit, well that is where the real GDP gains will occur.     Raise a Glass: Big news out of the Triangle from Teamworks led by Zach Maurdies. Teamworks is an enterprise SaaS provider for collegiate and professional sports organizations, has raised an oversubscribed $65M Series E funding round led by investment firm Dragoneer Investment Group. Congratulations on the raise the increased the fuel to go even faster!   Annnnnnnd that’s 5 minutes!  Product of the Week: MakeMine, BeNovel Job Change Alert:  Cory Hewett of Gimme Keynote of the Week: Four Questions for Startups Building in Generative AI - Tomaz Tunguz Raise a Glass: Teamworks raises their Series E
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    6 m
  • EP45 | Events Next Week | SoftGiving | Spendly | Primordial | Hazlnut

    EP45 | Events Next Week | SoftGiving | Spendly | Primordial | Hazlnut
    Apr 7 2023

    Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

    My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. 

    Well, it’s Friday of Masters Week this morning and I trust several listeners have that extra browser tab open this week as we all watch the giants of golf traverse Augusta National as they play the first major of the year. But back to the regularly scheduled program as there is a lot going on! Let’s start off with three value add events next week. 

    Events of the Week: The first event is the Women in Tech Meetup at the Atlanta Tech Village. Lauren Marturano of Zinnia (which is client events and team events made effortlessly) is headlining this event with the presentation around The Art of Self-Promotion. The event is $10 and held on April 12th at noon. Last week I mentioned we started a new meetup around AI, well the details are here. This Tuesday at 5:00 p.m. we are hosting folks to discuss how they are using AI, what they are building, and more. The event will be held in the community room of the Atlanta Tech Village. Lastly, we have Atlanta Startup Convos on Wednesday at 8:00 a.m. The three companies presenting are Enolytics, Nauvus and AMP.

    Company Coming Up: Softgiving is making major strides. They are hiring, they are starting to rebrand, and they are collecting several customers as they become the platform to market your product through live twitch streams. I caught up with their CEO last week. The momentum is significant with them as they partner with major brands to get consumer products in front of potential customers who watch live streaming services like twitch. Give Softgiving a look if you’re interested in seeing a company building brick by brick. 

    Product of the Week: We covered this company back in October out of Charlotte and it’s always fascinating how entrepreneurs evolve their business whether it’s through positioning, product, or go-to-market but the co-founder of Spendly Shannan Caulk provided an update on Spendly. Seven months ago, Spendly would tell you if you were overpaying for financial services, today, they’ve evolved the platform into a marketplace allowing business owners to find the best deals on the market. So far, businesses have been able to save $20K (avg.) a year with Spendly. They’ve raised $500k, signed up 20+ financial professionals, and are serving customers today. 

    New Fund of the Week: The Jurassic Capital team has launched a new pre-seed fund cleverly named: Primordial. They are targeting early-stage tech startups with less than $500K in ARR. Jenn Summe is leading the charge at Primordial with the full support of Joe and the Jurassic Capital team. Excited to see what gets backing in the future months. We put a link in the show notes to their new website. 

    Companies Worth Applying To: We’ve covered them before on their product and pivot and now this company out of Jacksonville is hiring for Customer Success team members. Hazelnut, which provides software for restaurants to maximize order efficiency, is hiring for an increasing number of customers they are closing and onboarding. Check out Hazlnut today, we put a link in the show notes. 

    Annnnnnnd that’s 5 minutes! 

    Events of the Week: Women + Tech, Atlanta AI MeetUp, Atlanta Startup Convos

    Company Coming Up: Softgiving

    Product of the Week: Spendly

    New Funding of the Week: Primordial

    Companies Worth Applying To: Hazlnut
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