Two Different Later Stage Raises

April 25, 2013

Two later stage Atlanta startup companies have recently raised significant amounts of money using different strategies. Airwatch raised $200M in a “Series A” equity round. Silverpop raised $25M in a debt financing round. With yesterday’s Silverpop news, several people chimed in on Twitter agreeing that while debt financing might not be as seemingly glamorous as equity financing, […]

Read the full article →

ATDC 2013 Startup Showcase and Graduation

April 22, 2013

Today I was proud to be part of the ATDC Startup Showcase and our graduation from this fine institution. ATDC is one of the longest standing startup traditions in the southeast and a pillar of support for building new companies and encouraging disruptive change. In order to graduate from ATDC, member companies must hit certain […]

Read the full article →

Conference Crashing

April 21, 2013

In 2007, I was still a graduate student at Georgia Tech and was co-founding a new company. I wanted to start building a prospective customer list, even before we had a product or a website. I found success by crashing conferences, using my student status as leverage to get a free booth. Here are 3 […]

Read the full article →

Limiting Factors

April 20, 2013

An important job for startup leaders is to identify and remedy the limiting factors holding the business back. A few months ago, I ran across this post that described the stages of limiting factors for startups: At the outset of a startup, engineering throughput can be a limiting factor; the team simply can’t code fast […]

Read the full article →

Full of Spring

April 19, 2013

For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” -from “MAUD MULLER,” by John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) I love those famous lines (full poem here). In large part, startups are about chasing what might be. It’s exhilarating. Spring is in full swing this year at AccelerEyes. Life is […]

Read the full article →

Jonny Birdsong’s Predictions for Atlanta

April 17, 2013

Jonny Birdsong put up an excellent post tonight. He offers up 4 predictions and prescriptions for making Atlanta great over the next 5-20 years: Atlanta’s Racial and Cultural Advances Will Be Our Greatest Asset Old Money Meets New Money Fortune 500 Companies Start Using What’s In Their Backyard High School Students Dive Into Tech Each point […]

Read the full article →

Two Examples of Tangible Value from Social Media

April 16, 2013

Social media has sufficient critical mass now that there is some nice tangible value to be had. Here are two examples: Foursquare I went to JC Penney on Saturday. I ended up with several hundred dollars of stuff and was on my way to the cash register. I decided to check-in on Foursquare. It took […]

Read the full article →

User Experience

April 15, 2013

I really like this short post by Chris Dixon on the “Experience Economy.” He basically talks about how user experience increasingly defines the success of products. It is no coincidence that interaction design is replacing technical prowess as the primary competency at startups. At AccelerEyes, we fully believe this is true, even for our very technical software. Users are […]

Read the full article →

Thoughts on Keeping People

April 13, 2013

Today, a beautiful and thoughtful slidedeck rose to the top of Hacker News on the topic of “keeping people” by one of the first Github employees. I like everything about the slidedeck except for the use of the word “keeping,” which comes from the perspective of the employer. To me “keeping people” is a byproduct of […]

Read the full article →

Advice to Those Wanting to do Startups

April 12, 2013

Earlier this week I met with an Emory Law School student nearing the end of his 2nd year. He’s interested in entrepreneurship and looking for ways to exit law school into the startup community. This is something I frequently see. Many people are intrigued by startups, but do not understand how to get off well-paved […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →