Thanks to the generous support of both Dash and Nelson Mullins, we are doing an after party at the Nelson Mullins offices in Atlantic Station (a few minute walk from the Twelve Hotel which is the venue for Startup Riot). The after party will run from 5:00pm until 8:30pm.

All conference attendees will be allowed to attend the after party. Folks who want to attend the after party but not the conference need to pre-register and be cleared to attend. The same attendance policy for the conference applies to the after party - no service providers and no vendors allowed. Entrepreneurs, job seekers, corporate employees (specifically those who invest or do M&A), non-profit employees, and investors are all welcome to attend.

The Nelson Mullins offices have a fantastic view of the city skyline and this should be a fantastic evening.

Oh, did I mention?  There are a limited number of slots for attending the after party and there will be an open bar and some random snacks available.

First, I’ve opened back up applications to present. There are still limited slots remaining but I’ve had a lot of people asking me to look at this company or that as a favor. So to be fair, I’m opening up the application for everyone on the site. One change though - along with your application you must submit your four slides (details below) along with your application. Based on those slides I’ll decide if you get a slot to present or not.

So if you want to submit slides to possibly present here are the rules. Your slides can’t have any animation, audio, video, or anything else to make them anything but static slides. They also must be submitted in Powerpoint (PPT, not the new PPTX) format. My suggestion is to cover your team, your product/service, and what you’ve accomplished and/or what you plan on doing.

Second, details will be coming soon (next day or so hopefully) about the after-party. Yes, there is going to be an after-party for Startup Riot. It’ll start right at the end of the event at 5pm and probably run until 8pm or later (depending on the final venue). Regardless of where we hold this, it will be somewhere in Atlantic Station so everyone can walk from the conference to the party.

So plan on attending the after-party if you come to the event or even if you don’t. We’ve got an awesome sponsor for this part of the day and this should rock.

UPDATE: fixed my suggestion above to include what I actually suggest for your slides.  It was cut off before.  Whoops!

Of the six companies that are graduating ATDC, I think I know three of them decently well.  It’s good to see these companies get moved out of ATDC so that space (and more importantly, attention) can be focused on the new companies that are already moving in (folks like Suniva and Clearleap among the many others announced recently).  None of these companies strikes me as being as huge as MindSpring yet (MindSpring was also an ATDC graduate prior to merging with EarthLink).  But then, MindSpring wasn’t a huge success right when they graduated either (although they were definitely on the right path).  If even one of the graduating companies goes on to make it big, then this year’s class will have been a success.

There are also five companies that are graduating from VentureLab - three of which have already moved to ATDC.  Personally I’m surprised this number wasn’t all five of the companies but perhaps the other two (Verco Materials and Zenda Technologies) are in a space that doesn’t make sense for them to be at ATDC.  On a quick glance, this seems to be the case with Verco working in materials technology and Zenda in neurological testing.  Given ATDC’s company composition as of late, these don’t seem to be a good fit.

Once registration opens up for the showcase, I know I’ll be signing up to go.  It’s being held at the Biltmore (just down the street from ATDC) which was in the running to host Startup Riot this year.  Speaking of which, I just hope I’m not too frazzled from planning Startup Riot which will be four days later.  Make sure you go to that too!

First, there is a nice site that is up for Startup Riot.  You can see the agenda (which is already wrong - see below) as well as info on the keynote and how to signup to attend and/or present.

As of right now, there are 55 companies lined up to present on May 19th.  This is way more than my 45 company target I initially hoped to hit.  At the rate things have been going, I suspect we’ll end up with 60-70 companies for the day.  This will require a shift in the schedule but it is totally doable.  Anyone (nearly) who signs up will have a slot to present.  I say “nearly” because there are a couple of companies who I’ve had to say no to due to lack of fit or other issues.  Not to say these aren’t good companies, just they don’t really fit with the other presenting companies.

Along those lines, there are also over 100 registered participants for the day (including representatives from presenting startups).  There are a number more waiting in the wings I suspect.  I haven’t discussed when registration will stop but I’m planning on stopping accepting new applications about a week before the event (so on May 12th).  So if you’re still contemplating signing up - better do it soon.  If there is a surge of registrations, attendees will be accepted on a first come first serve basis.

Presenting companies should get some info in the next day or so about parameters for the presentation.  I was thinking about having uniform icons for companies to use in their pitches (to make it easy to identify companies hiring people, etc.) but I think I’ve decided against that.  As an audience member, it’s your responsibility to figure out which companies you want to approach.  And even if a company says they aren’t hiring, if you’re a rock star in their field you should approach them (same goes if the company says they aren’t raising money but you love their business).  So to make sure good interactions happen, I’m dropping this “feature” of the presentations so that I don’t inadvertently prevent something good from happening.

Remember, I’ve got two Open Coffee events this week (soon to be renamed).  Feel free to swing by if you want to chat with me about Startup Riot or anything else.

Finally, remember to spread the word about this event.  We need more entrepreneurs, job seekers, big companies, non-profits, and investors at the event.  In this case, more is better for everyone involved!

So I’m announcing two more Open Coffee’s with a little more notice this time.  The location on the first is thanks to Rob Kischuk - so all praise/blame should go to him.  Here they are:

• April 16, 2008 - 2pm to 5pm - Cafe Intermezzo at 1845 Peachtree Road, Atlanta, GA 30309
• April 17, 2008 - 2pm to 5pm - Panera Bread  at 1545 North Decatur Road, Atlanta, GA 30307 (by Emory)

Cafe Intermezzo has free Wi-Fi which is why it made the cut.  If you’ve got a favorite place that offers free Wi-Fi at which you want to do an Open Coffee, leave a comment and I’ll try to work it into the schedule.  If you’re going to show up for either one of these, also leave a comment.  Not required but then I know to look out for you.

• April 1, 2008 - 2pm to 4pm (at least) - Panera Bread  at 1545 North Decatur Road, Atlanta, GA 30307 (by Emory)
• April 3, 2008 - 2pm to 5pm - Panera Bread at 4531 Olde Perimeter Way, Atlanta, GA 30346 (by Perimeter Mall)

Why Panera Bread?  Well, the free Wi-Fi of course!  I’ll be there with my silver Dell laptop.  In case you don’t know what I look like, you can find me on LinkedIn or Facebook (I don’t do promiscuous linking so don’t send me a request unless I know you).  If you are planning on showing up, leave a comment so I know to look for you.

Q: Does the Atlanta Business Chronicle care?
A: No.

See, wasn’t that simple?

Honestly, I don’t really care if the ABC continues to report ion startups. In my opinion, a weekly newspaper can’t really report fast moving news of startups effectively. Granted the reason why they decided not to cover this area of news probably has more to do with advertising dollars than journalistic effectiveness. If you talk to anyone who has started their company in the last year or two, they’ll likely not have even heard of the Atlanta Business Chronicle but they sure have heard of TechCrunch or Mashable or Read Write Web. Of course, if you haven’t heard of these sites, you just might be an Internet dinosaur.

I’ve also started reaching out to investors (both angels and venture capitalists) to introduce the event. Everyone so far seems interested in attending (even without a firm date set). My next round of introductory invites is going to go out to large local corporations and non-profits. The large corporations are a good chance to land paying customers (or potential acquirers!). My hope is that startups at the event will see non-profits as a way to get name recognized pilot customers who can provide valuable feedback while non-profits get to use bleeding edge technology for free/cheap. If you view non-profit folks in that capacity I think it’ll be a win/win.

So what do I need from you? A few things. I’ve already got a handful of people who have volunteered their time and help for this event. I need more of those people - people who volunteer to work the registration table, help with presentations, move people from area to area, etc. Also, if you have contacts with venture capitalists, angel investors, large companies, or non-profits who you think would come to this event, contact me and I’ll introduce the event to them with your help. This will help get them to register for the event once details are set.

So how do you contact me? Well, you can email me, DM me on twitter, or send a message through LinkedIn.

So the things that are interesting to me is the time since they’ve been around (7 months according to Braxton Jarratt - Clearleap’s CEO - his photo on the left), the size of the round they got (especially for a first round of funding), and the funders themselves. On the first two points I don’t have much to add so let’s talk about the funders.

The lead funder seems to be Trinity Ventures which is based in Silicon Valley (Noro-Moseley also invested in this round as did Imlay Investments and the former CTO of Time Warner Cable). Trinity is a pretty large fund overall with about $1.2 billion under management and their last fund (Trinity IX) closed in 2005 with $300 million. Given the age of the fund, they’ll probably start raising another fund in a few years. But more importantly, Clearleap is Trinity’s first investment in the Atlanta area. They’ve had interesting investments like Speedera (disclosure: they were a partner of mine at Digital Envoy before they were acquired by Akamai) and scanR but also companies like Starbucks and P.F. Chang’s (not sure if this means that Clearleap’s offices will be stocked with Starbucks). Hopefully with this initially foray into an Atlanta area startup, Trinity will start looking at other opportunities in the Atlanta area. Also, I hope I can entice them to attend the upcoming Startup Riot event. Same goes for the folks from Clearleap (you reading this Braxton?).

As for what they’re doing, Clearleap is working on a way to expand the ways that television content is delivered to consumers. Instead of doing something like Joost, Clearleap is focused on working with satellite and cable providers to deliver a cohesive experience for the consumer. From the little I know it sounds interesting although the path to adoption is a lot harder since it takes agreement and coordination from entrenched players. That being said, I haven’t heard of many people talking about using Joost (I tried Joost and gave up on it - I should probably revisit it at some point) so perhaps the issues aren’t that unique and Clearleap’s approach will provider a better user experience and thus lead to wider adoption.

By the way, this is also a huge win for ATDC as well since Clearleap was recently added as an ATDC company.

So congratulations to Braxton and the rest of the folks at Clearleap! We’re all looking forward to hearing about some interesting developments from you guys and seeing you involved in the local community! By the way, Clearleap is hiring.

I’ll arrange another dinner next month.  In the meantime, those of you who have attended so far need to reach out to your dinner companions and see if there is something you can do to help them.  By building a stronger local entrepreneurial community you’ll not only help others but you’ll help yourself in the long run.

Photos of the dinner have been uploaded to Flickr and join the photos from the previous dinner.

The blog has covered all kinds of mundane, but important, aspects of starting a company. They’ve posted all the different logo revisions they chose from (I think they chose the best one of the batch) as well as how they came up with the name (ConnectedSpoons isn’t all that bad).

You don’t often get entrepreneurs who talk about all of these aspects of their business. Usually this is because of a lack of time instead of a lack of willingness. I’m sure glad these guys thought to do this and engage folks early in their lifecycle. And Josh, don’t worry I don’t mind the long blog posts. They’re pretty interesting - at least to me.

So for now, all I can say is - Servinity Now… Insanity Later! (if you don’t get that, go watch some Seinfeld).

Target Audience

The invited audience will be three pronged so that all interested startups will have one or more groups to pitch.

First, I’ll look to invite folks who are looking for jobs especially those who are just graduating from local colleges. Rather than condemn these folks to cube farms, let’s try to get the best and brightest working in some great startups.

Second, I’m planning to invite those involved in technology with large local corporations and non-profits. Clearly getting these folks as customers would be a boon for any startup. Non-profits actually present a unique opportunity for both parties. Startups can leverage these folks as early adopter customers and get valuable feedback on their product/service while non-profits can have the opportunity to adopt new technologies for free/cheap.

And finally, I’m planning to invite investors - angels and venture capitalists. No need to explain why I hope.

Between these three groups, every startup that wants to pitch will have one or more groups that they’ll want to appeal to. But remember, you’ll only have three minutes in which to do this.

The Schedule

The format I’ve been able to come up with would get us through about 45 company pitches over the course of the day with lots of time left over for networking and private discussions. The format may change and adapt based on the venue I end up using as well as the demand for pitch slots. If it’s way over 45, then I’ll rejigger the event so that everyone gets a shot.

I intend to allow any startup that wants to pitch to be able to do so although I reserve the right to refuse anyone a slot based on my sole opinion. Realistically though, most anyone can suffer through three minutes of the most idiotic pitch.

Sponsors and Cost

This isn’t going to be cheap to do. I’m looking into catering (lunch and whatnot), venue costs, printing, etc. I’m fortunate to already have a few people volunteer their time for this event but the overall cost is still going to be hefty. Given that, I’m planning on running this event differently than most of my other events or events run by other local entrepreneurs.

First, I’m going to get sponsors for the event. Yes, that includes service providers. But once costs are covered, I’m not going to keep taking sponsors on for the event. The goal here is to cover cost and not overwhelm the event with non-startup folks. So if you’re interested in sponsoring this event, you probably need to contact me sooner rather than later since I’ll give preference to those who contact me first.

Second, the event is not going to be free for all individuals but fees will take into account each groups ability to pay. Pitching startups will get some allowance of folks they can bring for free. This also goes for non-profits looking to potentially use products and services from the startups. Large companies will have some minimal fee to make sure qualified folks are signing up. Job seekers will pay some minimal amount in an effort to make sure folks who show up are qualified candidates and aren’t just signing up with no intention of showing up. Finally, investors will pay some amount to attend as well.

What I Need From You

So what do I need from you? Well, first I need to make sure that I can actually get 45 or so startups lined up to pitch. If there are more than that who want to pitch I need to know that as well since I need to figure out a schedule that works for this event. At this point I’m targeting either late April or early May for this event and it looks to be an all day event in Atlanta. If you are a part of a startup that wants to pitch, fill out this form and indicate your interest in pitching. If you have any questions, feel free to drop me an email, contact me via LinkedIn, or send me a note on Twitter.

I’m not sure if any other Atlanta based companies are represented but I’m sure other East Coast companies are.  If you find them and like what they’re doing, use their proximity to the East Coast as your tie breaking decider on who to vote for.

Good luck Dave and JungleDisk!

I was going to write a long post about what I thought was right and wrong with the event.  Fortunately both Lance Weatherby and Scott Burkett did that job for me.  I will chime in on the whole video thing (Lance railed on this last year as well).  I think it’s really silly to have a videotaped intro done by someone who is in the audience.  Not only that, this same person will come up to the podium after the video shows.  Generally, people use video for including individuals that can’t make it to the event.  And if you are going to do something silly like this, the presenter should be well rehearsed and have a smooth presentation.  One can forgive a presenter stumbling when they present in person but you can re-record a video as many times as is necessary to get a smooth presentation.

Speaking of in-person presentations, John Imlay was an outstanding speaker.  Of course, if I were European I’m not sure I would have appreciated a number of his jokes but for us Americans the talk was great.  This talk alone made the trip to the Summit worthwhile.  As an added bonus I can now say that John Imlay is in fact a real person since so few people have ever seen the man.  He does exist and he is absolutely hilarious.

Personally this was a great event for me because it shows what should and shouldn’t be done at a pitch event.  I’m taking these lessons and will incorporate them in the event I’m working on.  More details soon!