Five & Thrive

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

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

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  

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

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

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

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

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

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.  Announcement of the Week: Neighborhood Studios was recently launched by Dave Payne - Former Managing Director at TechStars and Co-founder of ScoutMob. Neighborhood Studios is a hyper-local venture studio with the thesis that starting hyper-local is the best way to build something users love and then expand it nation and world wide. If you listened to last week's Youtube Video of the Week with Brian Chesky of AirBnB and how earning a 100 users that love your product is the best approach, well it just validates it's a damn good thesis. Dave has built a passionate and very talented team around him including Tapan Patel to validate ideas, execute on customer discovery, and then recruit a CEO to run the business. Their first company has already been spawned called Homegrown. Homegrown is the best way to finance your next brick & mortar location. The best SMB businesses face limited access to growth capital. Homegrown creates opportunities between local wealthy investors and best-in-class businesses that are ready to expand. Keep an eye on Neighborhood Studios and the idea generation occurring – oh and they are also looking for a CEO.      Community of the Week: This week I had a wonderful meeting with CodePath CEO Michael Ellison who is expanding their reach to Atlanta. CodePath is reprogramming higher education to create the most diverse generation of engineers, CTOs, and founders. There are over 20,000 students and alumni from 500 colleges now working at 2,000 companies that have learned how to build through CodePath. CodePath is supported by Google, JP Morgan, Andreessen Horowitz, and several other prominent companies. Whether you're a CS student today or moonlighting at night, joining CodePath provides the programming, mentorship, and community to accelerate your career and learning.    New Meetup of the Week: This week, Atlanta Ventures launched Atlanta AI Meetup. Artificial Intelligence is moving quickly. Applications are built every day that will lead to thousands of use cases in our work, art, science, life, and leisure. This Meetup group is for the curious ones who want to explore the rabbit hole of applications and deciphering what is valuable and what is not and the larger impact on society as a whole. The pace of advancement is so rapid this will be a great force function for those looking to learn the most important and latest innovations in the AI space. Whether you are an engineer on the OpenAI team or taking your first prompt, this Meetup is for you. At our events, we'll be experimenting with the most interesting applications and discussing ways this changes society through a respectful, supportive, and engaging environment. We're ironing out the date of the first meeting but join the Atlanta AI Meetup to get notified of the date which we'll cement soon.  Product of the Week: The product of the week is led by founder and CEO, Astrid Androsch called AlpStoriesTech out of Atlanta. They provide mass-customization at scale to the beauty, nutrition and health industry while making the world cleaner. They focus on influencers and entrepreneurs between 1M-20M followers who want to sell their own product but don't want to go through the pain of finding a manufacturer, sourcing the material, navigating packaging and design. AlpStoriesTech handles all of it, including the customization. How do they do it? As an influencer and entrepreneur you have 60 ingredients to create your customized product and they take care of the rest with their end-to-end supply chain technology solution with robotic on-demand manufacturing. If you want to create your own beauty product, AlpStoriesTech is one of the best avenues to design, manufacture, and build without the headaches and hassle with zero waste. Level Up with Coaching: Atlanta entrepreneur and co-founder of Terminus, Eric Spett is ramping up his coaching services. If you're an entrepreneur looking to accelerate value creation while minimizing pain, Eric is your coach. Having an objective sounding board removed from the inner circle of a business (co-founders, employees, investors, and Board members) is a huge asset while building in the trenches. If you're interested, reach out to Eric Spett on LinkedIn. Annnnnnnd that's 5 minutes!    Announcement of the Week: Neighborhood Studios and Homegrown Community of the Week: CodePath New MeetUp of the Week: Atlanta AI Meetup Product of the Week: MyAlpStory Level Up with Coaching: Eric Spett

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.  Beta Product of the Week: This beta product of the week is called TabNam and is led by CEO  Daksh Gupta. Tabnam started as a class project at Georgia Tech back in 2021. In 2022 they were one of 6 finalists on PBS' Inventure Prize and won the $100K 1st Prize Klaus Startup Challenge. They also went through Create-X Launch. They are revolutionizing how businesses talk to their customers with AI. Email feedback forms only have a 1% submission rate. With TabNam, customers reply 30x more with their AI Chatbot. If you're interested and a retail/restaurant/consumer services business reach out to Daksh Gupta on LinkedIn today. Youtube Video of the Week: A few weeks ago, Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO of AirBnB gave an insightful interview at Stanford's Business School. When I was listening to this, I still had to pinch myself. Youtube is not even 20 years old, still nascent in the timeline of education. Before this platform, information like this interview was behind the ivory towers of elite higher education. Now it's available to the world for anyone who can make time. Alright now that I'm stepping off my soap, let me share three unique insights from the interview. 1st he share the best piece of advice he ever received which was to build something 100 people absolutely love. If you focus on 100 raving customers, and do it in a market that is vastly wide like travel, you can create a behemoth business. Second, take a look at your product today and what a 5 star experience would be, now let your mind take you to what a 10x experience would be. Brian goes through several examples for an AirBnB guest. Lastly, he answers difficult questions around AirBnB and how that affects affordability as well as the epidemic in America around loneliness. This interview is a must listen for anyone looking to build a product in a new market and get very in depth answers and stories to how Brian views the world.  Product of the Week: I came across this product from the Overline team and it is called SlipRobotics right here in Atlanta. The value prop: take dock loading hours and turn them into minutes. They have an innovative piece of hardware that provides quick and automated trailer loading and unloading. The forklifts and box crates are being streamlined. The company has 19 employees and has been around for a few years. Check out their explainer video from the link in the show notes.   Companies Worth Applying To: Atlanta startup PadSplit is the nation's largest co-living marketplace, helping to solve the affordable housing crisis - one room at a time. They do this by by creating safe, attractive, and respectable co-living environments. They are currently hiring including Miami, Dallas, and more.  Raise a Glass: This week it was announced that ketteQ, led by Mike Landry, raised $9M from Vocap Partners and Circadian Ventures. Founded in 2018, ketteQ is software that sits on top of either AWS or Salesforce.com and provides end-to-end visibility to make data-driven decisions. Their software creates dynamic models and scenario planning, allowing a broad range of customers to optimize their inventory, logistics, production, material and service parts operations. Customers today include Carrier, Trimble and Coca-Cola Bottlers of Japan. Congrats to Mike and team as they add more fuel to the tank.  Annnnnnnd that's 5 minutes!  Beta Product of the Week: Tabnam Youtube Video of the Week: Brian Chesky Interviewed at Stanford Product of the Week: SlipRobotics Companies Worth Applying To: PadSplit Raise of the Week: ketteQ raises $9M

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.  Happy St. Patrick's Day. Y'all I record these on Wednesday or Thursday of each week and we obviously release them on Friday morning. I can't even begin to describe how much can change in a week or even a day. An entire 4 season Netflix documentary will be created from that last time I pressed record to today regarding SVB, all of its deposits, and the frantic nature of the past 7 days. But alas, the greatest entrepreneurs focus on what they can control including where they keep their money, but also building product and going to market. That is a long winded way of saying we have several thoughts on the SVB and Signature Bank situations but we're going to stay focused on the companies, entrepreneurs, and new products in the Southeast.   Alpha Product of the Week: Adam Bloomston who started Payscape now PayRoc with Jeremy Wing is starting to build his next company. Here is the problem he's solving: as an avid fisherman, he loves to head up to North Georgia, North Carolina, you name it, to fish. He has his select guides he'll text asking the best places to fish. He's experienced enough where he doesn't need a full guide but also feels guilty because he wants to pay the guides for their unique insight into the local geography. Enter FishTips. The sole marketplace to connect with local guides to get the most up-to-date information on where to fish. The alpha version was just launched this week and guides across the country are using it to connect with consumers to share information for money. The guides love it because they get compensated quickly and consumers enjoy it because they get vital fishing information without asking favors or paying for an entire guide for the day. If you want to see what an alpha version looks like with a small but passionate set of users, go to FishTips.com now. And of course, if you fish, give it a try today!  Event of the Week: Students who listen to this pod, put on your calendar Wednesday, March 29th at the Atlanta Tech Village we have our annual Startup Student Connection. This is a job and intern fair where dozens of startups have a booth to showcase their company. Students from all over the city and region can meet and greet, within a span of a few hours, several companies hiring and looking for talent. It starts at 4:30 p.m. and goes until 7:30 p.m. This is a wonderful opportunity to connect with many companies at once.  Product of the Week:  Product of the Week comes from Hazlnut out of Jacksonville. We covered them when they launched this product but now we're following up sharing some of their success. They have landed some major customers with their new product called Hazlvoice. Hazlvoice software that solves the problem of the unanswered phone call in restaurants, which 33% of calls to quick-serve restaurants do not get answered. If a restaurant doesn't pick up the phone, now there is an option to have the menu texted to the consumer to limit the number of missed orders. Keep an eye on this service and company as they scale. Metric of the Week:  Discipline around metrics has been a recurring theme throughout 2022 and especially in 2023. One that has been getting lots of attention is the burn multiple. This metric is for companies out there who are burning money or spending more than they are currently making so they can grow faster. The Burn Multiple takes however much money you are burning or projected to burn that year and divides it by your net new ARR. This number includes all the new ARR from the year, including expansion revenue and churn. For example, if you're burning $10M a year and bringing in $5M in net new revenue, your burn multiple is 2x. If you're burning $10M to get to $6.5M in net new revenue, your burn multiple is approximately 1.5x. If you're burning $10M to bring in $20M of net new revenue, your burn multiple is .5x. If your burn multiple is greater than 3x, that is not good. Anything under 1 is amazing. Anything in between should be analyzed at greater depths by you and your strategic advisors. 2023 is the year of financial discipline and understanding one's burn metric is a great start.    Annnnnnnd that's 5 minutes!    Alpha Product of the Week: FishTips Event of the Week: Startup Student Connection Product of the Week: Hazlnut's HazlVoice Metric of the Week: Burn Multiple Metric 

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.  Product Release of the Week: Who doesn't love a good product release and this week, after much anticipated industry coverage, Greenzie has pushed a major update to their software. Quick reminder about Greenzie, they are a software company that makes commercial lawn mowers autonomous. They have partnered with manufacturers including Wright Manufacturing and Bobcat to build the mowers with a few more bells and whistles so they can be activated into autonomous mowers. Landscapers love them, especially landscapers who mow big, wide open fields. This week, Greenzie launched a major update to their software including: Job saving and reloading: Map an area once and mow all season with the press of a button on an easy-to-use interface with no app download required. So now a lawn maintenance company can mow the perimeter of a property once and it's saved in the database so you don't have to mow the perimeter again. Before, you had to mow the perimeter each time. Not any more. Another major feature is job continuation. If your mower or job was interrupted now you can pick up where you left off with ease. Before it would start over from the beginning. These are huge workflow updates along with several other enhancements! Congrats to the Greenzie engineering team on delivering to the market.    Quiet Giant of the Week: This company just moved their HQ to 999 Peachtree Street which is 10th and Peachtree, right where Empire State South used to be. The name of the company is called FIXD Automotive. They have approximately 40 employees led by CEO, John Gattusso. Fixd is a hardware and software company that offers drivers the tools and resources that produce money saved and peace-of-mind over the life of their car. Their FIXD Sensor, which works with any gas-powered car since 1996 relays car problems from the vehicle to the FIXD App via Bluetooth. With the FIXD sensor, now you can translate 7000+ engine codes into plain English on your smartphone, see how severe your issue is, access detailed repair guides and how-to videos, monitor the health of multiple vehicles, and receive automated maintenance alerts. FIXD started out of Create-X and has been a Quiet Giant, growing steadily and quietly for years.  Question of the Week: We've been getting asked a bunch recently, what is Atlanta Ventures take on Artificial Intelligence? There is no question AI is a transformative evolution in technology. There will be several jobs and roles augmented and alleviated. From a pure consumer perspective, we are users of ChatGPT and Dall-E2 and explore those applications often. When it comes to pure investment in the space, it all depends on how AI is being applied. For example, last week, we invested in AdPipe out of Athens, Ga. They are Motion-First marketing platform that goes and finds specific types of clips in your video library, clips them into 2 second gifs, makes it easy to add overlays and copy, and then packages them up so marketers and sales reps now have a motion-first, customized piece of content. The engineering team is leveraging AI to find those specific clips. For example, one of their most well-known clients is Caterpillar. AdPipe now uses AI to find “videos of tractors” in Caterpillar's video library and within 30 seconds, AI has gone in and found dozens of videos from years of investment and delivered it to the AdPipe platform. Before AI, someone manually would have to go into the Caterpillar library, watch a lot of video for a few seconds to find tractor clips, clip it, and then upload it to AdPipe. Not anymore. One other point around narrative and storytelling on the fundraising side to highlight with AdPipe; they didn't brand themselves as a Generative-AI marketing platform when we first engaged with them. They were already solving a very real problem in the market with dozens of industrial customers. Instead, they are using AI to improve a specific use case and workflow. If we met a company that had no customers, limited product or revenue, and they positioned their product as an Generative-AI marketing platform, this is when our spidey senses would have heighted and immediately questioned if this was a spin on a piece of innovative technology looking for a problem to solve. All said and done, when it comes to AI, make sure the problem being solved is a real pain point and apply it smartly – a good example is the AdPipe product.  Annnnd that is five minutes! Links discussed: 

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.  Event of the Week: Mark your calendars for March 22nd, Christy Brown of Dr. Noze Best is being interviewed at the next Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurship MeetUp. Dr. Noze Best is an infant nasal suction device that's portable, easy to clean, and designed with hospital-grade suction. This interview will cover several intricacies of healthcare including go-to-market, manufacturing, unit economics, and their origin story.        Raise of the Week:  Cycle Labs out of Raleigh, NC raised $6.5M this week from Jurassic Capital. Cycle Labs  provides a continuous test automation software platform to large enterprises worldwide. Co-founded by CEO, Josh Owen, Cycle Labs has 30 employees and now has some more dry powder to put to use.  Also, AdPipe out of Athens, Georgia raised $3M dollars led by Atlanta Ventures with participation from Tom Noonan. AdPipe repurposes, repackages, and reposts content from your existing library of videos and makes them shorter and crisper with attractive copy so clicks are 3-4x of traditional, static marketing collateral. Congrats to Andrew and Sam!  Several funds are in the process of closing or just closed a new round. Starting first with Cofounder's Capital out of Raleigh, NC. It was announced this week that they closed their 3rd fund of $50M. Cofounders Capital was started by David Gardiner and they invest in the earliest of early opportunities mainly in the RDU area. Congrats on their raise and more fuel for the ecosystem.  Keeping it in the funds category, TTV Capital closed their most recent fund of $250M. Led by Gardiner Gerrard. This Atlanta Stalwart has raised over a cumulative $700M and invests in B2B SaaS, cyber-security, and fintech. Local investments include GreenLight and Cardlytics.      News of the Week: Fast Company came out this week with several lists including a few that we have highlighted before on the podcast. The first category is the Top 10 Innovative Companies with under 10 people and on that list is Franklin Junction. Franklin Junction matches food brands with underutilized kitchen space, making them a host kitchen – which is different from a ghost kitchen. Now a name brand food can be cooked in a kitchen with a completely different name and easily picked up and delivered to your doorstep…even if there is not a traditional restaurant location available.  The next list from Fast Company is the Top 10 Innovative Companies in Wellness and number two on the list is Reframe out of Atlanta. Reframe provides cognitive behavioral therapy on demand, offers a personalized daily alcohol reduction program, craving management tools,  community support groups and coaching.  Beta Product of the Week: Jordan and Scott Arogeti started a new company that helps people grieve around a death. Mi Alma (“my soul”) in Spanish offers resources necessary to not only aid in the initial grieving and times of need, but also creates a space where memories can live on in an active and meaningful way. Features include: community-wide collection of pictures, stories, and memories of the deceased with a “support registry” that makes it easy for anyone that's inclined to give money, meals, or time. If you're grieving over a lost family or friend, check out Mi Alma.  Blog Post of the  Week: The Godfather of SaaS is putting out superb content and the one worth highlighting today is his 5 Learnings from TradeDesk which offers self-service SaaS for Adtech. Here are three: first, the company was founded in 2009 and has been profitable since 2013. Just this past quarter it was announced they had a 42% adjusted EBITDA margin on 1.6B in revenue for the fiscal year. Second, they've been able to keep their sales and marketing spend at about 19%, which is half of what most fast growing companies spend on go-to-market. Lastly, they grew fast but not insanely fast. After hitting $100M in ARR, they grew anywhere from 28-76% a year, each one of them being profitable. Today they are over $2B in ARR, profitable, and in today's markets that efficiency is rewarded through a $28B market cap. We put the post in the show notes.  Annnnd that is five minutes! Links discussed: 

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.  Event of the Week:  A lot of moving money this week but before we get there, I want everyone to know about the must-attend event of the week hosted by Kyle Tothill of eHire. This event of the week is the TAG Sales Leadership Society and their Fireside Chat with Marc Gorlin. Marc started, scaled, and sold Roadie to UPS. Marc is a serial entrepreneur with tremendous stories. I highly recommend attending this event on Monday night at the Atlanta Tech Village starting at 6:30 p.m. We put the link in the show notes because there is a charge of $10 if you're in TAG or $30 if you're not.     Raise of the Week: I mentioned there was some money movement this week. First off is Queues. This one went a little under the radar as I didn't see much from Atlanta Inno or Hypepotamus on this but Queues was started by Sam Porta out of Georgia Tech. As a student, Sam was so bewildered and frustrated at the amount of lines he waited in – particularly at the coffee shop. So he set out to fix it. Today, his app, Queues is used by thousands of Georgia Tech students to view and assess wait times. How do they do it? Queues software can detect, down to the minute how long the line will be based through machine vision. Atlanta Ventures, Kenzie Lane, and Chris Klaus all made up the $1.1M investment. Queues is hiring!    Another major raise was from Lemon Perfect. If you remember, I interviewed their CEO, Yanni Hufnagel on The Atlanta Story about their growth plans. He alluded to big news but now we know what he meant. Just last week, Lemon Perfect closed on $36M of growth capital. The roles that they are hiring for likely just doubled. Lemon Perfect is the 4th fastest growing water brand in the country and Yanni's goal is to be the largest beverage acquisition in the history of beverage acquisitions.   Okay, one more on the raise front. MatchPlay Brands led by decent golfer but better Pickle player, Michael Gottfriend raised $4M from BLH Ventures led by Ashish Mistry. These guys are running back the playbook from their KontrolFreek days which was a superior success. MatchPlay brands has two major brands which include Piper Golf Balls and PCKL – two sports that have taken off post-Covid. If you want to learn how to run a successful e-commerce business, hustle down this team and company! Company Coming Up: I love stories of companies that plotted along for several years and then a transformational event occurred. These events can be a new technology, leader, customer or approach to the business. Activ Technologies is a great example. This is a company that is 10 years old but in the last 3 years, they began the shift to SaaS. Activ Technologies is a cloud-based platform for real-time supply chain visibility and management. Supply chain technology seems so vast and expansive to me. The industry is huge. The good news is their CEO, Jaymie Forrest who has been a 20 years industry veteran. This company has sticky customers and their growth plans are ambitious, which also means they are hiring. Beta Product of the Week: This week's beta product is Cookonnect led by Erica Tuggle. She is bringing talented and vetted family chefs into the kitchen. For working families who have enough trouble finding healthy, edible food to feed the kids and afterwards default to Uber Eats a few times a week, this product is for you. Cookonnect matches you with cooks who come to your house and will cook anywhere from 2-4 meals for you in one day. They cook, package, and clean so you have food for the entire week. Oh, and they also go to the grocery store to get the food. The price average is around $20-$30 a meal per person. If you're always on the go and want good healthy food for you and the kids without spending precious after-work and pre-Netflix time, check out Cookonnect right now. Link in the show notes.  Podcast of the Week: Lastly, we just launched this week our sitdown interview with Bloomberg columnist, Conor Sen. Each week, Conor writes for Bloomberg on all things housing, economy, and more. If you want to skip the paywall and get his thoughts on major trends on the housing market and the Sun Belt, give it a listen.  Annnnd that is five minutes! Links discussed: 

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.  Beta Product of the Week: Circool is the product this week and they are hq'd out of Birmingham filling a specific niche in school safety. Several companies ensure doors are locked and all guests are checked-in. Circool software addresses safety around school events. Some of the functionality around Circool includes providing the ability to create events, invite school parents/guardians and staff, and host events knowing exactly who is attending.  Articles to Highlight: In the Atlanta Ventures offices we always test theories and ideas around what makes a great entrepreneur. What ends up being the reason someone decides to dedicate their life to a specific problem and service? The Generalist has a great article on theories that make successful entrepreneurs: 1. The market misjudges you. I believe this is why so many companies get started in economic downturns. People who enjoyed safe, cushy roles find themselves out of a job and have limited fulfillment or desire to go work for a large corporation, so they take the leap. 2. The folks are an all around generalist and jack of all trades. I agree here as well. There are some people who cannot be boxed into a specific role. They will find ways to create and build. 3. Is around mental health issues. Examples include ADHD, OCD, etc. Lastly number 4 is a childhood trauma or difficult upbringing. Those that have overcome such setbacks early on know they can defy the odds of success in entrepreneurship.   Event of the Week: This is less of a specific event, but this week it was announced through StartupAtlanta that the Atlanta ecosystem calendar is live. This calendar includes every major hub in the city, specifically the ones on last year's tour which range in geography from the Russell Innovation Center to Tech Alpharetta. We put the link in the show notes so you can see all the events held in each location.  Job Change Alert: After going from idea and market to a $2.4B exit in December 2021, Salesloft CEO, Kyle Porter is handing over the next growth phase of the business to David Obrand. The story of Salesloft is as homegrown as one can find. Georgia Tech graduate, worked several years on and around the ATDC. Co-founded the company with David Cummings and Rob Forman. Through fits and starts, Salesloft leads and revolutionizes the SDR movement and role and now their software is used by thousands of companies and their sales reps as the application of record for their sales workflow. A historic changing of the guard from a one room office in the ATDC to a skyscraper in midtown. Proud of you Kyle Porter. A story for the ages. Company Coming Up: This company is called LoadHive and is headquartered out of Charlotte, NC. Their freight-tech software is making logistics and transportation much more efficient. Here is how they do it: once loads that fit the truck size and most convenient location of your driver have been identified, they are auto-assigned and show up in your driver's Loadhive app within seconds after the shipment is published. Your driver can see how much they are making per mile, per month and you nor your drivers ever have to search a load board and scan between multiple tabs. Also, all your contracts and documents will be handled through the software as well. If you work with 15 drivers or more, check out LoadHive today.  Companies Worth Applying To: This week it was announced SingleOps is hiring for several roles including customer success, product marketing, and SDR's. If you remember, SingleOps raised $74M back in July of last year from FTV Capital. They are putting the plan to work with job openings now.    Zinnia is looking for a technical lead. The authentic demand is strong with Zinnia which streamlines and organizes offsites and corporate retreats. CEO, Lauren Marturano and team are looking for their first full time engineer to build out the product. Zinnia, right now, is mainly services but there is a clear roadmap of features needed to reduce the headache and manual efforts to ensure every company who is not in the office 5 days a week yet still wants to build in-person culture, has an effective, productive, and affordable offsite or corporate retreat.  Raise of the Week: Spiffy announced this week they raised $30M led by Edison Partners. We've covered Spiffy several episodes ago. They service 3,000-4,000 cars a day whether it is cleaning, oil change, or more. Congratulations to Scott Wingo and team on the raise and future growth!   Annnnd that is five minutes! Links discussed:   

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.  Product of the Week: ARBO out of the Atlanta Tech Village is a lightweight, scalable ERP for SaaS companies providing automated revenue recognition and real-time access to financial insights such as cash flow, burn rate, profitability, yearly taxes, and financial projections. Saurav Bhandari is their CEO and has lived and loved accounting since his early days as an intern at the Georgia Department of Audits and Accounts. Check them out as they continue to refine their product offering and bridge the gap between services and SaaS.  Alpha Product of the Week: This product just launched and the value prop is in the name: Accountability. This company is led by Faiz Imran and their goal is to help as many entrepreneurs & founders network, collaborate, and push each other to hit their goals each week via weekly zoom calls. Faiz loves mastermind communities and their benefits. Now he is leveraging software to bring those benefits to the masses. If you're looking to connect with other founders around the theme of accountability and growth, check out accountability.to Event of the Week: Two items to put on the calendar. First if you or your cofounder is connected to Georgia State University as a student, alumni or a community member then take note. Main Street Entrepreneurs Seed Fund Cohort 4 applications are now open and closing soon on Feb 17th. Apply to get a great set of support as you continue building. Link in bio.  Second, next week is Atlanta Startup Convos on Wednesday the 15th at 8:00 a.m. Three companies presenting include: Prismm, AdPipe, and OinkChing. Put it on your calendar as the demos will be exciting to see. Company Coming Up: We have two companies coming up, both of them out of Alabama. First is StreetMetrics hq'd in Birmingham. StreetMetrics is solely focused on bringing Google Analytics quality insight and reporting but for the physical, out-of-home world. Examples include ads on buses, trains, taxis, bikes, and anything that moves. How do they do it? StreetMetrics software shows impressions per mile, what routes your ads traveled, and if they caused an incremental lift in action. Drew Jackson is leading the charge and they have gained tremendous momentum.    The next company coming up is Zaden Technologies out of Huntsville led by Valentine Nwachukwu is a company growing fast around cloud environment management and creation. They do this by automating the infrastructure for product development. Several of their clients are large enterprises looking to save immense hours and money around devops and cloud infrastructure with their product called Olympus. Keep an eye on this team as they grow.   Companies Worth Applying To: Safely (.com) is hiring for several roles including customer success, sales, and operations. Safely, led by Andrew Bate, provides two major services to protect your vacation rental. First they provide short-term vacation rental insurance and second, guest screening services. Simple. Sweet. And needed.  Lastly, strategic product managers are needed over at Thought Factory. CEO, Amanda Sabreah has put together a very needed offering at the intersection of product development and marketing used by large enterprise companies to attract customers by ensuring a clear, cogent message with a product that delivers on the promise. Check them out and apply today.       Annnnd that is five minutes!   Links discussed:   

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.  New Company Announcement: Today, Jeff Hilimire and an all star team are announcing their newest venture: Purpose Group. Purpose Group buys, holds, and grows purpose-driven businesses. Over the years, while leading Dragon Army as CEO, Jeff Hilimire has written several books focused on values based leadership styles and he's applying these lessons and frameworks to the companies purchased. The types of businesses Purpose Group is looking to acquire include the following characteristics: enduringly profitable with a minimum $1M of EBITDA. Over ten years in business and within a 6-8 hour drive from Atlanta. We put a link to the new and fresh website in the show notes.   New Product of the Week: Tip Top Proper Cocktails just released a new product that you can now find on Delta flights across the world: an espresso martini. In partnership with Counter Culture Coffee the espresso martini joins the Tip Top's Old Fashioned, Bee's Knees, Negroni and more as favorite selections for your next flight. We interviewed Neal Cohen last year on The Atlanta Story if you're intrigued on learning more about the company's origin story and more.  Raise of the Week: It was just announced yesterday in TechCrunch. Lavender has raised $13.2M led by Norwest Venture Partners. Will and Will, the co-founders presented their product in the more recent Atlanta Startup Convo if you want to see it live. Their product is an AI sales email coach. When sales reps write emails, Lavender's software ensures the highest probability of replies by suggesting the best content and copy which increases sales cycles and closes more deals. Check out their free trial today.  This week it was announced, Charlotte based, 2U Laundry raised $20M led by Level 5 Capital Partners. Just over 18 months ago, 2U Laundry made a major shift when it began focusing on brick and mortar locations calling this product LaundroLabs. The strategic change is paying off. Hypepotamus covers the story well. Congrats on Alex and team as they expand LaundroLabs to new cities and gain new customers.  Company Coming Up: This week it was announced Recess, a fast casual restaurant with two locations in Atlanta reached QSR Magazine Top 40/40 for 2023 of America's Hottest Startup Fast Casuals. Erik Goranson is the CEO and Recess promises food that makes you feel good and I concur. They have several healthy grain bowls, salads, and green bowls. We love the concept of fast, healthy, casual in the Atlanta Ventures office and Recess is making major moves in the industry.   Companies Worth Applying To: SoftGiving is hiring for several roles most notably influencer recruiters, an internal recruiter and trainer, and a junior data analyst. SoftGiving, headquartered in Atlanta, raises millions of dollars a year for charities across the country by hosting live events through Twitch by partnering with major influencers and activating fan base donations through their live engagements. I know that sounded like a lot, but imagine a Twitch influencer who has tens if not hundreds of thousands of fans who watch their live stream. Now overlay a charity fundraising event and voila, you have SoftGiving. Now SoftGiving is evolving their offering and providing this service for major brands to connect with an audience historically difficult to get in front of.   One of Atlanta's most active venture funds, Knoll Ventures, is hiring a Business Development Associate to increase their go-to-market motions including sourcing early stage venture opportunities, attending conferences, conduct market research and more. Andrew and Rich have been mainstays in the investing community for coming up on a decade and this will be a career enhancing position for whoever makes the cut and wants to make a significant impact on focused and nimble team. Check out the the LinkedIn Job Opening in the shownotes. They are headquartered on Georgia Tech's campus.  Lastly, AdPipe out of Athens, Georgia is looking for a product designer. AdPipe turns all your static content into motion first videos. Customers including Aflac, Caterpillar, and Stephenson Equipment use AdPipe to turn their existing video library into motion-first, click catching content. Keep an eye on the AdPipe team as they gain more steam and evolve into a full scale motion-first marketing platform. Apply today if you're a product designer looking for a dynamic product to work on.  Annnnd that is five minutes!   Links discussed: 

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.  Beta Product of the Week: Former Atlanta Ventures intern and Georgia Tech student, Aidan Pratt has a new and fun beta product called PinPoint. Here is how it works. You go to pinpoint.city and login with your Twitter account. After authorizing the app, you're taken to a picture of the world and you immediately see where everyone you follow is located in the country or world. Now this data is not real time, it only records the static location from your Twitter Bio. It is cool to see where everyone who has publicly stated the city they live in, especially post-covid. If you're looking for a fun, free rabbit hole to dive down for 15-30 minutes check out this neat product from Georgia Tech undergrad.  Events of the Week: This week we caught up with Joe Colopy of Bronto Software fame which sold to NetSuite in 2015. Today Joe and his team started Jurassic Capital and he also helps run GrepBeat - which is a Triangle specific publication on all things startup. The dates for the 2nd Grep-a-palooza have been set and it is June 1st at the Durham Convention Center. Put that one on your schedule for the summer now.    Raise of the Week: This week some strong national news occurred from Fortune announcing Atlanta-based Parable which raised $2.75M co-led by M13 and and Break Tail Ventures. Brian Davis is the Co-CEO and started the company nearly 2 years ago. Parable provides daily nutrients your brain needs in one scoop. The product is called Daily and comprises of eight active ingredients; including green tea extract, ginseng, lemon balm, and a few I won't attempt pronouncing. Check their link out in the show notes.  Also, out of Richmond, Virginia the HopDrive team raised an $8M round led by Cox Automotive as well as ACERTUS and Ally with existing investors, Overline participating as well. HopDrive provides short distance vehicle delivery solutions for automotive dealerships, independent service centers, and fleet management companies. Congrats to Nick Mottas and Rob Newton of Richmond on the raise.     Podcast of the Week: This isn't some form of inception promoting content other content we do but we did just launch a new Atlanta Story Podcast with a company that is hiring, more in the next clip. Lemon Perfect is the name of the business and it's a CPG company that sells healthy lemon water and is the 4th fastest growing water brand in the country. If you don't listen to the podcast, here are the main three takeaways: Yanni Hufnagel is the CEO and started the business after spending the first nearly 20 years of his career as basketball coach: point 1, it's never too late to pivot your career. When identifying factories to produce his product, found a company with two partners in the plant. Those partners ended up splitting up but Yanni built the relationship with the one who still produces the product today: point 2, just like in basketball or any sports, business is a game of inches and you need the ball to bounce your way to be successful. Make sure to put yourself in a position for the ball to bounce one way or another and keep at it. When I asked him what is in store for the future of Lemon Perfect, his answer was simple: “wake up and win tomorrow.” Spoken like a true coach. Keep it simple and let's all win today.   Companies Worth Applying To:  Just yesterday, I ran into Joshua Silver the CEO of Rainforest and he has been hiring like crazy. We've covered them a few episodes ago after their raise. Josh is currently looking for a zero to one marketer and ideally someone who has already been in fintech. We put their company link in the bio.  Also, Lemon Perfect's team of 79 is also hiring. They are looking for several marketing specialists to bring their drink in the hands of more consumers.   Annnnd that is five minutes! Beta Product of the Week: PinPointEvents of the Week: Grep-a-palooza Raise of the Week: Parable and HopDrive Podcast of the Week: Atlanta Story - Lemon Perfect Companies Worth Applying To: Rainforest and Lemon Perfect 

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.  Company Coming Up: The company coming up this week is in the education space and is called Tara Education, which was also one of the companies selected in the most recent TechStars Impact Accelerator. TARA automates the instructional workflows for K-12 teachers and schools in order to save time, improve effectiveness, and prevent teacher burnout. Ian Cohen, a former teacher and Teach for America Alum, is the CEO. They are making tremendous progress on several fronts, mainly product and customers. If you're a leader in education check out TARA to streamline the key instructional workflows that typically hinder teacher support and drive burnout. Question of the Week: Is it better to raise as much money now or segment the raise into two different raises due to the macro-economic environment? We've talked to several companies who are seeking to raise capital, and at some point in the conversation, the idea to raise a smaller amount resulting in less dilution for this round is suggested. It is an interesting thought exercise and very company dependent, however let's say a company wants to raise $2M today at an $8M pre money valuation, diluting the current ownership 20%. What if they only raised $1M, which would produce just over 11% dilution, took 9-12 months to either 1) validate more traction - whether that be on the product side or go to market side while giving time for the macro-market environment to settle into a more steady state where there is less investment hesitation (hopefully). Continuing on the example, if the entrepreneur raises half the amount, goes for a year and executes to their satisfaction and then raises the next round at $19M pre-money valuation, then they've timed their raise well and maximized for less dilution.   The main takeaway for entrepreneurs raising today: raise at the highest valuation possible while still feeling confident the business can double in valuation the next round.  Product of the Week:  The product of the week focuses on financial literacy and is called Money Masters. It is actually headquartered in Geneva but their sales and marketing is out of Atlanta. There are two different markets they approach: one is consumer and another is business to business. Their tagline is to be the Duolingo of Finance. How they are getting the product in front of eyeballs is the good ol'fashioned direct to consumer mobile app as well as white labeling the software for companies and universities to have a customized and specifically branded financial education software for their employees or students. Download MoneyMasters today.    Events of the Week: Our friends at investment firm PS27 in Jacksonville are putting together a female-founder event on March 3rd on all things entrepreneurship and company building. The founder of S'well, Sarah Kauss,  is the headline speaker. If you're a female looking to start a company or have started a company, this will be a value add event to put on your calendar.   Investment of the Week: Resurgens, which we covered a few months ago, who raised over $500M for their most recent fund is quickly putting it to work with an investment into MCIM a Fulcrum Collaborations company. MCIM makes all the data across a large company's enterprise clean, secure, and seamless. If there is a company that has several data centers across numerous locations, MCIM's software collects, organizes, and keeps it all very simple for the large enterprise.     Hiring of the Week: Lastly, two companies hiring this week: first is Intown Golf Club. Expansion is occurring swiftly at Intown Golf Club with Charlotte opening later this Spring and several more on the horizon. They are hiring for a Finance Controller. If you know anyone who loves finance and golf, send them to Intown Golf Club.  Also, Dr. Noze Best, is looking for a growth Marketer lead growth inside the marketing organization. Ideally, someone who has led a startup to $20M and understands growth marketing/channels, and can lead a small marketing team to success in digital, brand, and growth marketing. Annnnd that is five minutes! Company Coming Up: TARA EducationProduct of the Week: Money Masters AppEvents of the Week: Female Founders ForumInvestment of the Week: Resurgens Invests into MCIMHiring of the Week: Grayscale, Dr. Noze Best

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.  New Company of the Week: New year, new companies and job changes and roles are sprouting up everywhere. Chris Klaus of ISS fame announced this week that he has started a new company called Fusen World. Fusen is a Campus startup accelerator platform that connects students with other founders, mentors, and investors. Klaus has been on the pulse of CreateX for several years and supported hundreds of students in that time. I love how he is leveraging technology to broaden the reach. If you're a student looking for quality resources, check out Fusen World.   Product of the Week:  The product of the week is called Flowpath.  Founded by Alex and Brandon Cummings, Flowpath is the operating system for the facilities management in your building. They automate work orders, maintenance, events, notifications, projects, and reporting in a simple to use platform so now there is a clear visibility into the work needed to get done, getting done, and has been done. Right now, doing this is mainly performed through pen and paper with little significant manual work. Imagine a 10-20, or 40 floor building and all the continual needs and maintenance required to run an efficient show. Flowpath is the solution. Keep Flowpath and their product on your radar. These are companies that go from sticky product to quiet giant in a span of months.  Concept of the Week: Serial entrepreneur Landon Bennett and I were going back and forth over Vertical CRM's. The tl;dr or fast forward 30 seconds is that there still are several areas of opportunity to build a $50-$100M+ business in vertical CRM's. WelcomeHome software is a great example as a vertical CRM for senior living homes. The journey takes longer and is oftentimes bootstrapped. Learning the in's and outs of an industry and building enough of a product where the customer now either replaces their existing product or trains the team and company to do their work in a new way is difficult and takes time but if you get the right market at the right time they work. Vertical CRM's fit well in the characteristics of the South. We can bootstrap much further than most since the cost of living is lower, comparatively and building a $50-$100+ business with little to no outside capital is a way to create well-paying jobs and produce generational wealth.    Events of the Week: Earlier this week we had John Larriccia of WelcomeHome. We put that link in the show notes so you can see John interviewed by A.T. Gimbel. Another event to put on your calendar is the first Atlanta Startup Village which is back in gear on Feb 13th at 6:30 p.m. Five pitches, 1 winner. Acquisitions of the Week: A few months ago, we highlighted MessageGears raised a smooth 62 million. Well some of that investment has now been used to acquire Swrve (with no first “e”). Swrve is a mobile app marketing platform that helps enterprise brands deliver stunning mobile experiences. That makes sense since MessageGears works with some of the largest companies in the world to send emails after integrating with each company's enormous amount of data. Swrve seems to be an ideal extension of the customization for large brands and businesses, but now through mobile experiences. Congrats to Roger Barnette and team on the acquisition. Article of the Week: SaaStr founder, Jason Lemkin has been producing some very quality content recently and one of them is the metrical journey of SaaS company, Docebo. Over 15 years, Docebo has just passed the $145m ARR milestone after only raising $14m. Docebo is a learning management system for corporations. Their first seven years were bootstrapped until they raised a small amount that included mainly secondary shares. Here is a company that has consistently increased their ACV, nailed the market-product fit, and compounded growth very well. If the unit economics of your business are sound, keep going, next thing you know, you'll be at $145M in ARR.    Talent of the Week: Just recently I heard there is a rockstar People Ops leader out in the market. If you're looking for someone to lead your company's HR and PeopleOps, please send me an email jon dot birdsong at atlanta ventures dot com.  Annnnd that is five minutes! New Company of  the Week: Fusen World Product of the Week: FlowPath Event of the Week: Heathcare Meetup Recap, Atlanta Startup Village Acquisitions of the Week: MessageGears Buys Swrve Article of the Week: Five Interesting Learnings from Docebo Talent of the Week: People Ops - Email Me

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.  Where to Focus in 2023: Over the holidays, I asked each partner Atlanta Ventures, if you had one piece of advice for the entrepreneurs and startup team members listening to the pod what would it be. Their suggestions are below.  First off is Atlanta Ventures' CEO, David Cummings. His suggested area of focus: the distance between you and the customer right now. Staying close to your customers in 2023 is arguably the most important area for one to focus on. Doing so increases product iteration and enhancements, ensures limited churn, and produces optimal chances to upsell.  Second is Atlanta Ventures Partner, Kathryn O'Day. Kathryn's number one area to focus: picking and building in the right market. With the current or eventual recession looming, new companies built today will be forced to solve a real need and the biggest factor to growth potential is market size, not just today, but market size growth in 3-7 years from now.  Third is A.T. Gimbel, who always keeps the most complex as simple as possible — which we all know is very tough to do. His suggestion on one area to focus: assess what you can truly control and focus on that. Whether it be schedule, exercise, learning, diet, market you are building in, regardless of the macro economic uncertainties. My two-cents on where to focus in 2023 is about honing your craft. I've seen so many articles recently about people quietly-quitting now coupled with several companies laying off 10-20% and one starts to wonder, what motivates the entrepreneur or employee of tomorrow. I believe there is an entrepreneurial muscle or even spirit in every motivated individual. I've known several successful founders who didn't like their traditional J-O-B and when they commit to starting something outside of their regular routine, it can be energizing and magical. This starts with scratching your child-like curiosity and building around it.  Product of the Week: This past week I caught up with entrepreneur and Equity Shift co-founder, Will Duckett. Will is building out of Raleigh, NC which we must cover more exciting companies out of Raleigh and North Carolina in general because there are so many, but that is a side tangent. Equity Shift manages all the complex transactions within private companies. Let's say you have a company with 100's of investors. Equity Shift offers a complete digital automation for primary offerings, convertibles, vesting, and a variety of secondary transactions. Track, pause, and approve transfers with ease and simplicity. If you're looking for a company to Keep an eye on them and their product this year.   Events of the Week: On January 11th, A.T. Gimbel is coming out hot in a dynamite interview with John Lariccia of WelcomeHome in the upcoming Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurs Meetup. WelcomeHome is a quiet giant and growing fast. John does not do many interviews and this one is guaranteed to be insightful. WelcomeHome is senior living CRM software designed to make senior living operators' lives easier. They are currently bootstrapped with over 30 employees and hiring. John's story is fascinating. Before founding WelcomeHome, John spent 20 years at Bain and Company and took the entrepreneurial leap well into his career. More of the story, next week! Companies Worth Applying To: As the coffee shop hours shifted around the holiday, signaling a time for slowing down, Christy Brown, CEO of Dr. Noze Best, was putting in recruiting cycles in the lobby of the ATV. You may remember we highlighted Christy taking over the CEO role last year on the pod and after learning more about their growth, they have some real hiring needs, number one being a product manager. If you want to be part of a company who is in a massive market with authentic demand, Dr. Noze Best is hiring. The product manager will own the relationship with product design firms, prototyping, and the manufacturing relationships in coordination with leadership. Check them out!  Annnnd that is five minutes! Let's go get this year, y'all!  Product of the Week: Equity Shift Event of the Week: Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneur Meetup Companies Worth Applying To: Dr. Noze Best

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.  Welcome everyone to episode 31 of Five and Thrive and the last one of 2022. Outside of the Braves making major trade plays last week, there was some movement in the tech space as well which we'll cover shortly but before we get there, we did want to highlight some valuable and insightful pieces of content that spoke the most to us from the investment perspective. Also, if you're looking for a recap of all of Atlanta Ventures' investments in 2022, we'll link to the news portion of our website which goes through the year's investments and we'll also link to the sign up page to our newsletter which Jacey Cadet sends out monthly on all the specific investments, news, and more.  3 Pieces of Content We Really Like: I'm not putting out a listicle or Top 10 List. But since we started producing this podcast back in June, there are a few pieces of content that really resonated with us. We're only offering 3 to enhance the gravity of the recommendations.  The first one is TwentyVC where Martin Escobari of General Atlantic shares his wisdom and insight around why markets matter most, how to remain a disciplined investor, what they look for in due diligence and much more. I liked this interview because it was so normal. Martin makes his opinion clear on several topics and it all seems so cogent and well thought out.  The second is an article coming from Mark Suster of Upfront VC titled: What does the post crash VC market look like? Mark wrote this in July of this year and there are some timeless themes put into actions specifically discipline and focus. Suster argues in times like these, there are only two things a VC firm can do: either go very big or get very focused. Upfront is does the latter. He walks through, with metrics, how they've kept their strategy consistent of writing checks early at an amount and price point in a very specific ballpark regardless of all of shifting and shiny objects out there in the macroeconomy. A good one to read.    Our third is back to TwentyVC this time Harry Stebbings interviews Brian Singerman of Founders Fund. Brian is a pro's pro and goes into a significant amount of information here including FoundersFund investing style, the overall mismatch in public vs. private markets right now. By the way, this was recorded in October of 2022. Brian also talks about how venture capital is investing in the best entrepreneurs building the best companies at the best possible price. Pretty simple, yet so hard. Worth a listen for sure.  Market Opportunity To Watch:  As y'all know, we love sparking startups out of the Atlanta Ventures' Studio and markets are the biggest factor to success. One market opportunity we are excited about over the next 5-7 years is around solar panels and more specifically solar panel installations. As more and more consumers and businesses install solar panels due to either cost and energy savings, maybe with the help of government incentives as well, there will be an increased number of solar installers. Software will be needed to organize and streamline those services as demand increases. A market to watch for sure.   Raise a Glass: Lastly, as mentioned above, there were deals made into the final holiday hours of the year, maybe even one more between now and the new year but Qualytics out of Orlando went through the Engage program and just closed a $2.5M round led Tech Square Ventures, who've we've highlighted before on this podcast as well as Knoll Ventures — both firms out of Atlanta. Qualytics solves the massive problem of scattered and unorganized data within the organization. When this happens, even the smartest folks in the room are not informed enough to make meaningful, strategic decisions. Qualtyics helps companies manage data quality at scale. Imagine millions or billions of data points scattered across several applications, the opaqueness and confusion can compound quickly. Well done to Founder and CEO, Gorkem Sevinc on closing the round before the final bell of the year.   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Atlanta Ventures News from the Year:  https://www.atlantaventures.com/resources/news https://www.atlantaventures.com/newsletter  3 Pieces of Content We Really Like: Martin Escobari of General Atlantic on TwentyVC Mark Suster of Upfront VC - What does the post-crash VC market look like? Brian Singerman of FoundersFund on TwentyVC Market Opportunity to Watch: Solar Panel Installations and Installers Raise a Glass: Qualytics Raises $2.5M  

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.  Welcome everyone to episode 30 as we all prepare for the Holidays and St. Nick to come down that chimney in a few days. Let's light another candle and get to this week's Five and Thrive because our passionate community of listeners this week are going to get quite the treat.  Opportunity of the Week / Month / Potential Year: We're going to kick it off with a new segment called Opportunity of the Week, Month, and potential year. This segment highlights a specific opportunity for someone in the community to capitalize on. I caught up with a new friend who runs a Radiologist practice in Atlanta and for over the past 5 years he's had a side hustle. Now he's ready to turn the side hustle into something much bigger by bringing on a CEO. The name of the company is called Inside Injuries. When a player in the NFL or NBA, or any major league sport gets injured there is a large degree of ambiguity around the recovery. If a player is expected to return 4-6 weeks after an ankle sprain, well those two weeks of buffer have a major impact on the performance of the player and the outcome of the game. Inside Injuries has written an algorithm that takes the data from the injury and puts a much more scientific prediction towards the player and their performance. Back to the 4-6 weeks example for an ankle sprain: let's say the player comes back in 4 weeks, Inside Injuries compares that recovery time to all the other data they have on ankle sprains and specifically any from that individual player in the past and makes calculated assessments on their total recovery along with overall predictions. The Dr. named Dr. A and a sports analyst review the key injuries each week and make predictions on future games based off the data they have on their Youtube show called The SHOW by Inside Injuries. How is the authentic demand of the product? Well, they have 26,000 followers on Twitter. Now Dr. A wants to turn Inside Injuries the number one place on the internet to get the most accurate information, news, and predictions about sports through the lens of injuries. He's looking for a CEO to come in and take the reigns and propel it to the business he knows it can be. We brainstormed revenue streams and the recurring membership to obtain this regular information is number one. So anyone out there that loves sports, placing a wager from time to time, community building and software, this could be the moment and opportunity in your career to take the leap. If you're interested in learning more, shoot me an email or connect on LinkedIn.  Companies Worth Applying To: Coginiti is a software company out of Atlanta looking for a Head of Finance. This company has about 40 employees and provides tools to access and integrate your data in any SQL database. If you're looking to be a head of finance, check out Coginiti. Highlight of the Week: This week we are highlighting Atlanta Inno and their Form D Friday. The vibrancy test of any city's startup and technology scene is whether or not a reporter or news outlet is covering the Form D, or Notice of Sales of Securities, filings. A Form D is required by law in the U.S. to be filed within 15 days of selling the security. If someone in the community is actively monitoring the filings of Form D's and reporting it to the public, there is likely enough activity for it to be interesting and it keeps the entrepreneurs on their toes regarding PR and shaping their company's narrative. Zach over at Atlanta Inno write a weekly Form D Friday that we encourage every listener to follow if you want to stay up to date on the movement of investment money into private opportunities in Atlanta. Good work Atlanta Inno.  Company Coming Up: Lastly, this week's company is called Impiricus. Getting in front of and gaining the trust of Health Care Providers is a difficult task. Dropping off coffee and donuts doesn't work as well as it used to in the healthcare space. Impiricus was founded by physicians who wanted to put more of the information control in their hands and they did this by creating a platform that allows over 800k health care providers to opt in to information and communication from vendors across the health care industry. Right now the company has about 12 employees but this is one to keep an eye on in 2023 and beyond.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Opportunity of the Week, Month, and Year:  Inside Injuries Companies Worth Applying To: Cogniti Highlight of the Week: Form D Friday Company Coming Up: Impiricus

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.  Product of the Week: This week's product of the week is called Proline a communication tool for contractors. This application does everything from sending sales follow ups, providing job updates, creating appointment reminders, to generating invoice nudges. AJ Briley and team have been in the space for over 2 years and evolved their product offerings to this must-have solution for any modern day contractor. There is no-credit card needed free trial then a monthly subscription charge afterwards. When looking at companies who have simple and quick ways to sign on to a free trial then convert those trials into paying customers, you know there is real demand in the market.  Question of the Week: This week's question of the week is around venture debt and how we view it at Atlanta Ventures. The macro economic environment has made this a bit more topical with interest rates increasing and burn multiples now having a larger magnifying glass on it than let's just say the last two years. The way we view venture debt is as a safety net and not part of the burn rate calculations. Focusing your burn rate around the number of months of cash on hand is the smart play and then viewing venture debt as a way to sleep better at night. Venture debt should be used only as a “break the glass in case of an emergency” scenario.    Get Them While You Can: Just this week I met with an all-star candidate in finance. This person has spent 7 years scaling a SaaS company and now the company is just too big. If you are listening to this podcast and looking for a Head of Finance or early stage CFO, email me today, jon dot birdsong at Atlanta Ventures as this person will be scooped up quickly.   Company Coming Up: This company coming up is already up and scaling so we may need a new title headline here but the company is out of Charlotte, NC and it's called DebtBook. They are in the accounting standards compliance space, and make debt and lease management easy. Over 1000 finance teams across the nation use DebtBook to manage debt and lease compliance and streamline reporting so the team is efficient and on the same page. Their customers range from municipalities to universities to non-profits which makes it a sticky solution in a large and wide market. Back in August they raised $7.5M led by Elephant Partners. Keep an eye for this company to be a major job provider and software stalwart in Charlotte.  Raise a Glass:  A few announcements on the fundraising side this past week. First, Jim Stallings of PS27 out of Jacksonville just led the $1.6M seed round of SoHookd which is one of the fastest-growing digital wellness marketplaces. Whether you're an individual consumer or an employer looking to amp up your wellness offerings, SoHookd, led by their CEO B.J. Wiley Williams is making it simple to add the right products to you or company's lifestyle right now. Congrats to Jim and the PS27 team for leading the round.  Another major announcement this week out of Atlanta comes from MessageGears. Talk about a company that has put their nose to the grindstone for years and built a complete and persistent product for a decade – I can remember 11 years ago when they were in the corner office of the ATDC, walking in and seeing the focus and dedication of the team. Well, this week they announced their raise of $62M led by Long Ridge Equity Partners which included participation from Atlanta Ventures as well. MessageGears led by Roger Barnette is used by customers including Expedia, OpenTable, T-Mobile and more to leverage zero- and first-party data to engage with their customers in highly personalized ways across email and SMS. What makes MessageGears unique is how they directly access their customers' data repositories versus relying on the cloud making it faster, more secure, and have greater flexibility. And when we start talking about companies that have direct access to company specific data and workflows, we know that leads to a very sticky product. Well done to Roger and team. We look forward to seeing what you do with that $62M!    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!

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.  For those of you who need a five minute break from testing out ChatGPT, we have you covered for a few minutes.   Acquisitions in the Air: Just recently it was publicly announced that Radiance Solar, one of the largest commercial and industrial solar engineering, procurement and construction contractors in the Southeast was acquired by Bravo Infrastructure Group. Radiance was started in 2007 and had over 40 employees. CEO, Jamie Porges led the process and is planning to start his next big thing in solar. Keep an eye out for the product hitting the solar market soon. Congrats to Jamie and team.  Companies Worth Applying To: A major announcement this week came from Joshua Silver, co-Founder of successful Atlanta company PatientCo which sold to private equity a few years ago. Josh has launched a new company called Rainforest that is hiring the first few employees including sales, marketing, and product managers. Rainforest allows you to grow revenue by embedding payments into your product - without ops and compliance headaches. Josh is a seasoned vet in the payments space and a company to give special attention to if you are looking to join something early with proven leadership and experience.    Product Launch of the Week: We've covered the company XComms on here before, which sends company wide alerts to desktops and corporate computers. Oftentimes, emails and texts do not suffice when it comes to communicating imperative, time-sensitive information. XComms customers have thousands of employees and with the setup of a few alerts, can notify an entire organization instantly. Well, their new product is a piece of hardware that allows you to send that alert in with the click of one button. When I saw the product, I immediately thought of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. All you need to do is press one button to notify a large organization of an important message. Well done to XComms pushing product!   Another major feature launch in an existing product is the partnership with T-Mobile and the Bark phone. What a massive win for the Bark team! As a friendly reminder, Bark is a safe and secure phone built for kids that helps parents monitor content, manage screen time, set location alerts and much more. Now they have the power of T-Mobile behind their go-to-market efforts.   Company Coming Up: Looping back around to the solar industry, this company coming up is one put on your solar powered radar and it's called Wattch with two “t's.” Wattch enables observability, intelligence, and control for any renewable energy system. So going back to Radiance Solar, all of the implementations they've done over the past several years could use Wattch to make sure the hardware is up to speed and maximum efficiency is generated from the implementation. Wattch is headquartered out of Atlanta was founded by Alex Nussey. As the solar installation market heats up, keep an eye on Wattch. The second company coming up this week is out of Tampa led by Patrick Johnson and it's called Vantage Sports. For all the folks out there with kids seeking to excel in sports, the moment you start, several bottlenecks present themselves. Let's take for example, baseball, you've got to find a coach or assistant coach in the league your son is playing in and see if they'd be open to additional coaching and schedule it around their likely busy schedule. Well, Vantage Sports has created a marketplace of credible college athletes who have the time and flexibility to coach. Now there is a ready, qualified, and curated market of coaches set to provide the additional coaching and training needed to get the athletic scholarship we all want for our children.   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Acquisitions in the Air: Radiance Solar Product Launch of the Week:  XComms Bark & T-Mobile  Companies Worth Applying Too: Rainforest Company Coming Up:  Wattch Vantage Sports

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.  We have a lot of logistics going on this week in the pod. Excited to share each one. Product of the Week: This product of the week is coming out of Chattanooga founded by Spencer Ware and A.J. Cheek. The name of the company is called Repowr which is an open B2B marketplace of accessible equipment. 3% of trucking companies own 97% of trailer capacity in this highly fragmented market. This leaves little coordination and almost no connected network of vacancy which produces a large amount of inefficiencies in the market.   Getting a trailer, renting it, and using it should be as easy as opening an application, finding a trailer, paying for it, and gettin' to hauling. Welcome to Repowr. And trailers are just the trojan horse for the several other equipment verticals in the market. Check out Repowr if you're in needed of trailer today.      Question of the Week: This week's questions of the week is how do you find a co-founder? This past week I was chatting with an entrepreneur who was looking at finding a co-founder as it is one of the most important decisions maybe outside of finding your life partner. Naturally the easiest way is to find them through your existing work experience and relationships. If those primary sources are limited, then focus on your trusted network of individuals who would vouch for someone. Once your individual network is exhausted, now comes the tougher part but there are a few successful ways I've seen it done. First, seek to find like minded people. Like minded people in this important instance would be someone else looking to start a company. Timing is always everything especially when it comes to people's career, so go to events where other entrepreneurs would go to. I've heard several occasions where co-founders met at a fire-side chat, Atlanta Startup Village, or Atlanta Startup Convo (the next and last one of the year is on Wednesday). Outside of local events, check out the YC Co-founder Matching platform. This is one of the strongest communities of ambitious people online. Lastly, I have also found Reddit forums and other co-founder forums or websites to have worked in the past but it takes a disciplined process, a scrupulous eye, and significant patience. For those looking to start a company, try some of these strategies and let me know which one worked the best for you.  Company Coming Up: There are two companies coming up this week. The first is called Jax Rideshare Rentals and was started by Emory MBA graduate, Julius Bryant. While getting his Masters degree, Julius and his co-founder started leasing out cars they purchased to verified drivers so they could drive Uber and Lyft. Today, they continue to empower people who lack vehicle access in Atlanta and Dallas to earn income via the gig economy but instead of purchasing the cars, they are shifting their focus to organizations who already have the cars and now providing the software and verified drivers to turn those sedentary car lots into cash cows. Keep an eye on this product as they continue to scale city by city.   The second company coming up was started by Georgia Tech Alumnus, Murtaza Bambot and it is called HeartBeat. HeartBeat is the operating system to enhance your community. With their software, any community leader and organizer can host conversations, events, and more. The reason I get excited about HeartBeat is the online YouTube reviews. If you search HeartBeat reviews on YouTube, you'll find videos of users who walk through the product for 15 minutes, praising the product and how it solves a real need. If you're looking to put structure and organization around your online community, check out HeartBeat. That is Heartbeat.chat. Keep up the momentum and product love! Raise a Glass: Lastly, let's all raise a glass to Saltbox. Tyler Scriven, Maxwell Bonnie, and Paul d'arrigo have created the co-warehousing space. Across the country, Saltbox owns and operates large warehouses where tenants who run e-commerce stores can store, ship, and scale their product offerings without having to sign a long term lease. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses getting their start shipping product from the garage, the next affordable and flexible step is Saltbox. They just raised $35M from Cox Enterprises and Pendulum to enhance their software solution to provide a full suite of services improving the logistics for their customers. Congrats to the entire Saltbox team!      Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Product of the Week: Repowr Question of the Week: How do you find a co-founder? Company Coming Up: Jax RideShare Rentals HeartBeat Raise a Glass: Saltbox

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. Product of the Week: I've had two insightful, soulful meetings and conversations in the past month at the Decatur and Downtown Switchyards. Michael Tavani, Brooks Buffington, and their talented Creative Director, Brandon have refined the model of Switchyards through Covid and nailed the product-market fit. Imagine the reverence of a library intertwined with unlimited quality coffee engulfed amongst some of the best Atlanta memorabilia outside of the Atlanta History Museum or Coca-Cola archives and you've got Switchyards. Their model changed in three ways: each location is open 24-hours, the overall square footage is smaller, and providing self-serve coffee makes the product more economical and scalable. As a lover of posting up at a library to get work done or focus on deep work – with Emory's Woodruff Library being my favorite, Switchyard's product just makes sense. After chatting with Michael and Brandon and listening to their expansion plans, they will most likely be in your hood coming soon.   Product Launch of the Week launched this week out of Augusta, Georgia and was designed by the Weir / Stewart team. The product is called Big Dog Speakers, spelled Dog, to clarify for all the Yellow Jackets listening. Big Dog Speakers is the biggest, baddest bluetooth speaker designed to work everywhere with everything. With 15 hours of playback, 105db Max Output, and more, Big Dog Speakers is your speaker for the year in 2023, and priced on sale right now for just under $100. Shout out to pushing out product and production just in time for the holiday season.  Podcast of the Week: The podcast of the week we're all listening to is Harry Stebbing's 20VC with Martín Escobari of General Atlantic. There were several themes that hit home when listening to Martin Escobari's interview. Themes include General Atlantic's framework of successful companies including how the market is the single most important factor of success. He also shares how they remain disciplined regardless of market conditions during the highs and lows. They go into several other insightful threads and listening to it was like listening to your wise Uncle at the table over Thanksgiving share stories of his career. So if you don't have a wise Uncle, just throw your airpods in and press play on this one.     Question of the Week: Where is the marketplace for very high-end freelance work? We were having a fun back and forth in the AV office not too long ago brainstorming what a high-end marketplace for freelance work would look like? Today there are marketplaces like Fiverr and Upwork but price plays a significant part in the equation. Let's say you're a former Bain Consultant, banker, seasoned writer, or marketer with years of experience, if you wanted to freelance on projects, where can you go online today to get vetted, approved, and allocated to a project? There are several markets where one could go get work, but normally it relies on the network of the individual. Imagine a marketplace where you could find, connect, and consult within days of matchmaking versus months of networking.       Company Coming Up: Today is Thanksgiving and what better company coming up to highlight than Thnks — that is Thanks without an “A.” This company spawned out of the Loeb Studio and is now headquartered in Franklin, Tennessee. Thnks has built customer success software to build deeper business relationships by ensuring each customer and prospect feel appreciated. Now every company that uses Thaks equips every employee with the tools to send tokens of appreciation such as coffees, lunches, experiences, and more. There are over 50 employees at Thnks and they are also currently hiring for Account Executives in Franklin, Tennessee. On this Thanksgiving, check out a software company amplifying appreciation. And I thank each and everyone of you listening today and onwards!     Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode:   Product of the Week: SwitchYards Product Launch of the Week: Big Dog Speakers Podcast of the Week:  20VC - General Atlantic Question of the Week: Where is the high-end marketplace for remote work?  Company Coming Up: Thnks

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. Beta Product of the Week: Just yesterday morning, the iStory team launched their product on ProductHunt and it has been well received. Stephen Malik, Chris Hall, and team, have put an interactive product out there to help content creators improve audience experience through voice. How do they do it? Imagine you have a website that sells a product, with the easy use of iStory, you can add your unique voice to any part of the website. So as a user experiences your site, whether it be a video demo or a specific web page, adding audio with analytics is performed by iStory. Check out their website, demo, and if it peaks your interest enough, upvote them on Product Hunt.  The Second Beta Product of the week is Any Distance who just launched their 3.0 version which includes features making it the most safe and secure activity tracking app in the market, while still keeping their superior design. If you run, bike, or walk, Any Distance is the app for you to prioritize celebration and maintain motivation.   Event of the Week: Mark your calendars for the last Atlanta Startup Convos of the year on December 7th. It's amazing how much that MeetUp group has organically grown with over 2700 members in the MeetUp. Three very exciting products will be shown including Gatsby which we've covered on this pod before, Lavender, and The Gig Room. Jacey Cadet of Atlanta Ventures runs and hosts this informative and insightful event. Mark your calendars today.    Alpha Product of the Week: This week's Alpha product of the week comes from entrepreneur Drew Williams of FANFUNDR. The product is still early, but the community driven mechanisms are very interesting and I believe Drew as entrepreneur will create some magic in the space. Here is how it works: let's say you're a fan of an artist and you have an idea about creating a unique event, product, or piece of content you'd like to see your cherished artist produce. With FANFUNDR, the mechanisms are in place to dream the idea, generate a petition, gain a groundswell of fans who love the idea, begin collecting payments to fund the concept, and generate enough momentum to make the experience or product happen. This product is still very early and Drew is entertaining several ways to make the process seamless, even looking at digital assets to purchase as a way to kick start the momentum. Regardless, check out FanFundr, sign up for the product updates, and keep in touch with the evolution of this journey.   Companies Worth Applying Too:  This week I was speaking with a junior engineer looking to work for an early stage company. Outside of suggesting different engineering groups he should connect with as well as combing through some of the fastest growing companies in Georgia on the Inc 5000, the Atlanta Tech Village job boards came to mind. I went to check it out and in addition to several Carpool Logistics roles we mentioned last week, there are more companies hiring including ePlannerPro, ByteCheck, and more coming! Shout out to Irena and Aly for keeping this job board fresh!  Market Analysis of the Week: For those who have listened or read more of our content from Atlanta Ventures, you know the importance of markets. One of our very talented interns, Divya Pinnaka, put together an insightful analysis on the carbon footprint market not only today but in 10 years. She also highlights the companies already working on the problem. The saying is “pick a niche to get rich” is true, but picking a niche that will grow into an even bigger market is the cream of the crop. To me the carbon footprint market is vast. In Greenzie's sense, it would be like outdoor robotics, but even then an entrepreneur still needs to focus on a very real and specific pain point. In Greenzie's case, the pain point is the cost of repetitive labor solved by automating 52-72 commercial lawn mowers. What is that equivalent in the carbon footprint market? Only additional customer discovery and research will tell. Start with Divya's post, linked in the show notes.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Beta Product of the Week: iStory, Any Distance Event of the Week: Meetup with Gatsby, Lavender, and Gig Room Alpha Product of the Week:  FANFUNDR Companies Worth Applying Too: ATV Job Board Market Analysis of the Week: Carbon Footprint Market Analysis

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. Beta Product of the Week: If you love to learn about products right before they launch, we have one for you. A new dating app called Hatched is on the cusp of launching to the world next week. Their tagline: “You're more than a picture.” The mechanisms put in place for Hatched require personality, core value, and attitude matches that “hatch” the profile picture of the potential match before you fully connect. MItch Alterman is their CEO and few things are more exciting than the days leading up to a company's product launch. For all the single folks listening go to HatchYourMatch.com and sign up for the email updates and product info today.     Event of the Week: On Wednesday, November 16th, Atlanta Ventures Partner, A.T, Gimbel is hosting the Healthcare Entrepreneurship MeetUp. This wildly popular Meetup highlights entrepreneurs in Atlanta who are building in the healthcare industry. There is a substantial database of past MeetUps and the one for next week will showcase 3 companies building their products in the space. These companies include: Happy Talks, InovCares, and Stridelink. If you want to see live demos of the products of today, and tomorrow, sign up in the show notes link.   Product of the Week: There are two products of the week to pay attention to. First is a sales efficiency product called Managr. CEO, Michael Gorodisher is solving the painful problem of updating your Salesforce. Any sales rep who is listening, we know how laborious the process of recording notes, updating stages within the pipeline, and setting automations and reminders for next steps with leads. Managr integrates with Slack and Microsoft Teams to build bridges across platforms so you only have to enter data once – and the big news just this week: there is an individual plan, free, up to three users. For any entrepreneur who's attempted a freemium, bottoms-up model, we all know the strategic commitment required and the confidence in the value prop needed. If you or any of your friends use Salesforce.com try out Managr for free today.   Our next product of the week is PlayerZero out of the ATDC. In a circle of life story, CEO Animesh Koratana is back at the ATDC after growing up watching his dad build his startup in those same hallways. In between time, Animesh studied Comp Sci at Stanford and is now focused on how teams ensure product quality through superior communication with the help of data. 20% of bugs cause 80% of the problems – PlayerZero finds the 20%, shows why they matter, and provides the tools you need to fix them. They just scaled the leaderboard on Product Hunt to #1 last week. Keep an eye out and give PlayerZero a try as the team continues to build data-driven debugging tools for developers. Companies Worth Applying Too: Carpool Logistics is hiring in several areas including sales and engineering. We covered them in episode 9 of Five and Thrive. If you love cars, logistics, and transportation, check out Carpool Logistics as they continue to grow their business in meaningful ways. We linked to their careers page where they are looking for a Director of Sales, Account Executives, and more.   Quiet Giant: This week's quiet giant and true sleeper is called Formulytics. I first heard about them in the SaportaReport. This company is a file management system that helps police and prosecutors coordinate on gang cases. They approach the criminal, not the case, by providing full lifecycle intelligence collaboration of the criminal profile - including the investigation and arrest, to prosecution, incarceration, and release. This company is a decade old and likes to keep a low profile – naturally fitting into this category. Quotes from public officials  We put a link to the SaportaReport article with more details on their origin story and more. Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Beta Product of the Week: Hatched Event of the Week: Atlanta Healthcare MeetUp Product of the Week:  Managr PlayerZero Companies Worth Applying Too: Carpool Logistics  Quiet Giant: Formultyics in SaportaReport

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. Question of the Week: This past week I received a question from a friend who's company had raised a very large round at a significant valuation late last year. Back then, she was excited at the prospect of the company being worth that large number reported in TechCrunch. Having a validated and credible financial partner produced confidence in the direction of the business. Fast forward to today, rumblings around the office of upcoming layoffs in the weeks and months ahead persist around the water cooler. She has vested ¾ of her options but now wants to know what she should do. Should she stick around to help the company achieve the latest goals set to fulfill that exorbitant valuation? She is in sales and knows that growing into the valuation will take at least three years of strenuous work. Would it be better for her to stay there or move on to a new opportunity?  This is a timely and touchy topic. There is no question several companies who raised large rounds in 2021 at very high valuations are currently in a predicament. Most likely raised with the plan to grow at all costs, hire quickly, and achieve the 12-18 month plans to develop into that valuation. A few things have changed: first the macro-economy has shifted. Growing interest rates have made money much more expensive than this time last year. Secondly, valuation multiples on revenue have dropped precipitously from 12 months ago. We love to look at the Bessemer Cloud Index at the Atlanta Ventures office which gives a high-level barometer of current multiples among public cloud computing companies. As of this recording, the average multiple on revenue for publicly traded cloud companies is 7.4x with an average revenue growth rate of 35%.    Knowing this context, now let's apply it to my friend's company. First, every employee should know the strike price of their options. This way they can back into the value of those options once they would be exercised. Secondly, and we've talked about it before, but understanding the Rule of 40 (a concept we've discussed before) for your company is important to gain a perspective so you'll know how much your company is stepping on the gas to generate revenue. Lastly, finding out the valuation of the latest financing round will give you all the numbers needed for your equation to help make a decision. I won't go into specific numbers but if your company is way below the Rule of 40 and is burning a lot of cash each month to scale revenue, now you have an idea of ballpark revenue multiples on valuations – and pretty soon it becomes clear if and how long you should stay around. It could take years to get back to the last valuation of the company and then another 3-5 years to make any significant progress on those options. Would it be better for her to go work at another company and start fresh? Maybe.  Asking leadership when is the next time we're planning on raising is a good indication of how they plan to build moving forward. Remember, each new investor most likely has preferences over all other investors and common stock shareholders, which is also another factor. Regardless, if you work for a company that has raised a significant round at a seemingly high valuation, asking some probing questions around Rule of 40, growth rate, and revenue multiples is not a bad idea.         Quiet Giant of the Week: This week's Quiet Giant is Rev.io. With over 120 employees, they are used by thousands of companies for customized billing software to help your business grow. If you're looking to launch new product lines and quickly tailor your billing and subscription needs, Rev.io has you covered. Led by Brent Maropis, Rev.io continues to grow with health and swiftness. Keep an eye on them as they scale.       Acquisitions in the Air: First reported in Atlanta Inno this past week, Atlanta Tech Village Startup, Stellar Software was acquired by Austin based Storable. Stellar Software makes boat rental simple and easy through their software. If you own or rent a power or house boat, or a fleet of them, having software schedule, order, and process payments is now a must have in the market. Congratulations to Brent and team as they move on their next adventure.    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes.   Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode:   Quiet Giant: Rev.io Acquisitions in the Air: Stella Software Stella Acquired

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. Y'all what a week! From TechStars to Venture Atlanta, to the cocktail parties, dinners, and happy hours, I can say it was so fun. And it was wonderful to meet so many investors who come to Atlanta once or twice a year and showcase the city and meet in person. Congratulations to Allyson Eman on another amazing Venture Atlanta.   Quiet Giant: I was reminded of this past week's quasi-Quiet Giant out of Durham, North Carolina called Spiffy. Their short tag line is on-demand car wash and detailing service. While that may seem obvious as there are several mom and pop shops willing to meet you in your driveway to give you the detail your car wants and needs, Spiffy has raised over $60M in funding around this fast growing, successful tech enabled service that washes cars for several enterprise fleets. Examples include trucking fleets, rental car services, and much more. And the best part, car wash and detailing services are just the beginning. CEO, Scott Wingo and team have figured out that these fleets need much more than to glean and be cleaned – they also need brakes checked, new tires, oil changes, and disinfectants adhered. The auto maintenance shop is now coming to you. Check out Spiffy and see if they are in your zipcode today and book your next appointment over the phone or through their mobile app.    Beta Product of the Week: I met this entrepreneur last week in a serendipitous lunch at Jack's Deli. He overheard what a friend and I were talking about in another booth, introduced himself and shared the product he's building. The name of the product is called Ambitious App. Their brand promise: Learn in-demand digital skills in 5 minutes a day. He is launching the private beta this week. The CEO, Alim Charaniya, is a technical founder who wants to deliver bit-sized educational content to our generation of short reels and tik toks but package it all up in a productive way so there is a quantified and gamified learning. One of the go-to-market strategies that I already admire and respect from Alim is that he's building community before the product has been launched. For example, if you go to the link in the show notes taking you Ambitious App's website, Alim and his team filter you into a slack channel where you are immediately introduced to other like-minded learners.  In a world that is changing so fast in an industry (education) that has hardly evolved from that traditional classroom setting in a century, this is another innovative angle to learn outside of the classroom rat race.  Product of the Week: We've covered this product before, especially this time of the year and definitely this time of the political season, but the product is a simple website called GeorgiaVotes.com. If you live in Georgia and love early voting analytics, Ryan Anderson (@GTRyan) on Twitter has you covered. Each night, GeorgiaVotes updates the early voting records from the Secretary of the State's website and analyzes who has voted and compared those voters to elections prior. We interviewed Ryan on The Atlanta Story Podcast last year and will make sure to link to that interview in the show notes.   Event of the Week: The ATDC keeps coming with some great programming. This time it is with entrepreneur Tristan Walker. If you remember, Tristan sold his company to Proctor and Gamble in 2018 and moved to Atlanta from California. He is speaking at the P&G alumni event which has joined forces with the ATDC. This will be a fireside chat with Tristan mixed with networking on Tuesday, November 8th – which is also election day!  News of the Week: Shout out to Clint Green and team who just launched Revenue Ready. This is the ecosystem at work as Clint spent seven and a half years at Salesloft and before then Pardot, not only selling and closing deals, but learning the systems and processes to put in place to scale. Now he and his team have packaged up their services to take your company. If you're looking to tighten up the opportunity process and cement your sales playbook check out Revenue Ready as they have been there and done it.    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Quiet Giant: Get Spiffy Beta Product of the Week: Ambitious App Product of the Week: GeorgiaVotes.com The Atlanta Story - Ryan Anderson Event of the Week:  Fireside Chat with Tristan Walker News of the Week: Revenue Ready

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. This week it seems like so many representatives across the country of the investor community come to Atlanta for VentureAtlanta, what better way to start this week's podcast than with Raises of the Week.  Raise a Glass:  First is MileAuto out of the ATDC. CEO Fred Blumer raised $4M from existing investors including Ulu Ventures, Emergent Ventures and Sure Ventures. MileAuto provides auto insurance to low-mileage drivers through the use of computer vision and ML technology. That brings their total funding to $16M. Congrats to Fred and team.  Another announcement in funding is Greenzie with an $8M round that includes the strategic investment of Bobcat. This one is right in Atlanta Ventures' backyard as Founder and CEO, Charles Brian Quinn or CBQ started it out the Atlanta Ventures Studio just over 4 years ago. Today, there are mowers coming off the lot from manufacturers that are air quotes Robotic Ready to be activated by Greenzie's software to make them autonomous. This funding provides Greenzie resources to partner with several more manufacturers so in a not too far distance there will be dozens and then hundreds of mowers coming out of the productions lines ready for Greenzie's software to be turned as simply as Sirius radio, but instead of the Elvis Presley channel, it's autonomous mowing all the time. Congratulations to CBQ and team!  Product of the Week: This product is headquartered out of Birmingham, Alabama and designed to be your digital vault for all the key family documents in your nuclear and extended family. The company is called Prismm and it was founded by Martha Underwood. Think of all the important documents that are either saved on an external hard drive or in the cloud – most likely email or a desk drawer – that should be in a safe and secure location. Prismm is the place that keeps all of these documents organized, safe, and secure. Examples include documents around property & assets, financial accounts, and more. Say good by to the security deposit box and hello to the Prismm. Try the free trial today.    Hot Market of the Week: Last week Hypepotamus highlighted a product doing close to $10k MRR in the content marketing space called SuperCopy. Their CEO, Richard Lee from Georgia Tech has built a technology that takes a large part of the work load off of generating copy through what the industry and market it calling it “AI Content.” SuperCopy combines intent, tone of voice, demographic, and keywords for endless unique content. As that product was plastered across inboxes via Hype last week, just this week Jasper an AI Content software solution raised $125M at a unicorn priced valuation to generate content for blog articles, social media posts, website copy and more. And it was just released via Twitter but Lex.Page which has a waitlist of over 25,000 folks for Nate Baschez's new product. We put a link to his product demo in the show notes. So what is the excitement around content, AI, and marketers? The fight for eyeballs and ears is vivacious and any edge to produce more content in less time while maintaining, or enhancing the quality is going to produce substantial buzz. Check all of them out in the show notes below.  Companies Worth Applying Too: The popular pizza joint, Glide Pizza, started by Rob Birdsong (my older brother) is looking for an Ops Manager. They just opened their second location in Decatur and have plans to continue growth on the West Side and hopefully, eventually Buckhead or Brookhaven. With all that expansion on the horizon, they are looking for someone who makes sure all the trains or dough is tossed on time and nuts and bolts are as tight as possible around the early processes defined. If you're an operationally focused individual who loves physical locations and food, check out Glide Pizza and their growing enterprise.   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode: Raise a Glass: MileAuto Greenzie   Product of the Week: Prismm   Hot Market of the Week: SuperCopy Jasper Lex.Page - Demo Lavender    Companies Worth Applying Too: Glide Pizza

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.   Event of the Week: The next two weeks in Atlanta are loaded with dozens of events ranging from Venture Atlanta, TechStars Demo Day, happy hours and more with several investors from all over the country to get a taste of the Atlanta ecosystem. I hope to see several of you out and about. Here's a more tactical event to put on your calendar. On 10/20, the ATDC is hosting their regular Entrepreneur's Night starting at 5 p.m. This month is focused on all things 5G. Leaders from TMoble, Curiosity Lab, and the ATDC will be exchanging knowledge and conversations through a panel format on 5G today and tomorrow – if the 5th Generation for broadband cellular markets is of interest to you, sign up in the link within the show notes. In a state where no more than 21% of our households have high speed internet access and approximately 39% live in an area where there is only 1 internet provider, the opportunity is vast.        Company Coming Up:  This company coming up has stayed under the radar as it started as a side hustle for a few years mixed with a pivot. The name of the company? AdvizorPro (with a Z). This is software that provides a verified and robust broker-dealer, RIA, & insurance database of contacts. If you're looking to sell into the financial services industry, AdvizorPro is a great resource to get email information and direct dial numbers as the market of financial data continues to grow. AdvizorPro is a team of approximately 10 folks and one to keep an eye as they scale and grow against some of the legacy competitors in the market.    Product Launch of the Week: This past week, a company who is innovating in the litigation market publicly announced their product launch. Calloquy's software makes remote legal proceedings safe, secure, and efficient. What spawned out of Covid, Calloquy is now making several aspects of court proceedings including arbitrations, depositions, and mediations as simple as setting up a video conference call. The software is like a very secure Zoom on steroids, where you can upload and annotate documents, structure the actual video conference participants like one would be set up in a courtroom, and have all the proceedings and court reporting documented in a safe and secure location. Calloquy has invested significant resources in building out a product in a market that is tough to build a Minimum Viable Product. Check out their software today and refer it to any law firm who does remote work.     Blog and Podcast of the Week: The blog post of the week comes from Harvard Business School, one of Atlanta Ventures Partner, A.T Gimbel's alma mater. The title is “Why a Failed Startup Might Be Good For Your Career After All.” Regardless of success or failure, there is growing evidence that the market values the experience founders have and rewards them in terms of high seniority, prestigious positions, even though they failed. The article goes into detail about how they are valued and the benefits of a generalist's versatile value to a firm. I personally can't think of one successful entrepreneur who didn't have a failure. We've highlighted several entrepreneurs in our Stories section on the AV website and each one has a failure story. This may be one of the reasons why when we work with entrepreneurs in the Atlanta Ventures Studio, we love to see their previous entrepreneurial efforts, successful or not, but the experience is vital towards their next endeavor.    Lastly, I'm biased for this week's podcast of the week because it highlights someone we interviewed on the The Atlanta Story Podcast – which is another podcast out of Atlanta Ventures. The entrepreneur on this month's Atlanta Story is Cherie Kloss, Founder of SnapNurse. Cherie's story is one of fortitude, reinvention, innovation, and scale. What started out as a list of links to learn how to build a startup from her brother in 2015, led to the formation and generation of a $1.2B revenue business 6 years later. Cherie started out in the healthcare field, transitioned to a producer for A&E for nearly a decade, then started SnapNurse. In the Atlanta Story Podcast, we talk about her amazing story and how she not only reinvented herself time and time again, but also learn where the industry is going in general and more. Check it out as it drops, today!   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes.   Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode:     Event of the Week: Entrepreneur night at ATDC: All Things 5G Company Coming Up: AdvizorPro  Product Launch of the Week: Calloquy  Blog Post of the Week:  Why a Failed Startup Might Be Good For Your Career After All

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. Individual On the Move: Sometimes the 2nd, 3rd or 4th person at a company can create a transformational force needed to get the product in market. I can't tell you how many times I've seen or heard how the first go-to-market leader connects with a technical founding team and the sparks fly. Well, this past week I met with the ideal go-to-market individual who wants to be that 3rd team member right after the founding team has built out the minimum viable product in an interesting and fast growing market. After learning more about this individual's story, I can attest he would be a great addition in the early days based off his sales results, technical understanding, and extensive experience bringing products to market. If you or you and a co-founder are listening and looking for your first go-to-market team member, email me at jon.birdsong@atlantaventures.com and I'll put y'all in touch.  Event of the Week: The premiere conference on Bitcoin is next week. Now I know several folks may be down on digital currency right now, and quite candidly it is not an area we have place much focus at Atlanta Ventures, however, I would be remiss if I didn't mention it here as there is a big sentiment in the waters that digital currencies are going through the same cycle that the internet did after 2001 bubble popped. If you're looking to understand bitcoin, next week is a great opportunity in Atlanta.  Company Coming Up: This company coming up is headquartered out of Charlotte and it's called Spendly. Imagine overpaying for merchant services for years and having now simple or easy way to shop around or price compare. Millions of SMB's are doing it daily, right now. Spendly's software lets you easily compare your current financial services ranging from payroll, insurance, lines of credit, retirement plans, and much more. In three easy steps, you'll have quotes from their trusted network of providers comparing and contrasting each service you're assessing. Check out Spendly if you're wondering how competitive your current financial products are today.     Beta Product of the Week: The beta product of the week comes from Birmingham and it's called ClearMindNow. CEO, Liz Read and team are solving the cumbersome, invasive, and unaccountable process for drug testing. Their solution helps families across the country monitor and test family members in a safe, simple, and verified way through their technology. How it works is you open up the ClearMindNow App, and through facial recognition confirms the participants identity. From there, the software records you administering a test sent to you by ClearMindNow where one swabs their mouth and tongue. Upon completion, you take the swab, place it back in the holder and show the camera your test results – similar to a rapid Covid test. As the United States battles the fentanyl crisis, and more, ClearMindNow provides another way to combat the disease affecting millions upon millions Americans. ClearMindNow is an up and coming solution to put on your radar.   Concepts of the Week: Over the past few weeks in the Atlanta Ventures office, we've discussed the topic of how long it takes to accelerate from start date, to finding product market fit, to building a repeatable, scalable sales process. For example, the Figma team, which just sold to Adobe for $20B spent 5 years building their product before they made their first dollar in revenue. Figs, the high end scrub company spent 3-4 years before generating over $1M in ARR. Today they are a publicly traded company valued in the billions. One of the hardest aspects of entrepreneurship is maintaining the faith in the product or the market or the team during these years towards scale. Investor David Sacks calls this “The Wilderness Years.” We've linked to one his posts elaborating more on these intrepid years of a startups' journey, but how does an entrepreneur know they are successfully navigating the Wilderness years? The most simple answer in the early days is the rate of customer feedback which is a direct indication of the authentic demand your product is solving. For example, even though Dylan Field, the CEO of Figma spent years, years y'all, not generating revenue, there was enough natural product demand, through feedback and excitement in the market. One unique caveat with Figma is their self-signon go-to-market strategy. It takes time to build that foundation, much more so than picking up the phone or sending a cold email, introducing and urging people to try and use your product. Regardless, if you are an entrepreneur in the Wilderness years, it is vital to be extremely honest with yourself to assess not only the overall market potential, but the velocity of market feedback and product iteration, as that is the best indicator of progress in one of the toughest stages in startups.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Company Coming Up: Spendly Event of the Week: Tab Conference - The Atlanta Bitcoin Conference Beta Product of the Week: ClearMindNow Concept of the Week: The Wilderness Period 

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. Company Company Up: This week's company coming up is called Bottle. Co-Founders, Andy Blechman and Will Schreiber have an obsession with solving the pains of local businesses to serve their customers and improve operations. How do they do it? Bottle makes it dead simple for a local vendor to launch a store, communicate with customers, and sell flexible subscriptions all in one place. Customers who use Bottle have a very simple and beautiful way to showcase their products, text and email customers, and batch the orders with suppliers so greater margins are achieved. Ideal customers range from bakers, to florists, to butchers. They launched this product approximately two years ago and customer satisfaction is off the star chart scale. They are currently hiring for sales reps and more. Check them out and keep an eye on their growth! Announcement of the Week: Hypepotamus ran a great article on Christy Brown who just took over the CEO role of Dr. Noze Best. I'm excited about this for several reasons: first, we are happy customers and can't say enough good things about the product. Second, this company was started by an Emory Pediatric Otolaryngologist, Dr. Steve Goudy. This local, direct to consumer company helps suction the ever-present congestion out of babies and infants. This is a great example of commercialization in the healthcare space on the consumer side. It takes significant, fun work to even get a prototype out there, particularly while being a practicing doctor, nonetheless. Congrats to the Dr. Noze Best team on the next major chapter of the business. I'm very excited to see this grow and scale.     Real Real Estate: There's been tremendous coverage on the MailChimp move from Ponce City Market into their new building in the Biz Chron but when it comes to real estate I've found it more interesting to get the take from the folks who make the decision. This is why when MailChimp Co-Founder, Dan Kurzius wrote a descriptive LinkedIn post on the decision making process, where they are going and why I was intrigued. The synopsis is they are moving 10 minutes down the Beltline in Jim Irwin's New City Development. There are three major towers in the development and MailChimp is taking one entire tower and three floors in another tower connected by a sky bridge. In addition to more details about the building itself and the interior designers, Dan includes several images and videos of the new spread. There is a new sheriff in town among the office portfolio on the East Side Trail of the Beltline; the activity and excitement around that area will be even more energizing! No specific date on the move but they are in the test fit phase today.   Beta Products of the Week: Okay, this product isn't even in beta yet, it is still being built and is pre-launch, but nonetheless, we're going to cover it this week as their launch is imminent. The name of the company is called Gatsby and it's founded by Alice Thacker. She is solving the pain point of getting several folks to coordinate schedules while keeping communication simple. How many times have you been on a group thread looking to organize a dinner or gathering, yet a busy recipient and a two-day later response and suddenly you lose all potential fixity. I'm intrigued in this market because I believe Gatsby can disrupt Doodle. I remember using Doodle 25 years ago in 8th grade…and we still use it today! Add to the fact the natural viral coefficient opportunity here and there could be some serious magic. As mentioned, the product is not out but sign up for the waitlist if you're interested in being the first in the know.  Lastly, one of the busiest weeks is on the horizon which is October 17th-October 21st. Techstars Demo Day to Venture Atlanta amongst several other events, happy hours, and more are sprinkled throughout the week. Lock in your plans now!     Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Announcement of the Week:  Christy Brown Becomes CEO of Dr. Noze Best Company Coming Up:  Bottle Real Real Estate:  MailChimp Real Estate Update Beta Product of the Week: Gatsby  

Five & Thrive | Episode 17 | September 22nd's Weekly Rundown 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. Blog Post of the Week: This week's blog post of the week focuses on serial entrepreneurs Landon Bennett and Kyle Connaro. In the world of headlines highlighting money raised and strategic acquisition, there's also a quieter, more subtle path to entrepreneurship, especially in Atlanta and the Southeast where the cost of living is a touch lower than some other places in the world. One of my favorite communities online is called IndieHackers and they wrote a post highlighting how Landon and Kyle operate 4 startups at once. Clearly these guys love the early stages of company building. An insight from the post states how Landon and Kyle get each company to a place where they can put systems and operations around the business, freeing them up to start another one. Read more about how they are laying the foundation to a multi-SaaS portfolio of starting companies.  Announcement of the Week:  Resurgens Technology Partners made a substantial announcement about closing their second fund with $500M of committed capital. This is quite the news for Atlanta and the region as more capital comes in to fund growth stage startups. I spoke with one of the team members and asked specifically what they are looking for: their ideal company to add strategic capital ranges from $5-$30m of ARR that are growing 10-40% year over year with strong unit economics and a capital efficient business. Well done to the Resurgens team for bringing more capital into the region.  Company Company Up: Infinite Giving is the company coming up. They just presented this past week at Atlanta Startup Convos and Karen and Seth are building a world class product. Infinite Giving is the first robo advisor that allows entity investing. If you took all the assets within non-profits and added them up, they would be the 5th largest economy in the world, but after non-profits do all the hard work of raising money, now they have the tough task of managing it. Today, several non-profits are not big enough to warrant attention from institutional investors and the ones that do pay high fees and have manual and painful processes to ensure risk-adjusted, quality returns. Infinite Giving makes it simple for non-profits to invest their capital by first providing the ease to open a brokerage account in minutes while offering a wide variety of options to allocate money and more. Be on the look for Infinite Giving in the week, months, and years ahead!        Event of the Week: This event of the week is for all the folks looking to do something tonight. Starting a 5:30 p.m. this Thursday evening is the final leg of the ATL Unlocked circuit which traversed throughout the Metro Atlanta area. This one is hosted in Peachtree Corners at Atlanta Tech Park. This entire program put on by MAC and all the hubs has been a strong success as I've learned about new companies and met new people going to two of them. Link to RSVP in the shownotes.  Beta Products of the Week:  What started out as a Georgia Tech Capstone project has now transformed into a company whose mission is ​​to bring simple and affordable wearable technology into physical therapy clinics. This company is called Stride Link and their first product identifies, highlights, and collects data on consumer's walk or gait and delivers it back to the physical therapist so they are more educated and equipped to solve the patient's need. These entrepreneurs continue to innovate and be on the lookout for refined product offerings.   Raise a Glass: Luke Beard and Daniel Kuntz just announced their $1.5M round for AnyDistance which we highlighted before on the pod. AnyDistance is the most elegant, safe, and shareable activity app. Luke and Dan's vision includes incorporating real world accomplishments into digital achievements that can be exchanged for anything from swag, to clothing, to coffee. The future is bright at AnyDistance and the list of investors is impressive as well including Overline and Shorewind. Congrats to all involved!    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode: Blog Post of the Week:  Landon Bennett - Serial Entrepreneur Announcement of the Week: Resurgen's Technology Partners Raises $500M Company Coming Up:  Infinite Giving Events to Put on your Calendar:  ATL Unlocked - Peachtree Corners Beta Product of the Week: Stride Link Raise a Glass: Any Distance

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. Product of the Week: Last week we covered an innovative hardware product to deter car break-ins, this week we're back at it with another hardware company led by Akshita Iyer. This company is called Ome. Ome upgrades your kitchen starting with the most vulnerable and dangerous areas - the stove. More specifically the stove knob. Ome Kitchens smart knobs connect to your mobile app so you have full control of the stove, even when you're not in the kitchen. Akshita turned down $800k from the Shark Tank judges,  a product and name iteration before their current offering today. From the sounds of it, product is being developed and stoves are getting smarter and safer. Give Ome Kitchen a look.   Another product of the week is called BackSpace run by serial entrepreneur, Faiz Imran. After successfully building a marketing agency and working with dozens of influencers and builders of online communities, he saw and felt the acute pain that brand builders and community galvanizers face which is monetizing their community. For example, let's say you're a fitness influencer through Instagram and Tik Tok and want to engage deeper and deliver differentiated product offerings throughout the community experience. Enter BackSpace where communities around people and products can engage through live chat, premium community levels, and simple mechanisms to up sell and cross sell passionate consumers. If you or any of your friends have built substantial communities online, check out BackSpace.  Companies Worth Applying To:  This week the company worth applying to is called Itential as they are looking for a Senior Accountant. This would be a great opportunity to work with a software company from a finance perspective and get great experience a level or two under C-level leadership. Ian Bresenhan, is the CEO of Itential and they make it simple for businesses to navigate a dual network ecosystem into one. What does that mean? Over the past few decades companies have built their businesses on physical or on-premise networks. Then the cloud came along. Now, how does a business who has some networks on prem and some networks in the cloud co-exist, coordinate data, and seamlessly operate. Welcome to Itential. They are hiring for several roles.  Events to Put on the Calendar:  Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurs Meetup is on Wednesday, October 5th with Atlanta Ventures Partner A.T. Gimbel who will be interviewing Ascend Medical CEO, Jason Madsen. The topic of conversations will be around the lessons and learnings Jason experienced co-founding WellStreet Medical and now running Ascend Medical which brings the doctor's office to you. Ranging from telemedicine to home visits to mobile testing, Ascend is reimagining the healthcare experience starting with location.  Beta Product of the Week:  This company is truly laying brick by brick and producing a strong foundation and that company is called ToolPath. Andy Powell, co-Founder of Atlanta success story CallRail, is on to his next company which is focused on manufacturing technology. ToolPath is making it easier to create CNC machined parts — from prototyping to mass production, and they are doing this by building cloud-based CAM software to automatically create g-code programs for CNC machines. Let's elaborate on those hieroglyphics.   CNC machining is a procedure used in most manufacturing operations. CNC stands for Computer Numeric Control and deals with the use of a single-setup or more computer to administer actions of different machine tools and in ToolPath's case, specifically mills for now. And CAM stands for computer aided software. So now with ToolPath, the opportunity for CNC just moved from the horse and buggy to a car because the software brings accessibility and convenience to the CNC market. Keep tabs on ToolPath and go to their website for an early look.    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode:   Product of the Week:  Ome Kitchen BackSpace Companies Worth Applying To: Itential Rolls Open Events to Put on your Calendar:  Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurship Meetup  Beta Product of the Week: ToolPath

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. Beta Product of the Week: This week's Beta Product of the week is led by serial entrepreneur, David Moeller. The name of his company is called Keep Technologies and their main product is called Knight. If you live in a major city, car break-ins are a dime a dozen. Keep Technologies has built a hardware product that sits in a cup holder and does everything from deterring thieves from approaching the vehicle, to record video of the crime, to notify the owner, and provide continual monitoring after the break-in. Knight's design is simple with a natural logo - a chess knight – and the pre-orders are racking up. Keep an eye out for Keep Technologies. Link in bio.  Companies Worth Applying To:  An exciting opportunity in the construction software space has opened up. RedTeam headquartered in Orlando, which recently acquired paskr out of Nashville, is looking for a VP of Sales. I remember speaking to the founder of paskr years ago and remembering how good their product was and solving a deep and validated need in the market – and most of the sales then were founder-led. Now through an acquisition and growth capital provided by Braemont Capital, RedTeam is ready to step on the gas with the addition of a talented and experienced VP of Sales. This role is remote and a superb opportunity to take a strong product to market.  Another company worth applying to is also out of Nashville and this company is called Lasso. Angela Alea is the President and CRO. Lasso's software helps run live events. Their customers produce events including the Super Bowl, The Oscars, The Grammys, Dreamforce, and more by offering 6 different products that unify event staff management tasks into one easy workflow via scheduling, communication, onboarding, time tracking, and more. They were on this year's Inc 5000 list and looking for a VP of Sales, Engineering talent, Dev Ops and more.  Events to Put on the Calendar:  I know we're only in September but what better time to start planning for October as it is a very busy one in Atlanta. The Metro Atlanta Chamber put together a good list of several keystone events including Venture Atlanta, Fintech South, A3C, TechStars Demo Day, and much more. We put a link to the list. Pick and choose as there are plenty of great options.  Question of the Week: Can entrepreneurs be made? This is a topic we discuss a lot out of Atlanta Ventures and with our friends. Here's my take: entrepreneurship levels are on a continuum, almost no different than athletes. Can athletes be made? Sure. Are some predisposed to winning championships because of natural God-given ability? Absolutely. However, when we hone in on entrepreneurs, I believe there are thousands who would go start a company if the mechanisms were there. For example, this past weekend, I spent all weekend with a new friend from Nashville. He is one of the top sales reps at a large enterprise SaaS company, does very well, yet in addition to trouncing quota, he has several AirBnB's, a side blog on food, traditional real estate, and a few other entrepreneurial outlets. So he is already an athlete, he is already an entrepreneur. Now the question resides with every person who wants to build a company or any athlete pursuing a sport, how much sacrifice and commitment is one willing to make to achieve their ambitions. So now we just brought in three other factors: ambition (which is a huge one), commitment, and sacrifice. If you are a top sales rep or performer, it doesn't have to be in sales, at a premier SaaS company, and you have the itch to start something, those are all factors weighing in on your decision to startup something. Fortunately in today's environment, where companies are started quickly in thousands of niche markets, there are several options than traditional routes. More on that in due time!   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode:   Beta Product of the Week:  Keep Technologies Companies Worth Applying To: Redteam Paskr Lasso VP Lasso Events to Put on your Calendar:  Metro Atlanta Chamber

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. Y'all we did shorten the intro as time is just too precious.  Product of the Week: There are two products of the week worth highlighting. First is a company call Nauvus which is one simple platform to book load, manage expenses and get paid when it comes to freight and trucking. Still early, but the grand vision is to be a universal freight network & payment solution for trucking companies and the independent dispatchers that support them all in an effort to maximize revenue and reduce cost. Check out Nauvus and if you're into logistics and payments.  The second product of the week is called Givsly. This company has created software that makes it really simple to infuse social good into your marketing. Let's say Arby's wants to promote a new sandwich and wants to put a social good twist on the campaign. Enter Givsly that provides the tools, services, and reporting capabilities companies can connect with causes and produces seamless campaigns to increase revenue and giving. Check out Givsly if you want to add a charitable spin to your go to market efforts. Quiet Giant: This week's QuietGiant raised a growth equity round in June and the company is called Inductive Health. According to LinkedIn there are approximately 60 employees and Inductive Health brings disruptive technologies to the public health informatics arena to lower the costs of integration and large-scale analysis of health data – probably a pretty timely tool over the last two and half years. From the looks of it, they have been bootstrapped and the PE firm that infused growth capital is called Diversis and they are out of Los Angeles. Another fantastic example of a Quiet Giant, right off Clairmont road, that is nearly another 10 year over night success story. All you folks out there building Quiet Giants, keep at it!  Question of the Week: Can billion dollar businesses be built on nice to have products? This is the question that was posed last week in a conversation with an entrepreneur we talked to in Miami. The call that was supposed to last 30 minutes and wove towards an hour as we shared our thoughts on the differences between nice to have products versus need to have products — which is such a fascinating discussion. The short answer is: at some point the product must become a need to have in the person or company's business, if not significant churn will result and it will not become an extraordinarily valuable business. I'll never forget the moment years ago, when I was speaking to a CEO who had about 30 sales reps at the time, share how Salesloft had transformed his sales team and that it was a must have for them to operate. Yet, for the 18 months beforehand, they piece-mealed the workflow on spreadsheets and free email accounts. So I asked: “when did you finally realize Salesloft was a must have for your business?” Two things had occurred in the business: one the pain point of having so many sales reps on his team that the manual process was costing the business too much not to have it. 2) It took a sales rep to uncover that realization and educate the company that there is a better way. Fortunately, Salesloft is tied directly to ROI which makes the case that much more compelling. There is a continuum of nice to have vs. need to have products but at some point in the customer's life span, the product must turn into a need to have.       Raise a Glass: Nashville based SoundStripe just raised their Series B led by TopMark Partners out of Tampa and includes existing investors most notably David Sacks of Craft Ventures. SoundStripe “keeps creators creating” with a plethora of royalty-free music, videos, and sound effects. Now, creators to corporations can pay a simple subscription fee and not have to worry about licensing rights, copyright infringements, and more. To date, the startup has issued more than 10 million licenses for tens of thousands of customers in more than 140 countries – cha ching! Started in 2016, SoundStripe out of Nashville, fills the seemingly ideal narrative for fast growing software company out Music City.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Product of the Week: Nauvus and Givsly Quiet Giant:  Inductive Health Raises Money from Diversis Raise a Glass:  SoundStripe

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. Y'all we are going to need to shorten this intro from here on out as there is just so much commerce going on in Atlanta and the Southeast. Let's get into it.  Blog Post of the Week: The blog post of the week and I don't know if all this press is a direct correlation with news from last week of Andreeson Horowitz investing $350M in Adam Neumann's new apartment company, but Neumann's vision has already been executed on and by Birmingham's lodestar entrepreneur: Bill Smith of Shipt fame which sold for $550M in 2017 to Target started Landing which is a very similar concept to Neumann's – just 3 years earlier – where a community of residents can pick and choose between fully furnished apartments across the country. TechCrunch did an interview with Bill this week and it's fantastic. We've linked to it in the show notes but if you're a student of entrepreneurship, go-to-market, product packaging and more, watch how these two entrepreneurs duel it out for years to come – and make sure to add butter and salt to the popcorn.  Product of the Week: I recently caught up with CEO of PressSports, Conrad Cornell at the SouthSource Tortuga party on the West Side and he shared that they just launched a completely revamped product at PressSports. I downloaded the app which has over 10,000 reviews with an average rating of 4.9 on the app store. High school and college athletes download Press Sports to start, document, and organize the digital portfolio of their careers so friends and coaches can engage and connect with them outside of the traditional social media outlets.   Companies Coming Up:  Where do we even begin here? The Inc 5000 list came out and there are too many on the list to name for this short podcast. Atlanta Ventures Founder, David Cummigns put together a list of 30 that have a three year growth rate of at least 300%. Not only is the Inc 5000 list a great annual water mark for growth, one would be hard pressed to find a better list to prospect fast, growing companies. We've highlighted several on this podcast including Stord, PrizePicks, Neighborly Software, SingleOps and several others. One we haven't explored in depth is the overall number 2 on the list, right out of Atlanta which is SnapNurse. More on that rocketship in the future! Take a look at the list through links in the show notes. Question of the Week: We get to talk to so many investors and entrepreneurs week in and week out and several recurring questions come up. Here is one where we got this week from an investor and it was: how do y'all measure product-market fit. This is where art meets science in startups, but to me, product-market fit is 10 unaffiliated (so not your Uncle or roommate) customers who raves about your product AND there is a clear line of sight to a repeatable, scalable customer acquisition model. I know that still leaves many questions but let's start this new segment with that answer this week.    Raise a Glass: Several raise a glass moments this past week: Michael Gottfried and Ashish Mistry raised $2M for PCKL (gotta love a 4 letter domain). PCKL is serving the massively growing market of Pickle Ball. Shop for paddles, balls, and accessories. PCKL joins the burgeoning D2C empire with their first company Piper golf balls.  Motivo, led by Rachel McCrickard, raised $14M led by Cox Enterprises to tackle the shortage of therapists by connecting mental health organizations with virtual clinical supervisors. Congrats to Rachel and team.  Lastly, legendary entrepreneur, Bill Nussey joined TechSquare Ventures and Engage. We've covered TechSquare and Engage on before this podcast. He led SilverPop to 600 employees and their eventual sale to IBM. Bill wrote an eloquent LinkedIn post worth reading that we put in the show notes.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Blog Post of the Week: Bil Smith: The Anti Adam Neumann Product of the Week: Press Sports Company Coming Up: Inc 5000 Atlanta David Cummings Growth of 300% or more Raise a Glass: PCKL Raises $2M Motivo Raised $14MBill Nussey Joins Tech Square Ventures and Engage

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 Too: I recently caught up with Ian Steward, CRO of Tricentis. Now if you dust off your Atlanta Startup history books, you'll remember about 4 years ago, Tricentis and QASymphony agreed to merge (yes they use the word merge in the press release) making them a leading player in the continuous testing industry. Ian joined QASymphony when they were under $1M in ARR. Today, they are doing hundreds of millions in revenue and hiring sales people all over the map, literally. Especially here in Atlanta. If you are looking for an organization that is not public but still hearty enough to have significant infrastructure to support your career and development, check out Tricentis. They are hiring for SDR's, AE's, and Enterprise Account Executives right now. Quiet Giant:  This week's quiet giant, and there are just so many in the salutary market of Atlanta and the Southeast, is called MapLarge. This is a platform for GeoSpatial and IoT Application Development. With about 40 employees according to LinkedIn, MapLarge is solving some of the world's hardest and most interesting mapping problems across dozens of industries and enterprise clients – all in the heart of Atlanta. If you love solving problems with GIS mapping tools this is your company…and yes, they are hiring too! Product of the Week: This week's product of the week produces a smarter, more versatile, and customized Alexa or any integratable virtual assistant. Co-founders Sam and Jerimiah have built a no-code platform for businesses so their products and services are delivered with the same intelligence we are used to with Siri. Normally it takes 40-80 hours of development time to build out one integration with a business to ensure it is sufficient for an intelligent conversation. They are currently onboarding several enterprise customers.  If you have a business where AI-powered virtual assistants are used to interact with customers, check out VoiceWorx as this will be a product you'll want to keep tabs on.  Company Coming Up: This company coming up has one of the best logos I've ever seen for an early stage software company. The name of the company is called Whskr and they are state of the art veterinary clinic software. Co-Founder Elliott and his wife have lived and breathed the problem of antiquated and clunky clinic software for veterinarians. Whskr allows for clinics to put automations around appointments, have much smarter inventory, and have streamlined labs all in a beautifully designed solution. Check out Whskr if not for the feature list at least for the logo.     Raise a Glass: Let's raise a glass to Michael Otis, CEO Procoto who just raised $750k led by Tampa Bay Ventures. Hypepotamus covered this week and this raise is part of a broader emerging story of Tampa Bay's startup ecosystem gaining significant steam. Procoto makes procurement software simple, affordable, and easy to implement. Michael went through YC and raised from one of the best firms in Florida. Keep an eye out for their growth, and they are hiring.    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Company Worth Applying To: Tricentis and QASymphony Merge Quiet Giant: MapLarge  Product of the Week: VoiceWorx  Company Coming Up: Whskr Raise a Glass: Michael Otis - Procoto

Event on the Calendar:  This week's Event to put on your calendar is the Dell for Startups Pitch Event. Look I know there is a lot of startup theater out there with pitch events nearly every week. This one is a touch different because they are handing out a very real prize and that is $15k in Dell Rewards for the best 3 minute pitch. I wondered what Dell Rewards were so I put a link in the show notes to a more detailed description but you get $15k into select products and services without any catch. If you've got a dialed in Pitch, which I know several listeners do because they go to Friday's Pitch Practice with Jacey Lucus, put August 25th on your cal from 6:30 to 9:00 p.m. at the Atlanta Tech Village. A few minutes on stage could yield some sweet hardware.    Quiet Giant: This week's quiet giant is called Neighborly Software. Co-founders, Jason and Chris, of Neighborly Software have built a tremendous bootstrapped business with software designed for Housing, Economic, and Community Development program management. In the vicissitudes of political climates, Neighborly Software provides backbone sturdy software for municipalities, cities, counties, and states to manage and allocate community resources in a paper-less, secure, and efficient solution. They just posted #72 on Inc 5000's fastest growing companies so you know they are hiring. This week's Quiet Giant may not be so quiet any more.  Blog of the Week: This week's blog of the week comes from the Godfather of SaaS himself Jason Lemkin who is gearing up for his major conference, SaaStr next month. The blog title is like a Dear Abbey but instead it's a Dear SaaStr and the question is: Is a big market really better than a niche market? The answer is always yes but with a few caveats. First, one may think if it's a small market, that's better because there will be less competition and while that's true, you're have 12-16 hours a day to work on a business and so you might as well be working on one in a massive market as that will be a key defining factor or growth and success. Let's get to the caveats. First, small markets can grow into large markets. I touched on this in last week's episode in our “Market Ready for a Startup” segment. Pick a niche to get rich is true, but if you can get niche but a rapidly growing market, bingo. The article's other two buts include that small markets don't always mean there is less competition. And lastly, most entrepreneurs start in a small segment of a large market. Overall, study the market and trends just as much if not more than anything else before committing.  Product of the Week: Hazlnut - this company is out of Jacksonville, Florida is making a major evolution in their products and services as they navigate the ever-changing demands of restaurants. While their core product of providing beautiful and dynamic mobile experiences for food franchises continues to grow, they've discovered through customer feedback, that the unanswered phone order is a major area of opportunity for many restaurants to drive additional revenue. Approximately 30% of calls into restaurants don't get answered. Enter HazlVoiceLite. If a restaurant doesn't pick up the phone, there is an option to have the menu texted to the consumer to limit the number of missed orders. HazlVoice Pro is in the works which will include automated phone ordering all through voice, but for now check out Hazlnut and their rapidly growing suite of products in the restaurant industry. Shout out to co-founders Dick and Steven for driving stellar innovation. Raise a Glass: Ben Chestnut announced this week he is stepping down as CEO of Mailchimp after founding the company 21 years ago and recently selling it for $12B. For me and several other Atlantans, I've been fortunate enough to attend fascinating talks they've held over the years, use their product, and watched and respected how they built and scaled their way with their rules, on their time frame. Congratulations Ben! What a legacy and excited for what's ahead!  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode:   Event on the Calendar: Dell for Startups Dell rewards program Blog of the Week Big Markets vs Niche Markets Quiet Giant Neighborly Software   Product of the Week: Hazlnut Story  Raise a Glass: Mailchimp

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. Countdown to Launch: After 5 months of customer discovery, brand development, and early prototype mockups, Zinnia was announced this week out of the Atlanta Ventures Studio, led by CEO Lauren Marturano. As partial or fully remote work continues to trend up, traditional office space is needed less, yet employee in person interaction is still as vital as it was pre-covid. So how is this solved? Through corporate off-sites. The time demands and personal requirements to plan and produce an offsite are beyond exhausting and highly expensive. Zinnia not only saves companies tens of thousands of dollars in site selection, it provides content, packaging, and planning so your team, company, or division can connect often and effectively. Have Zinnia plan your next offsite.  Company Coming Up:  Coming off the major news of Curricula's acquisition by Huntress in the cyber security training and awareness space, another player has produced a product catching the attention of customers in the white hot market. HookSecurity out of Tampa Bay is solving a similar problem around catching phishing attempts, security training, and continual monitoring. What both Curricula and HookSecurity focus on is making the experience of cyber security fun and interactive. In a world where every sizable company is a customer, look for more players to enter the space as HookSecurity is this week's company coming up.   Market Ready for a Startup: Keeping on the theme of launching startups, we at Atlanta Ventures have a spreadsheet with 100+ markets that we believe are ripe to start a company. These thoughts on the markets are way better out in the universe for listeners to hear than on a sleepy spreadsheet tucked away in a Google file. And, if the market analysis is done right at this early stage, it is less about big markets today but which markets will be big in the next 5 to 10 years. For example: software that powers autonomous lawn mowers through Greenzie, or private indoor golf clubs orchestrated by Intown Golf Club or any home management hassle eradicated with Zeto. This month's market ready for a startup is security. Not the cyber security mentioned with HookSecurity, but personal security. Here's what we mean: as a consumer, on one end of the market is your traditional home security system. This could be Brinks, SimpliSafe, ADP, etc. On the far other end is a private security guard costing six figures full time. Where and what is the option for  example $500/month service around security option. Today, one example is the neighborhood patrol where neighbors unscientifically contribute to the venmo account or something of like to make sure the patrol has allocated hours in the neighborhood. We believe there is a market ready for a technology advancement in the security space. Atlanta's FlockSafety has proven neighborhoods and municipalities will pay for license plate reading. What ideas and solutions are out there for a scrupulous way to monitor and be proactive about the security of your house? We have a few ideas but only the market will truly reveal the answer. If you're interested in exploring ideas around this problem. Let us know and we'd love to talk.  Raise a Glass: It was announced in Ebony this week that Atlanta entrepreneur, Lauren Wilson, CEO of ImIn, closed a $1M seed round from CollabCapital. ImIn delivers the on-demand flexibility and experience to any workforce. Now companies can quickly adjust, schedule, re-schedule, and optimize the workforce management based on the company's and employee's needs. Congratulations to Lauren and the entire CollabCapital team!          Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Countdown to Launch: Hypepotamus, BizJournal, Zinnia Company Coming Up: Hook Security Raise Your Glass: CollabCapital

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: A new number 1 spot has been taken on the leaderboard outside of the Atlanta Tech Village by PrizePicks. CEO, Adam Wexler, who we did a longer form interview on the Atlanta Story, set the goal to gain the top spot on the leaderboard years ago and achieved it this month as he and the PrizePicks team now are the largest tenant in the ATV. That will be a graduation party you don't want to miss when the time comes. Wexler recently shared he is looking for a Director of Social Media, a role near and dear to his heart based off his prior entrepreneurial experience. PrizePicks is the largest independently owned Daily Fantasy Sports platform in North America centered around real-money over/under predictions. If you live, breathe, eat, and sleep sports, this is the company for you. They are hiring for several roles.    Product of the Week:  This product of the week is out of Nashville led by Raven Hernandez and is called EarthRides which is a ridesharing app made up exclusively of Teslas. Right now, the service is available in Nashville and Austin with major plans to expand in other cities. 228 reviews on the Apple Store with an average 4.8 stars demonstrates there are plenty of happy customers who want a quiet, clean ride while being eco-friendly.  Intern Philosophy of the Week:  The simple philosophy is to find a Slack channel to revolve around. This summer, our interns, Evie and James, who you may have seen on our Instagram stories, are putting in phenomenal work helping us not only build this podcast but also make so much of our marketing efforts come to life – and it really got me thinking about how interns today can become a natural extension of organization regardless of existing societal structures. Let me explain: last summer we had Nic Terwindt in the office and on Slack. He did such a great job, all throughout his senior year, he stayed in the Atlanta Ventures Slack and continued helping. After graduating in May, he had several offers from local companies seeking his full time employment including Grayscale where he landed. In the world of remote work and centralized Slack communication the artificial barriers of traditional interns can be overcome, demonstrated by Nic and the growing group of impressive interns. Careers can start earlier than expected with the help of technology. If you are a parent listening and wondering how your son or daughter can get an internship in technology, have them find a Slack channel they can revolve around similar to the ways our marketing interns do today.    Raise a Glass: There are two companies worth mentioning this week who raised rounds in the Southeast. The first was announced out of Charlotte and it is called CivicEye. They raised $12.4M from Cercano Management which is a spin out from Paul Allen - the late Co-Founder of Microsoft's - Venture group he started in 2003. CivicEye is the platform for public safety that brings powerful and easy-to-use solutions to law enforcement, drug control, prosecution, campus police, private security, and fusion centers to keep communities safe. With only 28 employees on LinkedIn, you can guarantee they will be hiring in several departments.  The other company worth mentioning is one we have well familiarized ourselves with and that is Carpool Logistics. Atlanta Ventures led their latest round of $2M. Mike Malakov and team have built a marketplace that helps dealers and auto auctions ship and track cars more efficiently and reliably. Today that market is plagued by inefficient shipping of cars, little visibility, and a fragmented network of phone calls, emails, and personal connections to move cars between locations which is timely and expensive. Now, there is much more communication, coordination, and transparency with Carpool Logistics' technology. They are hiring in several roles.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Companies Worth Applying To: PrizePicks Product of the Week: EarthRideShare Raise Your Glass: Civiceye  

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.  -- Company Coming Up:  Nectar, a TechStars Atlanta 21' company, helps real estate entrepreneurs scale with cash flow financing. Here is how it works: accredited investors invest in the Nectar Fund that yield 12-15% annual dividends. Nectar finds and works with the best and most proven short term rental entrepreneurs to help them grow their real estate portfolio and operation. These real estate investors are mostly proven AirBnB hosts with over 3 years of operating experience. This company is led by two Co-founders, Brittany Mosley and Derrick Barker. Both are Harvard graduates with extensive real estate and finance background. Keep an eye out for this company coming up and check out their website linked in the show notes.    Product of the Week:  This week we're highlighting Saleo led by Justin McDonald. Saleo empowers sales reps to build interactive and customized demos. As sales reps across the world give demos of their company's product, it is really hard to deliver an accurate, customized demo filled with rich data without the help of an engineer – which is timely and expensive. Saleo's software fixes this. There are several companies spawning in this early market and Saleo is making a fantastic splash with their entry. They recently raised their seed round. This market is one to follow in the upcoming months and years.      Events To Put on the Calendar:  The Jewish Business Network is hosting some top notch folks on July 25th at Chabad Intown, right across the street from Ponce City Market. Investors from Phoenix Capital, Overline, Joule, and Overtime will be sharing their thoughts and perspectives on the current state of fundraising and valuations. It is $18 to attend and the link is in the show notes.     Companies Worth Applying To: We mentioned them in episode one, but I just caught up with Ty Abernethy of Grayscale and they are hiring for senior positions in just about every category: VP of Sales, VP of Marketing, VP of Product, and more. Grayscale improves recruiting with SMS. Customers including Amazon, Wayfair, and hundreds of others use them to streamline communication with applicants and maintain a tight process when it comes to recruiting in high-volume industries.    Another early stage company hiring in Customer Success is TruckerCloud. This company is led by their CEO, Spencer Mitchell, and originated out of the Rule1 Ventures Studio. TruckerCloud connects any fleets' Electronic Logging Device (or ELD) data to any application with the use of their API. The product is scaling and customer success is needed. Give them search and click.        Acquisitions in the Air: It was announced this week that Nick Santora, the CEO of Curricula, sold his company to Huntress, the managed security platform for SMB's. Nick and his team started Curricula back in 2015 as a security awareness training platform. Instead of the boring, check the box, traditional training software, Nick focused on fun, storytelling techniques, to captivate employees' attention and provide a superior education. In early 2020, they raised $3M and have grown the team and customers ever since. What started as a one man show out of the Atlanta Tech Village has now grown to a $22M exit. Impressive and exciting for Nick and the entire Curricula team. He wrote a thorough and heartfelt post on the translation that I encourage all who are listening to read.    Annnnd, that's 5 minutes.   Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode:   Company Coming Up: Nectar   Product of the Week: ​​https://saleo.io/   Events To Put on the Calendar:   Chabadintown Event   Companies Worth Applying To: Grayscale TruckerCloud Acquisitions in the Air: Huntress acquisition   TechStars Announcement: Bizjournals News Article  

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. — Raise Your Glass: Shout out to Sean, Taylor, Peyton, and all the team members at SingleOps for raising $74M from FTV capital. Sean wrote a heartfelt post on the SingleOps website that we link to in the show notes. This story is so exciting for me because five or so years ago, Sean and I sat down when he just moved into his new office on the West side of Atlanta and did a long form interview. Pictures were taken and the team wasn't that big at the time. Now fast forward years later, the progress and growth is truly inspiring. We'll link to that interview as well for all the folks who are students of the game.  Blog Post of the Week:   We share several blog posts a week in the Atlanta Ventures slack channel on trends, market analysis, and compelling companies. The one shared this week that had several interesting insights was from Elad Gil. Elad is a sharp mind from the valley who has built and invested in several companies. His most recent blog post is titled: Startup Markets, Summer 2022 Edition. The high-level takeaway is that things have yet to truly get bad in private tech, yet if interest rates rise and money supply tightens, then things will get worse before they get better, which is a high probability. Elad then goes into what he predicts the next few quarters will look like. First are valuations: he states “we are in a “sliding knife” market and things have only partially propagated into earlier and earlier companies and that will continue from later stage rounds all the way to Seed over the next 3-9 months. Another aspect to reiterate is around metrics and speed. Companies are being analyzed on burn multiple and capital efficiency. As mentioned on Episode 3 of Five and Thrive, the Rule of 40 is a good metric to evaluate. The next segment on this post that stuck out was to expect structured or down rounds and even shared that Facebook and Stripe had down rounds which proves it does not mean it's the end of the world. That is an interesting insight. Another segment includes layoffs which we will continue to see not just over the next 3 months but next 6-9 because more companies will be adjusting to the probable revenue deceleration. With greater layoffs comes a natural refocus on culture, customers, and the core mission. One of his last segments is M&A. Look for more of it 6-18 months from now. Several companies will be looking to sell versus “trudge along indefinitely.” And if a recession hits, look for everything to come down even more: growth rates, valuations, longer sales cycles, and more. Finally, Elad ends the post on a positive note when he states that several great companies started in poor, macro economic times: Apple and Microsoft started in the stagflation era of the 70's, Cisco started on Black Monday, and of course all the decacorns that started right after the financial crisis of 2008 and 09. His final line: “it's still a good time to build.” Couldn't agree more.   Companies Worth Applying To: Blair Chenault, CEO of Flashtract, put out on LinkedIn: “Career Catapult Opportunity” and I like that title so much I may borrow or steal it, Blair. Anyways, it's been documented and recorded. Blair and the Flashstract team are hiring SDR's all over the country: East coast, West coast and everywhere in between. I can't recommend Blair and the Flashtract team enough. If you're looking to accelerate your career in sales, join them.  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode: Raise your glass: SingleOps  Sean McCormick Blog of the Week: What may be coming to Startups Companies Worth Applying To: FlashTract

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. Company Coming Up:  This company coming up was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in historic Cabbagetown in Atlanta. They have raised $5.3M to date and solve a very real problem in several markets. The company is called BoxLock and they are shaping the future of unattended delivery technology. What does that even mean Birdsong? So thousands of companies in healthcare, construction, transportation and warehousing have serious problems regarding safety, reliability, and efficiency when it comes to assets that are stored or transferred. Think of anything ranging from tools on a construction site to shipping containers to even election boxes. BoxLock's Supply Chain Access Control Platform is used by companies like UPS Healthcare, University of Nebraska Healthcare, LUX Diagnostics (local to Atlanta), just to name a few. This market is massive and I just love finding not only passionate CEO's like Brad Ruffkess who are pioneering this field but then learn they are walking distance to Carroll Street Cafe!  They are hiring right now and trust me when I say this: growing very very fast. Links in the show notes. Beta Product of the Week:   This week's beta product of the week comes from two Auburn engineers and it is called Smart Stall. Nearly everything in the bathroom workflow is automated and touchless. You can get soap, paper towels, water, dry hands and a quick flush without touching any surface, so why are we still latching and unlatching the bathroom stall? Chase and Wynn are the co-founders solving this problem with an early prototype already built. If you are a building owner, tenant rep, or CEO looking to automate your latches, check out SmartStall. Link in the show notes.  Jump to the Front: This is a new format called Jump to the Front. For companies who are offering early access to product launches and customer codes, we deliver them here. I just caught up with Christian Ries, CEO of Zeto. Zeto is the trusted home manager for your house. Through their reliable network of vetted partners, they can easily knock out to-do's, meet vendors on location and respond to emergencies 24/7 all through text. They are humming! Satisfied customers are all over Atlanta as the hassle has now believe relieved from the household. If you're interested in skipping the wait and jumping to the front, put Five and Thrive in the comments section of the wait list form.  Event of the Week: Mark your calendars for the third stop of the ATL Unlocked Tour. This event is held on Thursday July 21st from 5-7 p.m. at the ATDC in midtown. The signup link is in the show notes. The first stop was at the Atlanta Tech Village, the second stop was at the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurship, and this one is right in the heart of midtown on Georgia Tech's campus. It is entrepreneurs night and I know this will have several entrepreneurs mixing and mingling.   I hope everyone had a happy, relaxing, and safe Fourth of July and for everyone who ran the Peachtree Road Race, I hope you're not as sore as I am.   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Company Coming Up: Boxlock Beta Product of the Week: Smart Stallus Jump to the Front: Zeto Event: atdc events  

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.  — Company Coming Up: This company is out of Mobile, Alabama lead by Walt Armentrout is called HeartLegacy. What started out as a video product for Senior Living Communities to help preserve life stories has morphed into a SaaS platform for businesses to leverage video. They have two different mobile apps, even titled differently for each market. The one for Senior LIving is called RemyGo, and the other for sales teams with over 250 five star reviews on the app store is called SalesMail. Like email but salesmail. This is a tell tale sign of an entrepreneur heads down in one market (senior living) but still keeping a pulse to where another market is pulling. There is probably a wonderful blog post or even book to be written about this pivot and evolution but in the meantime Walt and the team are growing fast and scaling. If you're in sales, check them out. Link in the show notes.    Products of Week: AnyDistance: Upcoming this week is the Peachtree Road Race. 50,000 folks brave the heat on the 4th to tackle the city's 10K. Local startup AnyDistance led by Luke Beard is the ideal app to download before the race or your next run. AnyDistance is doing to Strava what Instagram did to your iPhone camera back in 2012. It tracks and records your runs with unparalleled visualization and creative 3D renderings while wrapping the real world rewards ranging from badges to local shop credit. Give it a download today.     Event of the Week: Healthcare Entrepreneurship Meetup - A.T. Gimbel of Atlanta Ventures hosts a healthcare entrepreneurship meetup with over 2000 members in it. They had their event this week but I'm mentioning it because it was recorded and 3 companies presented their products and story and they are so good! The event recap and recording link is up on the events page on Atlanta Ventures Companies Worth Applying To:  Last week we missed this section so we have three companies ready for you.    Fleetio - The darling's darling of Birmingham, Fleetio is hiring for several roles and this is another company worth applying to, lead by Tony Summerville. Fleetio is reshaping fleet management by providing software that manages, tracks, and optimizes all different types of fleets world-wide. The roles open are several, ranging from software development to customer success, ops, and sales. And they just renovated their very slick looking new office.   LoadUp - if you're driving north on 75 through Atlanta and get near the West Paces exit, you'll see a big LoadUp billboard on the right hand side as of this recording. Greg Workmon (great name) and his team have modernized junk removal. They are looking for a CTO, CMO, and Head of Operations.  Intown Golf Club is in the works to open their second location and is looking for a finance controller. The 12,000 sqft private indoor golf club, right in the heart of Buckhead is expanding its footprint to Charlotte with line of site locations in Philadelphia and DC targeted. Join a fun and fast growing company in the golf industry as they grow!  Raise Your Glass: Goodr. Jasmine Crowe of Goodr just raised $8M to feed more and waste less through their technology and logistics solution. Congrats to Jasmine and team on all the great work they are doing!  Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Company Coming Up: Heart Legacy Product of the Week: Any Distance Event: Atlanta Healthcare Entrepreneurship Meetup   Hiring: Fleetio Loadup intown golf club   Raise Your Glass:  Food waste management startup Goodr raises $8M  

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. Real Realestate: LinkedIn and Twitter have been laced with debates around the future of office space since the pandemic began. Predicting the market cycle for commercial real estate exceeds the current ambition on this podcast however we do have a sound data point regarding startups and early stage companies. Aly Merritt, the MD of the ATV and I chatted amongst the hustle and bustle of the Kula coffee line yesterday. As of this recording, there are over 1200 members and 300 companies. Since the pandemic, this is the first time a waitlist has re-formed at the ATV. Aly described the new work experience which I'm paraphrasing “companies are using the Village as a natural addition to their work experience. Folks may come in later or leave earlier, but there is way more foot traffic and people working on the weekends as well.” The fluidity of the ATV is always exhilarating. We have companies moving out and moving in every 30-60 days  but overall the office is definitely back…but it is back on the terms of the entrepreneurs and employees.   Company Coming Up: For this week's Company Coming Up, this Atlanta entrepreneur has an innovative approach to host kitchens. That's right, host kitchens not ghost kitchens. FranklinJunction is the name and Rishi Nigam is the CEO. What is a host kitchen and how does Franklin Junction leverage them? They match underutilized restaurants, called Host Kitchens, with restaurant brands looking for rapid expansion through delivery. Each restaurant benefits because it involves "capital-free revenue growth for both partners." Franklin Junction works with about 30 brands such as Nathan's Famous, Hooters, and David Chang's Fuku. These brands make their products through approximately 250 host kitchens currently in production. Now, Franklin Junction owns the revenue from each sale, and then pays everyone else a cut. They are still early but definitely a company coming up!  Blog Post of the Week: Transitioning to the Blog of the Week: Ergeon's Pitch Deck Teardown. This comes from TechCrunch and we admire it for several reasons. First, Ergeon is a fence building company, headquartered out of California but they just launched in Georgia – the market is massive. The previous founder of Upwork, Jenny He is on to her next act so you know it will be good. They just raised $53M after being at it for 4 stealthy years of serious first mover advantage. If you are a student of business model disruption as well as want to know how to tell a Series B story with a top notch pitch deck, click on the link in the show notes.   Product of Week:  Transitioning to the Product of the Week I spoke with the CEO of Storied Collection this week. They are actually pre-launch but this is a time in the company's journey that can be the most fun to connect with founders as you will get early access to services and even help shift the product. What is Storied Collection? There are over 10,000 castles across Scotland and the UK but they are really hard to find. Storied Collection is a collection of the finest castles, chateaux, and estates wrapped around a membership model. Micheal, their co-founder showed me the castle he is staying in for the British Open next month and it is sweet. Keep an eye for their launch or just send them an email today.     Event of the Week:  This week I attended ATLUnlocked at the Russell Center – which is so legit – Jay Bailey and team brought the energy and connectivity. Mayor Dickens kicked it off. There were entrepreneurs showing their products, food trucks, V-103, WAOK, good beer and delcious lemon ice – just all around greatness. Next week, StartupShowdown is next week. My colleague and Atlanta Ventures Partner, Kathryn O'Day is one of the judges. Link to the event in the show notes.  Raise Your Glass: Prokeep, out of New Orleans just raised $9M lead by IronSpring Ventures. Prokeep is simple messaging made for distributors between contractors. Cheers to NOLA bringing the heat!   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!  Resources discussed in this episode: Company Coming Up: Franklin Junction   Blog Post of the Week: Pitch Deck Teardown: Ergeon's $40M Series B deck Products of the Week: Storied Collection Events: Startup Showdown Raise Your Glass: Prokeep raises $9M seed  

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 As the macro economy plays out its current hand, abundant layoffs amongst technology companies are sprouting up all over the country and Atlanta is not immune. News of such layoffs at companies include OneTrust, Sonar, and Terminus. For those listening who have been laid off, know in the bleakness of being let go there are healthy amounts of opportunities which is one of the several reasons we highlight companies who are worth applying to. Which brings us to the debate of the week.  Debate of the Week: Last week a few of you asked about the Rule of 40 and Atlanta Ventures' Founder, David Cummings wrote a timely piece which we have linked to in the show notes. 15 second recap: the Rule of 40 is the growth rate added to the free cash flow profit or loss margin. For example, if your company is growing 50% a year with a -10% profit margin, then you would be at the Rule of 40. If your company is growing 20% and you have 20% profit margins, again you hit the Rule of 40. This metric is powerful because when a software company maintains the Rule of 40 or above, it can grow forever at that metric and be in great shape. The metric also accounts for how expensive it is to grow the compan. Now the debate of the week is should companies share where they stand and trend regarding the Rule of 40. While it is up to each CEO which metrics they decide to share, I am advising people who are applying to new companies to know where each prospective company currently stands in that oh so insightful metric.  Events to Put on the Calendar: Applications are open for Venture Atlanta. This is the preeminent conference of the year. Shout out Allyson Eman and Knoll Ventures' Richard Fraim for stewarding the 15th year of the conference. This year it is held on October 19th and 20th. If you are a Growth Stage, Early Stage, or Seed Stage company, apply today. Improve Your Skills: An inexpensive way to sharpen your skills is through Pitch Practice every Friday after lunch in the Atlanta Tech Village. Jacey Cadet runs a dynamic show so entrepreneurs of today and tomorrow have a tight and powerful pitch.   Product of Week: This software for go-to-market teams is currently being built out of Athens, Georgia which is also where the current NCAA College Football Champions reside, and it is called Adpipe. Most companies who leverage video for marketing purposes make a beautiful, compelling video, launch it, and then 30 days later that video sits in the company's Youtube graveyard of videos. What Andrew and Sam have built with Adpipe is software that takes those videos, splices them into bite-size, compelling gifs that marketers and sales reps can use to increase click through and enhance prospect engagement. If you're looking to generate more engagement through your existing video library, give them a look.  Companies Worth Applying To:  A fast growing company hiring is Georgia Tech co-founded Flatfile. Eric Crane and team have built a remote-first culture and when we were going back and forth this week he shared they just hired 3 folks in Atlanta and have several roles open in engineering, marketing, and sales. Flatfile is the simplest way to onboard valuable customer data.  Had a great catch up with Blake Patton at Tech Square Ventures. They are doing phenomenal work and hiring a Principal and Associate. This is a very unique and special opportunity to be in the middle of Georgia Tech's venture ecosystem along with the high power relationships and connectivity Engage creates. If you want to get into venture, here is an ideal opportunity. Raise Your Glass:  Teamworks, out of Durham, North Carolina is the Operating System for Sports. They just raised $50M led by Delta-v Capital as they transition to a comprehensive platform and if you watch the compelling video, Zach, their CEO is looking to hire and acquire.      Annnnd, that's 5 minutes. Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode: Rule of 40 for Startups Events: Venture Atlanta Skill Improvement: Pitch Practice Product of the Week: Adpipe Hiring: TechSquare Ventures  Flatfile Fundraising: Teamworks  

Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast's most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes.    Hosted by Jon Birdsong, Partner at Atlanta Ventures.   Beta Product of the Week: This week Amanda Sabreah launched CopyFoundry on Product Hunt. Think of the Library of Congress for copywriting and brand positioning. Amanda has indexed every major company's copy and brand positioning so marketers can quickly learn, study, and then execute on those magical tools called words. What many smart entrepreneurs do is build community before baking out the product – this is a good example. Amanda knows this space very well and is an entrepreneur worth following on Twitter as she builds her next company.        Announcements of the Week: Dave Gray is an entrepreneur out of Birmingham (proving this is not just an Atlanta podcast), who is getting the band back together with Pamlico Capital to buy a business. Some of the characteristics include $10-$50M million in ARR, near the Rule of 40, and the CEO is looking to make a transition out of the business. Look up Dave Gray on LinkedIn.    Quiet Giant: Welcome Home Software - Software for Senior Living Homes operators is my favorite quiet giant of the week. I've been following them for years and they have phenomenal leadership and are growing fast and steady. John Larricia the CEO worked at Bain for over 2 decades before starting the company. Teddy Helfrich is leading sales and marketing and they are hiring in just about every department of the business – and I'm pretty sure they are unlisted.   Events to Put on the Calendar:  Paul Judge and Panoramic are hosting their monthly Startup Showdown on June 30th - this one is virtual. One winner walks away with $120k. Apps are due June 10th. Also, going to double down on the June 21st event at the Russell Innovation Center for Entrepreneurs. There is a link in the show notes to RSVP and more details from last week's pod.    Companies Worth Applying To: Josh Lieberman and the team at Visily.ai are looking for a Content Marketing Consultant to help with their content strategy and execution. The KMS Technology team have built several companies starting off with QASymphony which was a hit. From there, they started Kobiton, Grove HR, Katalon, and now Visily, which enables non-designers to create beautiful software app mockups. The KMS team are true builders.    The other company that has an ideal opening for the next up and coming Marketing Director is Copient Health. Mike Burke is a serial entrepreneur who successfully sold his last company, Clockwise MD, and is at it again with Copient Health which makes software to improve operating room efficiency.    Raise Your Glass: Bark, headquartered out of the Atlanta Tech Village, raised an impressive $30 million last week. Shout out to Brian and Titania. Bark keeps kids safer by providing parental control applications. Maija of Hypepotamus and Zach of Atlanta Inno wrote some quality pieces around the raise. Links are below!   Annnnd, that's 5 minutes.   Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word!    Resources discussed in this episode: ​​CopyFoundry Amanda Sabreah Dave Martin Gray Rule of 40 PamlicoCapital   Events: Startup Showdown ATL unlocked Block Party   Quiet Giant: Welcome Home Software   Hiring: Visily CopientHealth Marketing Director   News: Hypepotamus BizJournal How you can get involved:  Visit atlantaventures.com/ if you're interested in learning more about Atlanta Ventures.    Where you can find us: Website: www.atlantaventures.com/ Twitter: @atlantaventures Instagram: @atlventures Facebook: @AtlantaVentures LinkedIn: @Atlanta-Ventures YouTube: Here