Academic VC

Buy this CD!

2008-11-07T08:24:00.001-05:00

Alright, I'm actively courting codgerhood here, but I don't like rap. Or hip-hop. Or whatever else the young whippersnappers call "music."

But I just spent ten bucks on a rap CD (well, partially rap), and I love it!

If you've been to a Georgia Tech football game this season, you've seen the music video for "A Perfect Option" up on the big screen. That's the second video by a pair of recent GT graduates who call themselves The GTGs (after their campus email addresses); the first was "Take the M-Train." (Which I have seen seriously discussed by Gary Schuster, and which took up a good chunk of the College of Engineering advisory board last spring!)

I may not be the biggest fan of their musical style, but the kids are undeniably talented. (Listen to some of the other tracks on "Look to your Left, Look to your Right" and you'll see that they really do display some musical ability!) But the point of this album isn't the music quality, it's the lyrics.

Anybody who has ever been a Tech student, or known a Tech student (or married a Tech student!), will understand The Ratio:

Sir, if you got a daughter

Throw her in some white and gold

And put her on the campus

To help us raise the ratio

And "Take the M-Train" raises valid points about engineering students switching to management:

Why would ya take the harder route when there’s an easy way?

See what all tha fuss about, we callin’ it tha M-Train

Those engineers are gonna pout, you’ll be their bosses one day

It’s where all the ladies are hidin’ out

We’re callin’ it tha M-Train

Now, the GTGs have published a CD, containing these and other songs, two of the videos, and some hysterical phone calls for George P. Burdell. If you were ever a Tech student, you'll understand why I almost drove off the road laughing at Track 4!

They position themselves as "Music for the Georgia Tech Community," and that's exactly right. Talent and audacity like this should be encouraged. Go ahead, spend ten bucks on their CD. Buy a second copy at a stocking stuffer for a GT person in your life. You'll be glad you did!

Over a hundred years we been on Grant Field

Bobby Dodd, John Heisman, yo they all been here

Under the shadow of the tower

Whistle blowin' every hour

When that Wreck rolls out

You feel that Yellow Jacket Power!

Do the Right Thing

2008-11-06T17:57:00.001-05:00

I had a hardware problem with my MacBook Pro today. Apple delivered a model of stellar customer service. I figured the least I could do in return was write about it.

My three-week-old laptop woke up dead today. I Googled the symptoms on another computer, performed some tests, and convinced myself it was a hardware problem.

(It's almost never a hardware problem. According to Pournelle's Law, it's usually a cable. If it's not a cable, it's something you did to the software. Bugs, viruses, and hardware problems are way down on the list of likely culprits.)

A hardware problem meant calling AppleCare, or visiting an Apple Store in person. I don't think Genius Bars replace logic boards, but I figured it was better to hand my laptop to an Apple employee than to rely on UPS/Airborne/whatever, since our building has had problems with package delivery in the past.

I called the Apple Store at Lenox around 10:30 am. Their first Genius Bar appointment was 7:00 pm tomorrow. When I sounded disappointed, the woman who answered the phone volunteered to check the Perimeter store, and found a 3:45 appointment today. First example of excellent customer service: she didn't have to do that, but it made my life better.

I got to the Perimeter store a little early. Friendly T-shirted employee greeted me, sent me to the Genius Bar maitre d', he explained they were running right on time, and asked me to wait until 3:45. At 3:45, he came over and introduced me to Brendan behind the counter.

I had had a few minutes to think over what I'd say to Brendan, so I dove in:

Laptop wouldn't boot this morning, wouldn't pass POST, got three long beeps. Googled that, and it means bad RAM. Popped the case, started swapping RAM modules. It runs fine with the bottom slot empty and either module in the top slot. It fails POST with either module in the bottom slot. Sounds like a logic board problem to me. I figure it's gotta go back?

That took thirty seconds. Brendan's immediate reaction was: "Hmm. It shouldn't do that. We can send it back... but is this a custom build-to-order? If not, we can see if we have a laptop like this one in stock." No dithering, no "let me go check with my manager," no "expediting fee," just trying to figure out the best thing to do for me.

Wow. This is really above and beyond the call of duty, and I didn't expect it.

Turns out they had an identical unit in stock (one argument against buying BTO). He hauled it out, broke the seals, popped out the factory hard disk (which required removing only one screw!), popped in my non-standard Samsung 500 GB, closed it back up, and handed it to me. He spent more time doing the paperwork than the hard disk swap.

I was out the door smiling at 4:06 pm. Elapsed time, 21 minutes.

I don't think you can do that with a Dell.

Let's do the math. At 3:47 pm, there were two machines in Apple's store. One was broken, the other one was going to get sold to someone else for full retail. Apple was obligated to fix my broken one under warranty, but they were perfectly within their rights to ask me to ship it back to a repair depot, leaving me without a laptop over the weekend (at least). And I'd likely have had to drive out to Perimeter again to pick up the repaired unit sometime next week; that's most of an hour round-trip. But my time and inconvenience are not a tangible cost for them. This approach would leave them with the untouched new machine on the shelf, ready to be sold for $2499.

But Brendan instantly decided to swap machines with me. I walked out with the new one, and Apple gets my old one back. They'll repair it and sell it as a refurbished unit online for (I suspect) $2299. So, choosing to delight me as a customer incurred a real cost for them of $200.

Is Apple hardware overpriced? What's your time worth?

Rules for Voting

2008-11-04T11:49:00.001-05:00

"If you are part of a society that votes, then do so. There may be no candidates and no measures you want to vote for ... but there are certain to be ones you want to vote against. By this rule you will rarely go wrong."
—Robert A. Heinlein

Personally, I'm a fan of the "One man, one vote" philosophy as embodied by Lord Havelock Vetinari... he is the Man, he has the Vote. I want that job!

Short of that, it's Election Day, and ballots get long and complicated. Here are my simple rules to figure out how to vote once you make it to the polling place:

If there are any candidates you actively support, from any party, vote for them. That's usually not a problem; that's why you went to the polls in the first place.
Don't be afraid of "throwing your vote away" voting for a third-party candidate. The lesser of two evils is still evil.

But there are zillion other races on the ballot. You can drastically simplify your choices now:

Don't cast any votes for anyone running unopposed. (This seems to be incredibly prevalent in Atlanta and Fulton County.)
If there is an opposed race where you don't know anything about any of the candidates, vote against the incumbent.
If there are any amendments that include the word "authorize," vote NO unless you've done your homework.
Any races not covered by these rules, leave blank.

There! Franchise exercised, you can exit the polls and enjoy your felonious Starbucks and Krispy Kreme!

InVenture Prize @ Georgia Tech

2008-11-04T09:30:00.001-05:00

Announcing a new innovation competition for undergraduates at Georgia Tech!

After a lot of work behind the scenes, Georgia Tech is finally ready to announce the InVenture Prize! It's aimed at undergraduates (only), independently or in teams. Read more about it at http://inventureprize.gatech.edu/.

VentureLab is proud to be one of the sponsors of the InVenture Prize. In addition to cash prizes, the winning team will be automatically accepted into VentureLab for commercialization assistance. Georgia Tech OTL will also help pay for patent filings, if needed.

The deadline for "intent to compete" is November 14th, so sign up now!

Serenbe

2008-11-02T22:35:00.001-05:00

Spent a gorgeous fall day driving, eating, hiking, and shopping at Serenbe.

I had planned to come home and write a blog post about it, but it turns out Angus beat me to the punch months ago: http://blog.angusmcrae.com/?p=43.

Not a place I'd choose to live (I'm a city boy), but it's nice to know it's available, only forty minutes from my driveway.

More pictures here: http://photos.stephenandcecilia.com/gallery/6445439_ADE22

My Letter to the Editor for "New Scientist" magazine

2008-10-31T22:31:00.001-04:00

They probably won't publish this, so I'll put it here:

-----

To the Editors:

The premise of your special on growth in the 15 October 2008 issue is just plain wrong, and the wrongness starts in your lead editorial. http://tinyurl.com/4evh5e

You state that "we live on a planet with finite resources." But we also live in a solar system with eight planets, fifty moons, a million asteroids, a billion comets, and a thermonuclear generator we call the Sun.*

Starting with near-term goals like beaming limitless clean solar power to Earth, and continuing on to longer-term goals such as mining the asteroids, all the resources we need to create wealth for every one of the seven billion people on Earth are right above our heads. Free for the taking.

It doesn't take new technology; those problems were solved forty years ago. It takes leadership and nerve. Both of which appear to be lacking in the Western democracies. Luckily for mankind, other nations on Earth will reject your "no growth" prescription and will develop the untold riches of the solar system. It's a shame that the working language of space will not be English.**

-----

* Hat tip to Jerry Pournelle.

** Hat tip to Robert Heinlein.

Random Quotes WebApp for iPhone

2008-10-28T23:34:00.002-04:00

A while back, I posted the code for my "random quote of the day" widget for Blogger/Blogspot. Now I've tweaked it a bit to make it into a Web app for the iPhone (or iPod Touch). If you're reading this from your iPhone, try it now at http://tinyurl.com/ipquote!

It still pulls from the same online database. But now you'll get a single randomized quote, displayed in large print, with at least the top part of the Mobile Safari chrome hidden. (I experimented with hiding all of it, but didn't like the results.) Touch the top bar (the part with the standard "Reload" icon) to get another quote. Repeat until satiated.

Assuming you're running the current iPhone OS, press the "+" sign at the bottom of the screen, then choose "Add to Home Screen" to save the app with a nice custom button.

Obviously, it's free. Enjoy!

(Thanks to SoftFacade for the underlying icon artwork.)

Startup Gauntlet returns!

2008-10-27T12:21:00.001-04:00

As a reminder, the second running of the Startup Gauntlet is this Wednesday, October 29th, at 5:30 pm. We're going to be in the 2nd floor ATDC Connections Room this time.

Read my previous post about it here. The first running was great fun, and attracted nearly a dozen entrepreneurs. We're expecting more this week. Sign up now!

Remember, you have to be ready to pitch to get in the door. No observers. Each monthly winner from October through January gets a slot to pitch at StartupRiot in February. And the September through November winners get to compete in December for a TAG Top 40 slot!

Lousy Presentations

2008-10-21T13:39:00.001-04:00

So, like 450 other people, I attended VentureAtlanta last week. For a first-time event, I was impressed. Things were well-organized, they ran on time, and a lot of out-of-town VC friends showed up with checkbooks.

Wednesday was great, with investor-focused events featuring ATDC and VentureLab companies. Then there were two major presentations on Thursday by Carlos Dominguez (Cisco) and by Bernie Marcus, plus a panel discussion -- but the main attractions were the presentations by 21 Atlanta startup companies. And, boy, they stunk.

Alright, I'm going to be rude here... which is why this post is here instead of my other blog.

First off, everyone was alloted six minutes, and that's too long. At an event like this, you want to give people a taste of why your company is special, not the whole meal. Three minute pitches are enough to accomplish that (see Startup Riot). Shrink the slots, and you can either fit in more deals, or you can allow more networking time (which was scarce on Thursday).

Second, the selection criteria weren't obvious. New companies? Nope, Vocalocity and MDdatacor have been around forever. Need money? Nope, MFG.com was explicit about "having all the money they need." I'm still not sure how these 21 companies got on stage and 100 others got left behind.

Those two issues can be laid at the feet of the organizers. To their credit, it was the first time around for this event, and I suspect they'll improve for 2009. But then you get to the quality of the presentations themselves, and there's no one to blame for that except the presenting CEOs.

Look, people, it's supposed to be difficult to organize a coherent and compelling story that you can tell in six (or three!) minutes. That's why they pay you the big bucks. (Or the big equity, if the company doesn't have any bucks yet.) I understand that. There are lots of resources out there to help you, ranging from free to cheap to very pricey consultants.

(In my classes, I tell entrepreneurs to buy and absorb all the books by Edward Tufte, and Guy Kawasaki, and then to scrape everything then can out of Presentation Zen. Those are my basics; there are plenty more.)

But once you've organized your story, putting it up on the wall should be a simple mechanical process. PowerPoint is a blunt instrument, and should be used appropriately. Almost none of the CXOs presenting last Thursday got this part right.

Typeface

Part of it is the typeface rule: 30-point minimum, dammit! I emphasize this over and over again in my classes, but Thursday is an example of why I emphasize it. Look at this sample from Snapfinger:

I don't want to pick on Snapfinger—they did a decent job of explaining an interesting idea, and I wish them a lot of luck. But this photo gives an idea of why I talk about 30-point minimum fonts. From my seat, about halfway back in the ballroom, the only thing big enough to read clearly on that slide is the title. (I know, I know, it's a lousy cellphone snapshot. But it gets my point across. If you can't read your text in a lousy cellphone snapshot, your text is too small.)

Maybe 22-year-old founders can read it just fine. News flash: the check-writing angels and VCs in your audience are twice your age. Maybe three times. Our eyes aren't as good as yours. Adjust.

It may be alright to cram lots of information onto a printed slide that you're going to slide across the table to one or two people. (Actually, I have issues with that strategy also, but that's off-topic for this post.) It's absolutely unacceptable in a hotel ballroom with hundreds of people when you're competing for attention with their Blackberries, iPhones, and laptops. They'll glance up, see an illegible slide, and look back down to their email. You've lost them.

So, out of 21 presenters—including some very well-financed companies that have been around for years— none of them had large enough type throughout their presentation. One was only an occasional offender, and three at least seemed to try. The remainder ranged from marginal to bad to absolutely atrocious.

Better to have no slides than bad slides. And, indeed, challenging CEOs to give a presentation with zero slides would be a good test of how well they can capture and maintain attention without PowerPoint crutches. I doubt that the organizers will try this for VentureAtlanta 2009, but I wish they would!

Artistic License

Then you had the artsy syndrome... where companies had obviously paid expensive graphics artists a lot of money to draw pretty slides. Which were useless.

Look all the way back to the beginning of this post, to the photo of a slide presented by Bill Nussey of Silverpop. Now, I've been friends with Bill since he was with Greylock, and I've known Silverpop since it was still ActiveGrams, but for cryin' out loud, Bill! This slide consisted of white text on gradient backgrounds that faded from pale-grey to even-paler-grey. Completely and totally illegible. There may have been good information on this slide, but it certainly didn't survive transmogrification by the artists.

Other companies did this, too. (I'm looking at you, Paul!) It seemed the more mature and well-financed the operation, the more the slides were outsourced to artists. I'd take 30-point Arial on a black background before any of them. (And I hate Arial.)

Kitchen Sink

Finally, too many of the companies seemed convinced that they had to use their six minutes to throw in everything plus the kitchen sink. Way, way too much information. Look, a pitch at an event like this is an advertisement. You're supposed to wind up with a call to action (shockingly few did that) to convince interested investors to come see your booth, or visit your Website, or whatever. You can't possibly get across all the reasons he or she should invest in six minutes and a handful of slides.

Hit the high points, hit them hard, display them clearly and legibly, repeat them if you have time, and sit down. If there's any interest, there will be lots of time to make the minor points and add clarifications later.

Overall

Out of 21 presenters, if I were assigning letter grades, I'd give:

A	1
B	3
C	4
D	11
F	2

That's embarrassing. And sad. And unnecessary.

Starting a company is hard. Displaying a decent slide deck shouldn't be.

If a CEO can't get the basics right... why should I be convinced that anything else in the company will be done right?

PS—since I know I'll get asked, the A and B grades would have gone to SoloHealth, Multicast Media, Zenda, and MFG.com. The other grades... maybe you shouldn't ask.

Phi Beta Kappa

2008-10-17T23:13:00.001-04:00

I got into a discussion about Georgia Tech academics the other day, when I mentioned how difficult the undergraduate curriculum was. The other person (who graduated from a state university that shall remain nameless) retorted with "Well, Tech doesn't even have a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa!"

That's true. We don't. And I started digging into why.

From the "Stipulations" on the ΦΒΚ Web site:

Grades earned in applied or professional work shall not be counted in computing the grade-point average for purposes of eligibility. Applied and professional work shall be understood to include those courses intended primarily to develop skills or vocational techniques in such fields as business administration, education, engineering, home economics, journalism, library science, military science, physical education, communications, secretarial studies, speech, and applied art and music.

Well, excuse the hell out of me.

I actually don't have an engineering degree, although I've worked in an engineering capacity more than once during my career. But I'm a ramblin' wreck from Georgia Tech and a helluva engineer, even if my diploma says theoretical physics. (Summa cum laude, thank you very much.) And these pantywaist literature majors from Swarthmore and Vassar Dickinson have the temerity to lump engineering courses in with P.E. and "secretarial studies"?

Scroom.

If those are their rules, we don't need a ΦΒΚ chapter. They are clinging to a worldview and a set of rules that are increasingly irrelevant, if not downright harmful.

The "Two Cultures" debate goes back a lot further than C.P. Snow, but I'm tired of this attitude that engineering (and the associated "hard sciences" and mathematics) are somehow superfluous for the truly educated. There's not an engineer alive who would say "Sorry, I can't read." But if you propose a math problem any harder than splitting the check at lunch, I bet half the English department at Duke would throw up their hands and say "Sorry, I can't do math."

(Of course, I suspect most of them also can't write a clear English sentence at gunpoint, but this isn't a post about deconstructionism.)

The classic "liberal arts" major (which is what the self-perpetuating ΦΒΚ aristocracy is claiming to be the ideal) has a lot to be said for it. Studying classical history, the Great Books, a bit of Latin and Greek, and the rest of the underpinnings of Western civilization made a good background for a young man (for it was always men, back then) to go into the City of London or to Wall Street and manage institutions that were based on the strengths and foibles of individuals. If you knew a bit about how Caesar managed his campaigns, or Lee managed his lieutenants, you had a better chance of managing your Midwest regional vice president and making sure he made his numbers for the quarter.

Now, however, businesses are based on more than that. Internet speed means you'll be making decisions in far less time than Caesar or Lee enjoyed. Global connectivity means you will be managing staff in Bangalore that you may have never met. And, of course, your white-shoe Wall Street firm has a back room of "rocket scientists"—in reality, bright science and engineering majors—developing a dizzying array of financial derivatives such as credit default swaps that allow you to pyramid your profits to the sky.

Oops. Did someone mention "credit default swaps"?

I think there was some math involved there. Didn't you say you couldn't do math?

I minored in history at Georgia Tech, back when that was technically impossible. (I actually never got a "minor" designation; I just took a bunch of courses, and read one heck of a lot outside of class.) I think every educated person should understand the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire and the connection between Columbus's voyages and the Renaissance. And he (or she!) should have read and thought about and written about some Shakespeare, and Cervantes, and Tennyson. (And Kipling, dammit!) And we should all be competent in at least one foreign language. (I'm not, and I wish I were.)

But every educated person should also be able to solve a series of linear equations, or guesstimate the power consumption of a server rack, or give a layman's explanation of private-key cryptography. Technical problems are important in today's world, and top managers don't have the luxury of just saying "let the geeks figure it out." Because that road leads to credit default swaps, or multi-millions of dollars wasted on failed SAP implementations, or cancellation of nuclear power plants that would emit less radiation than the coal-fired plant you build instead.

So the ΦΒΚ types don't think our "applied and professional" courses are good enough for their precious honor society? Well, I'm not terribly impressed with what the ΦΒΚ keyholders have done to our financial system, or our government, or our educational system. Maybe it's time to give the engineers a chance.

Because a "liberal arts" education is no longer enough. If young men and women want a well-rounded education that prepares them for the real world we're living in... they should major in Mechanical Engineering. That's the liberal arts degree for the 21st century.

eBooks

2008-09-27T02:06:00.001-04:00

The late, great Jim Baen used to talk about "ludic readers" and how they would transform his business of book publishing. He used the term to distinguish something that people would use to read for fun, rather than things they were paid to read (like technical manuals, 10-K filings, etc.).

I always thought it was a silly name. "Ludic" means "playful" or "pleasurable", but it sounds like a cross between "Luddite" and "ludicrous." Jim failed the name game.

But, fundamentally, he was right. We now have devices that hundreds of thousands (soon to be millions) of people are using for pleasure reading. But I don't think Jim ever imagined that his "ludic reader" would be a cellphone!

I've always been generally supportive of eBooks. I downloaded and read about twenty novels or book-length story collections on my Palm Treo. It was a marginal experience at best. I don't know how to get a digital screenshot off a Treo, and I no longer care enough to learn, so here's a digital camera photo:

It's hard to get things to scale on the Web, since everyone has a different screen/browser configuration. But that's a 320x320 pixel screen, 2.6" diagonally. No anti-aliasing. Sans-serif typeface. Pretty ugly, to be honest.

The value was always having several books in my pocket, so I always had something interesting to read during idle time. But, given the choice between a eBook and even a crappy water-stained paperback, I'd would have chosen the dead-tree version.

That's changed.

Like everyone else, I've abandoned the moribund Palm platform (which I used to love!) and switched to the iPhone. I've now read four novels and several short stories on its gorgeous 320x480 pixel screen. And, at least for the most recent volume, it was a better experience than the dead-tree version!

I bought a copy of Neal Stephenson's Anathem the day it came out. Stephenson is just one hell of a writer, but he writes big sprawling books. (Think James Michener on really good acid.) Anathem is a big book... 937 pages. It's an intimidating amount of weight. And not something I'm going to toss into my briefcase "just in case"... it bulkier than my laptop, and weighs more than a MacBook Air!

So, after paying full price for the dead-tree version, I turned around and paid another ten bucks for the eBook version at Fictionwise.com. There's a great eReader application for the iPhone that links to Fictionwise... and, although I'm philosophically opposed to DRM for books, I caved in this instance.

It's gorgeous.

Here are some screen shots. Anti-aliased text at 320x480 is clear enough to read effortlessly for hours. You can choose your typeface and size (this is Georgia, "large-ish"). And note how the bold, italics, smallcaps, and oddball characters (like "Sæcular") come through unmolested.

You can have simple diagrams:

And if you like landscape orientation better, just rotate your iPhone.

I'm scaling down the iPhone screenshots to approximate the actual screen size (at least on my screen/browser combination; your mileage may vary), but here's some of the 163dpi text shown at 72dpi:

Like I said, gorgeous. Anti-aliased, sufficiently high-resolution to draw the serifs properly, high-contrast, bright backlighting... I know technology will continue to improve, but this is Good Enough™.

As a comparison, here are the two phones side by side—click on the image to see actual size:

Yes, the iPhone screen really is that much brighter and whiter than the Treo screen!

Ideally, I'd have a Kindle in the photograph. I've played with a Kindle, and I'm not impressed. I like the wireless downloads from the Amazon.com store... but I don't like the restrictive DRM, I don't like the typefaces, I don't like the reverse-video pageturns, and—most important—I don't want to carry yet another battery-operated device that needs care, feeding, and a charging cable.

Short of SCUBA-diving, my iPhone is going to be with me wherever I go. It's not another device to carry, and I will already have made arrangements to keep it charged.

Ubiquity is important. Which, screen technology aside, brings us to why reading Anathem as a sequence of 3338 iPhone screens was better than reading 937 paper pages: I had it with me. I was able to grab a bit during lunch, a bit more while waiting at the doctor's office, etc. Which means I read it faster and in more digestible chunks. And, honestly, Stephenson occasionally needs some digesting! Sample:

Proc: A late Praxic Age metatheorician, the standard-bearer in his age of the theorical lineage traceable to the Sphenics, and the progenitor of all orders that trace their descent to the Syntactic (as opposed to Semantic) Faculties of the early post-Reconstitution maths. Contrast with Halikaarn.

Bozhe moi! Eto topor v moyei golove!

I have to wonder... most of the walls in my house look like this:

Cissa and I own approximately 6000 books; many of them are cataloged here. They're a big part of the physical fabric of our lives. What will it be like when our books are just patterns of bits, stored on flash RAM and backed up to the cloud?

Anyhow: I have three eBook readers on my iPhone: Stanza, eReader, and BookZ; there are others. Download one of them; heck, download them all, they're either cheap or free!

(For some reason, Mobipocket totally missed the iPhone game. Perhaps being owned by Amazon.com, they didn't want to participate in killing the Kindle? Luckily, I only bought non-DRM Mobi files on my Palm, and Stanza reads those nicely.)

Then download some free books from the Baen Free Library, or the Gutenberg Project. Or buy a new release at eReader.com.

And try it! Within a dozen pages, I guarantee that you'll have forgotten that you're reading a book on your cellphone. You'll just be reading a book. Which is, at the end, exactly as it should be.

Startup Gauntlet begins next week!

2008-09-19T14:50:00.001-04:00

As you may have heard, we're starting a new event for local entrepreneurs and entrepreneur-wannabes: Startup Gauntlet. Click over and take a look.

This may be "Toastmasters for Entrepreneurs," but the mailed-fist logo is not accidental. The judges are going to be brutally honest about what works and what doesn't work with your three-minute pitch. It's a safe environment -- no investors, no media, no looky-loos -- so you can crash and burn with no risk except to your ego. And if your ego is that easily deflated, you've got no business being an entrepreneur!

The news is that we're going to be collaborating with TAG, using the Gauntlet as a run-up for the Georgia Technology Summit's Top 10/Top 40 awards next February! The best pitches from the first three events will be invited back to a public event on ~~the evening of November 19th~~ December 17th. The TAG Top 40 selection committee will sit in judgement, and will pick (at least) one winner who will be included in next February's Top 40, and have an automatic audition for the Top 10!

The first Gauntlet will be Wednesday, September 24, 5:30 pm, in the ATDC Community Room, 2nd floor of Centergy in Tech Square. The first event is filling up fast. You have to register at the Web site or you won't get in. If you get in, you have to be ready to pitch when your name gets called!

Aerospace Venture Forum

2008-07-21T10:19:00.001-04:00

Most venture forums concentrate on a particular geography (Atlanta, the Southeast, the Mid-Atlantic, whatever).

This one is a little different... it's focusing on a particular industry sector. In our case, aerospace. So, even though it's going to be in Los Angeles, we're interested in aerospace entrepreneurs from anywhere in the world.

And we have a pretty liberal definition of "aerospace":

Information-Based Applications (e.g., satellite telecommunications, GPS-based navigation, weather observation, asset tracking, remote sensing, imaging, environmental monitoring)
Transportation Systems and Services (e.g., orbital and sub-orbital vehicles, satellites, personal aircraft, very light jets, UAVs, space tourism and air taxi operators, spaceports)
Technology Commercialization (e.g., SBIR/STTR applicants, university and federal lab tech transfer, dual use technologies, business plan and prize competition teams)
Aerospace-Related Technologies (e.g., clean tech, entertainment, media, retail, medical devices, telemedicine, life sciences)

I have faith in the entrepreneurial community... that's broad enough that I know the twenty presentation slots will fill up fast!

It's going to be September 26, with a reception the night before. You can see more details here: http://www.spaceangelsnetwork.com/ventureforums.php.

PS — I occasionally get asked "What's a 'space angel'?" Really no different from any other angel investor (Wikipedia definition here), but with a sector focus on aerospace investments. After making deals individually for years, we launched Space Angels Network about a month ago to add some deal screening and deal sharing capabilities. You can read about the founding members here.

Turn your iPhone into a Digital Wallet

2008-07-09T20:05:00.001-04:00

I just counted. I have 21 plastic cards in my wallet... credit cards, ID cards, membership cards, you name it. And there are four barcode tags dangling from my car keys.

Being a geek, I keep all the relevant numbers encrypted in my Palm Treo (using SplashID... I really hope they're doing an iPhone version!), but rattling off a ten-digit number doesn't do much good when the clerk at Barnes and Noble wants to see your card.

In preparing for the switch to an iPhone this weekend, I started thinking. Why not carry images of all those cards instead?

Here's the video of the result:

(Sorry that it's a little fuzzy. I didn't want to recreate redacted versions of all my cards.)

Getting there is simple.

First, scan all your cards, front and back, on a flatbed scanner, at 200 dpi. (Actually, I didn't do my credit cards, since I'm waiting for someone to come up with an encrypted version of this hack.) You'll get a scanned page with multiple cards on the page.

Then, open the scan in Photoshop (or whatever image editor you like) and scale it so that each card takes about 470 pixels horizontally. You can do math, or you can just do trial-and-error. In my case, I found that scaling the image from 1700 pixels across to 1150 pixels worked well. Be sure to check the "Constrain Proportions" and "Resample Image" boxes.

Now select a rectangular selection tool and, using the pulldown menu, lock it to a fixed size of 480 x 320 pixels (the size of the iPhone screen).

Now play cookie-cutter... center the rectangular selection over each card image, copy, and paste each one into a new GIF file. Make sure to get the backs of cards where that information is relevant.

Save all these images into a folder. Launch iPhoto (on the Mac... I'm not sure how this works on Windows, but I'm sure you'll figure it out) and import that folder. Rearrange the images to taste.

Now, in iTunes, sync that photo folder with your iPhone.

Here's what you get:

Every card is displayed as a square icon. Most are recognizable, even at this small size.

Tap on the one you want, and you get a very legible version of each card on your iPhone screen:

And you can double-tap to zoom in, so you can read the fine print without your glasses!

In the zoomed view, I've been able to get a barcode scanner to recognize the image.

I hope this is useful to others out there. Now... someone wrap some encryption around this so that someone stealing my phone doesn't wind up with all my ID numbers! :-)

Travel Lessons Learned

2008-07-02T18:58:00.001-04:00

This was written as part of my earlier post on our South Africa trip, but that was getting over-long, so I decided to split it out. Trying to record some "lessons learned" about travel preparation for long trips, with an emphasis on digital photography.

Laptop

Yeah, bring it. It's heavy and awkward and fragile, but I was able to download pictures to disk every night, and about every third night I burned DVDs of the trip's photos for safety. (We wound up taking 3200 pictures. Ain't digital grand?) We were able to upload selections to our photo site so that people back home could be jealous in real-time. And it was nice to dip into the flood of email occasionally, just to remind myself that things can get done without me.

(Note: Test-drive the brand of DVDs you pack! I had brought a supply of blanks that apparently my MacBook Pro can't initialize... so we had to find a local electronics store to sell us some. Not a challenge in urban areas, but it would have been a real problem out in the bush!)

Power Adapters

"Universal" power adapters aren't. And "world" kits of plug adapters are apparently for a world that doesn't include South Africa. SA uses a bizarrely huge plug (bigger than England's!) that's not compatible with anything else on the planet. So the bag of adapters I brought was useless weight.

Camera

A lot of people have asked "What did you use to take those pictures?" I think I have hit the current sweet spot among cameras. I used to be a 35mm SLR guy... carrying the big square bag, the lenses, the tripod, you name it. And, often, I'd look at the sheer weight and bulk of what I needed to take good pictures, and I'd say to heck with it... and leave it all behind.

Then, when digital happened, I went through about six cameras, and found myself swinging too far the other way, in favor of the tiny little deck-of-card-sized cameras that fit in your shirt pocket. The advantage: it's always with you. The disadvantage: I don't care how many megapixels it has, it's not going to take great pictures.

On this trip, I thought very hard about bringing a DSLR... and decided not to, purely on logistical grounds. Instead, I brought my Canon A710is (and Cissa brought my old Canon S230).

I think the A710 took some pretty darn good photographs, despite its small size. On my oversize Optech strap, I could keep it slung across my body for security, but stuck in a hip pocket for convenience. So I can't drop it, a pickpocket can't steal it, and there's nothing bouncing around and banging into things like a DSLR. It's a camera small enough to always be with you, but powerful enough to capture a wide variety of shots with surprisingly good quality.

The mix of features is just about right. No interchangeable lenses, so you're stuck with the 6x optical zoom, but with image stabilization, that works reasonably well. (Digital zoom is worthless; that's what cropping is for.) I used the exposure control a lot on sunny days, and occasionally played with aperture priority when I was trying to tighten a depth of field. And manual focus let me shoot through train windows without blurring. From the factory, it doesn't do exposure bracketing, but CHDK fixes that.

I also grabbed a Gorillapod that I kept stuck in another pocket. That came in handy for self-portraits, for the occasional low-light shot, and for experimenting with timelapse photography. (For an example of timelapse, play this video of sunrise over Table Mountain, here. That was shot with the intervalometer option that Canon disabled, but CHDK re-enables. Hacking your camera's firmware is fun!)

Based on our experiences (comparing the same shot taken at the same time with our two cameras), I'm going to hand the A710 to Cissa, and buy its successor, the A720 for myself. Anybody want to buy a used S230? :-)

Camera Management

Since I collected photos from other travellers on our trip, I wound up managing photographs from five cameras, with five different filenaming schema, and seven different system clocks. (Seven? Yes... I changed my camera and Cissa's to South African time. But at different times on the first day, so there was some period of overlap. And the three cameras I didn't control were on three different time zones... one was a full day off!)

iPhoto on the Mac doesn't stutter when handling thousands of photographs... but it's really happiest when it can sort according to the EXIF timestamp written inside the JPEG file. The varying system clocks made this chaos, and I had to make multiple trips to the "Adjust Date and Time" menu. If I were doing this again, I'd ask everyone to snap one easily identifiable photograph at the same time to use that as a baseline for synchronizing the timestamps later.

Batteries

Using the deck-of-cards cameras with their vendor-specific battery packs, you're always worried about battery life. One of the advantages of the A710/A720 is that is uses standard AA batteries. Rechargeables are cheaper in the long run, but it's nice to know that you can always grab a pair of batteries at a convenience store (or, in a pinch, out of anything nearby that runs on AAs!). I took a supply of rechargeable AAs and a 110-240V charger. I recharged every night, and always had two spare pair stuck in a pocket. Using CHDK, I always had an onscreen display of remaining battery life. Never any reason to worry.

Clothing

We're not the kind of people to travel with just two shirts, and always wash one out in the sink at night. Sorry, that's not our style. But bringing two weeks' worth of clean clothes would have been ridiculous.

Yes, the hotel laundry service is expensive. Do it anyhow. We had the Victoria and Albert Hotel do a week of laundry for us, and it greatly cut down on packing volume.

Small Bags

The disadvantage of a trip like this (as compared to a cruise, for example) is packing and unpacking. In two weeks, we spent nights in seven different hotels plus a train. We took two large suitcases and two smaller bags (as well as the laptop case, which is irreducible). Whenever possible, we'd repack the small bags so that we wouldn't need access to the large suitcases at the next stop. This turned out to be especially important on the Blue Train, where there wasn't room to open the large suitcases!

Wheels

I used to laugh at people with wheels on their suitcases. Now I pity people without them.

South Africa Diary

2008-07-02T08:33:00.001-04:00

For people who are interested, this is a classic "What I did on my summer vacation" post. If you are interested, click below to read more. If not, go on to your next RSS feed...

Note that many more pictures, in higher resolution, are available on our SmugMug site at http://photos.stephenandcecilia.com.

This trip came as a bit of surprise. Georgia Tech and the University of Pretoria have had a lot of interactions in the last couple of years; both my boss and one of my employees have visited there. But I hadn't thought about going myself until I was invited to represent GT's commercialization activities in a set of meetings scheduled for the end of June.

I figured that, if I were going to fly that far, I wanted to take some time to play tourist. So Cecilia and I both arranged to take vacation time... but we only had a couple of weeks notice. Normally, I'd research a destination thoroughly before visiting. This time, I basically just re-read James Michener's "The Covenant" and figured that everything else would sort itself out.

Cissa and I met Andy Smith and Steve McLaughlin at Hartsfield on Tuesday afternoon. It was not a painless departure... our aircraft was down-checked for maintenance, and for a couple of hours, it seemed the flight would be cancelled. But Delta found a spare plane (and how do you find a spare 767-ER???), and we were off.

Cissa was travelling on a Delta "buddy pass", so we weren't guaranteed that she would get a seat... and certainly weren't guaranteed that we'd get to sit together! But they found her a seat, and we traded around a little bit after the plane pushed off, and we were happily ensconced together in coach.

Eight hours later, we were landing in Dakar. Bizarre security ritual. We were not allowed to leave the plane, but a dozen or more security troops came on to roust out the sleeping passengers, rip up every seat cushion, and identify each carry-on bag. It would have been far more efficient to have us deplane, keep us in a holding area, then reboard after the search. I still haven't figured out what they were looking for! Certainly made it impossible to have a restful refueling stop.

Got brief glimpses of Senegal on takeoff. No pictures.

Pretoria

Eight more hours and we were landing in Johannesburg. It was after dark, so we didn't see any of the city on landing. Quick immigration formalities... although South Africa has an unusual requirement that you must have two blank facing pages in your passport before entering their country. I think I'll have to get a passport addendum before I can go again!

We were met by the supremely efficient Alta Scheepers and her husband of the University of Pretoria, in a "combi" (what they call a van). The Joburg airport parking deck has the same neat feature as decks in Santiago... red and green lights over each space, so that it's easy to find an empty one. Why hasn't the U.S. figured this out?

We were four hours late arriving, so our dinner with the Chancellor was cancelled. We drove straight to the hotel in Pretoria and had a quick room service dinner. We were able to get a glimpse of the Southern Cross... yes, we're far away from home!

Thursday, I joined Andy, Steve, Aris Georgakakos (Georgia Tech CE), and Laurie Olivier for campus events. Laurie is a university of Pretoria graduate now living in Atlanta. As part of his venture capital work, he has been putting in special efforts to connect the two universities.

One of the issues which both communities share is "brain drain"... at Georgia Tech, the concern is our smart graduates moving to California. At U.P., the concern is smart graduates leaving the country entirely! Emigration among the talented and ambitious is a real problem for South Africa. Providing top-notch degree programs and the infrastructure to encourage entrepreneurship isn't a silver bullet, but it's an important way the universities can help. (I believe the same goes for Atlanta, as any regular reader of this blog will know.)

While we were working, Cissa got a tour of Pretoria. She visited the Voortrekker Monument (kind of a military cathedral) and Oom Paul Kruger's house and a few other sites around town.

She joined us in the afternoon for a tour of a couple of museums on the University of Pretoria campus... one from Mapungubwe (a civilization predating that of Great Zimbabwe) and one amazing collection of Chinese porcelain donated to the university by J.A. van Tilburg.

At the end of the day, Andy and Robin Crewe (U.P.) announced the new Joint Water Resource Management Degree Program, which you can read about here.

Friday morning, the spouses left early for the game park, while Andy, Steve, and I joined the University of Pretoria folks for some facilities tours.

After a lunch meeting where I compared notes on commercialization strategies, we all headed to the airport to fly to the Ngala Lodge (where our spouses had already arrived).

Ngala Lodge/Kruger Park

Little bitty prop plane... a Cessna Caravan. We squeezed in and headed north. Gorgeous views of the Drakensberg Mountains in the northeast of the country:

We landed about 4:30. Our spouses had landed three hours earlier, so they got an extra game drive... which means they wound up seeing a leopard and her cub napping in a tree! Almi Olivier took this great photograph. (An advantage of digital: I collected photos from Laurie, Almi, and Steve McLaughlin; they're identified on the main photo site.)

We joined them a few hours later, but it was already getting dark (remember, it's winter in South Africa in June!), and we saw the leopard, but couldn't get any pictures worth reproducing. It was a gorgeous sunset, though!

Back to the lodge for a fabulous al-fresco dinner... and more talk about technology commercialization.

Ngala Lodge ("lion" in the local Shangaan language) is a luxurious place, adjacent to the Kruger National Park. There are no fences of any sort... the animals have an area the size of Belgium to roam in. And, if you want, you can just drive through Kruger in your own car. Good luck. But the advantage of a place like Ngala is that they have dozens of trackers out every day, reporting in by radio, so the guides can pretty much drive you directly to great views of the animals.

Up at oh-dark-thirty on Saturday morning for the next game drive:

Although you can't see it in this picture, there were baboons cavorting on the roof of the lodge building... and the sunrise we were watching was the summer solstice. The sun stays to the north in the Southern Hemisphere. Intellectually, I understand that. Reflexively, it's easy to get confused...

Note to self: Next time we go to South Africa in their winter, take gloves! And a scarf. And a warm jacket. I had none of the above. (Cissa had a scarf and a warm coat, but bitterly missed having gloves.) It was 3°C on Saturday morning... that's 37°F. Then you start driving about in an open Land Rover... no roof, no windows, no windshield. It's cold.

I'm not going to reproduce all the photos here... but a brief list of the animals our group saw over the next two days: Lion, leopard, rhino, elephant, and Cape buffalo (the "Big Five"). Giraffes, zebras, hippos, wildebeest, warthogs, kudu, and a semi-infinite number of impala. Plus lots of different kinds of birds.

On Saturday morning, about the time we finally warmed up, the Land Rover pulled into a clearing where the Ngala folks had set up a sumptuous breakfast buffet in the middle of nowhere! Nothing like a pitcher of mimosas to prepare you for a mid-day nap...

After more game drives on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning, we finally flew out on Sunday mid-day. Andy, Steve, and Aris headed back to Atlanta. Cissa and I had arranged for a week of vacation time, so we spent the night back in Pretoria at the Whistletree Lodge... the perfect place to relive a bit of British colonialism.

(As an unreconstructed Confederate, I tend to sympathize with the Boers...)

The Blue Train

Early Monday morning, we boarded the legendary Blue Train and headed south. More pictures here, but this gives you a sample:

This isn't Amtrak! It's a throwback to a completely different era, before air travel, when luxurious trains were the preferred way to cross continents. Europe has the Orient Express; Africa has the Blue Train.

The overnight trip to Cape Town is 1600 kilometers (1000 miles). This is when we first started getting a conception of how big -- and empty! -- South Africa is. From news reports, you could be forgiven for thinking it's all shantytowns and violence. You could probably get the same perception of the United States if you just saw pictures of the Mexican border and the South Side of Chicago.

South Africa covers 1.2 million square kilometers... about a sixth the size of the continental United States, and comparable in size to our familiar Southeastern U.S. But most of it is too dry. Only 12% of SA's land is arable, and only 1% irrigated. The overwhelming impression crossing by train, or from the air, is that "This place needs some more rain!"

In general, the topography is a mix of the Western U.S... you have some bits that remind me of California, some bits that remind me of Colorado, and desolate bits that look like Nevada. The settlement pattern is much like the U.S.... individual houses widely scattered in farming territories, with suburban areas surrounding the cities and towns. It has a much more American feel than European... something I didn't expect.

The mountains are incredible. Multiple mountain ranges, all looking like something you'd see in the Grand Tetons or Yosemite... with farms and homesteads in the valleys between. If you like scenery that goes up and down, you're going to love South Africa.

Then you get to Cape Town.

Cape Town

Oh, my. This is possibly the most beautiful city in the world. (And I've been to Rio de Janeiro, and Sydney, and Vancouver, and Venice, and San Francisco, and etcetera.)

Like everyplace in South Africa, it has a history with tragic elements. It's the place where entire neighborhoods were bulldozed in the mad pursuit of complete apartheid. But Cape Town City Hall is also the place where Mandela addressed the nation after being released from prison.

There are an amazing number of parallels between Cape Town and Rio de Janeiro (and, on a larger scale, between South Africa and Brazil, as well). I'll let Cecilia write that post one day. But one of the biggest differences: South Africa clearly sees itself as a First World country with some Third World problems. Brazil sees itself as a Third World country with some First World enclaves. The consequences of that shift in mindset are immense.

We were blessed with fabulous weather and a brilliant guide (Melissa Pike; highly recommended! Contact me for her email/phone), which was unusual for the dead of winter. So we got to ride the cablecar to the top of Table Mountain, and to drive out to the Cape of Good Hope, all without a cloud in the sky.

More pictures here... including a side trip to Stellenbosch. How do you describe Stellenbosch? It's a university town, and also the center of South Africa's winemaking industry. Imagine mixing Ann Arbor with Napa Valley, then putting it all in the Yosemite National Park. That's Stellenbosch.

There's a cheetah-rescue project at Spiers outside of Stellenbosch where you can go inside the enclosure and pet some of the cheetahs. They're just like huge housecats! Purring, rolling, batting at strings... we want one, but our existing cats would probably get jealous!

Cape Town has a great aquarium. Much smaller than the one in Atlanta, of course, but it wants to educate as well as entertain. There are long textual explanations next to each exhibit, and they're not dumbed down in the slightest. I was impressed. I wish Bernie Marcus would consider adding something like that.

Charmed life department: One of my favorite musicals is Tim Rice's "Chess". I have three different recordings of it at home. Unlike most of Rice's work, this one is almost never produced on stage. Turns out a South African touring production of it was running in Cape Town while we were there. It was sold out, but Melissa was able to find tickets for us! I snapped some clandestine pictures from the audience, so the quality is lousy:

This was a different production than I had seen before, and was much more "true" to the original concept than some of the post-Cold War adaptations. I hope it get a chance to travel to the U.S.!

Tiny intimate theatre, with most of the pre-curtain chatter in Afrikaans, not English. They encouraged you to bring your wine glass into the theatre... so the ovation at the end looked like a mass toast to the performers! Very different, very pleasant.

False Bay to Hermanus

On Friday, we rented a car, and I got a chance to reacquaint myself with driving on the wrong side of the road. In the rain.

But the weather cleared up a bit as we navigated the southern coast to Hermanus, a beautiful harborside village famed for its whale-watching. Even though we were early in the season, a quick run offshore in a small boat brought us face to face with two humpback whales who clearly had been practicing synchronized swimming!

More whale pictures here.

Garden Route

We drove east all day on Saturday, expecting to spend Sunday night at Port Elizabeth before flying home on Monday. But, as I said before, it's a big country! I wasn't looking forward to spending all of Sunday on the road without time for stops. A chance encounter with a friendly clerk at Jukani pointed out that we could fly out of George as well as Port Elizabeth. So we juggled hotel and rental car reservations, rebooked our flights, and spent a much less stressful Sunday driving from Mossel Bay north to Oudtshoom then south again to George, stopping at various places along the way to admire the views. That let us spend about an hour at the Point at Mossel Bay, which is just outrageously photogenic.

Then a beautiful drive through the Robinson Pass, past ostrich farms to the Cango Caves, then down through the Outeniqua Mountains to George for the night.

After an easy flight from George to Johannesburg, we had about a six-hour layover until Delta flew us home. There was a brief bit of concern when it appeared Cissa wouldn't clear the flight on her buddy pass, but she got aboard at the last minute... with a warning that she might have to leave the plane at Dakar. Panic! But no one asked her to leave, and Delta made a 19-hour flight as painless as possible.

Conclusion

So... two weeks in South Africa, by plane, train, and automobile (and boat!). It's a beautiful country. Incredible wildlife. Gorgeous scenery. Friendly people. Reasonable prices. You can usually find a Wi-Fi connection. The wines are great, and the water is safe to drink. Everyone speaks English.

The only thing I can't figure out is: Why hasn't it been overrun by American tourists?

South Africa is going to host the 2010 World Cup, and they're working hard to build new arenas, new roads, and all the other infrastructure necessary to handle three million visitors. I predict that a lot of people are going to come for the football (soccer)... and fall in love with the country.

South Africa

2008-06-22T12:31:00.001-04:00

In case anyone wonders why I've been so silent on the blogs and on Twitter lately... click here.

Back in a week or so. Happy Fiscal New Year!

Jim Wooten on Tech High

2008-06-10T08:36:00.001-04:00

Just a quick link for those who may have missed it: http://www.ajc.com/print/content/printedition/2008/06/10/tuwooten.html.

A Year of Blogging

2008-05-28T08:42:00.001-04:00

Yeah, a self-referential blog post about... blogging. Yeah, I hate them, too.

But, hey, it was a year ago today that Jeff Haynie (with a nudge from Lance Weatherby and a few others) nudged me into starting this blog.

I'm not the most prolific of bloggers (although MarsEdit helps immeasurably; highly recommended!), but I get a lot of positive comments... occasionally from people I don't even know! So I'll keep going as long as people see value in it.

As noted earlier, I've moved the Georgia Tech-specific posts to our new GT VentureLab blog.

Suggestions are always welcome, either via email or through the Skribit box to your right.

Tech High School Graduation on Sunday!

2008-05-22T08:27:00.001-04:00

What are you doing Sunday night?

If you're in Atlanta, and not spending the Memorial Day weekend on the beach, I'd like to invite you to the first-ever Tech High School graduation.

The official history: Tech High was born out of the determination of respected, successful business, community and educational leaders in the metropolitan Atlanta area to deal with the student performance needs of Atlanta and the shortage of highly skilled workers in Georgia. Seed capital came from a generous donation from the partners at Noro-Moseley, then TAG adopted Tech High as a target for donations. Don Chapman, a Georgia Tech graduate, Atlanta native and successful entrepreneur, took the early leadership of the Tech High Foundation, raising several million dollars to establish THS as a charter school within the Atlanta Public School system to deal with the student performance needs of Atlanta and the shortage of highly skilled workers in Georgia.

The unofficial history: The Atlanta Public School system is a expensive disgrace. It's too big to fix, but it's not too big to humiliate. By taking the same students as APS (charter schools, unlike magnet schools, don't get the luxury of admissions tests and admissions standards), but without the soul-killing bureaucracy that dominates APS, we could demonstrate in microcosm that the problem isn't the students... it's the system.

We initially thought that applying technology would be the solution, hence the name Tech High. "Laptops! Eight o'clock! Day One!" It turned out that we were getting ninth-grade students scoring at the fifth-grade level in reading and math. So some of the more ambitious technology projects were put on hold in favor of some old-fashioned fundamentals. Yes, you have to do your homework. Yes, you have to wear a uniform (nothing exotic: khaki pants, and any solid-colored shirt with a collar and no words on it). Yes, you have to shut up when the teacher is talking. Yes, we're going to hire teachers who actually give a damn about the students.

It makes a difference.

We started with a ninth-grade class of 100 students in the 2004-2005 school year. About half of those students are still with us, and we've added one class every year... so, this year, THS was a full four-year high school with our first-ever senior class. We've survived an eviction by the city of Atlanta (after we spent $600,000 to renovate the SciTrek building, they kicked us out, but have left the space vacant for three years). We survived a boiler explosion in the 1920s-vintage school building we're now occupying on Memorial Drive. We even survived the recent tornado, which made a direct hit on the school. And the reason is the students.

These kids are awesome. We don't dwell on their backgrounds but, as one parent described her son "He's not just the first person in our family to go to college, he's the first in our entire church!" They've busted their tails on their schoolwork, and it shows.

There are years when the entire dinosaur herd of the Atlanta Public School system (50,000 students) sends one graduate to Georgia Tech. In our first senior class of 43 students, Tech High School is sending three.

We have another graduate with a full ride to Emory. We have other graduates going to Mercer, to the University of Georgia... we already have 40 out of the 43 accepted to college, and we're not done yet. These kids are embarked on productive, fulfilling lives that wouldn't have been possible had they been warehoused in the APS "schools" immersed in crime, violence, and despair.

Our first graduation ceremony is Sunday afternoon, at 5:00, at the Ferst Center (Georgia Tech campus). It's free and open to the public. If you live in Atlanta—or if your company hires employees in Atlanta—come see a demonstration of hope. Come see the future.

StartupRiot

2008-05-19T22:56:00.001-04:00

So I spent the day today at StartupRiot.

First off, hats off to Sanjay Parekh for pulling this all together. It was better organized and better run than a lot of "mature" events run by professional conference organizers. And I don't know what he used to threaten the speakers with, but people actually stayed within their three minute slots!

(I want to bottle some of that and use in our TAG Top 10 auditions next year, since the "three minute pitches" there tend to run five or six minutes...)

Second, the deals. Fifty-five deals in a little more than three hours. Some of them, to put it politely, needed a little more work. (Okay, some of them need to be ritually defenestrated while chanting "Hope is not a strategy!") Some of them were quite compelling. Most, unsurprisingly, were somewhere in between. But, for the investors in the audience, there were enough worth looking at to justify the day away from the office.

Third, the format. Okay, some of the presentations were painful. But the pace was fast enough to keep me from getting bored... an occupational risk of most investment conferences. I think this proves that Sanjay was right on with the three-minute target. Truly awful presentations are obviously awful within the first 30 seconds. For six- or eight-minute presentations, I have time to wander out to the lobby and get a ginger ale and probably get caught up in a conversation with somebody. When it's three minutes... heck, by the time I've made a snarky comment on Twitter and caught up with the Backnoise channel, it's almost time for the next presenter! No reason to leave my seat.

Fourth, the community at large. I'm not sure Atlanta could have supported an event like this two years ago... I'm darned sure we couldn't have supported it five years ago! I think today underlines the fact that Atlanta's technology community is finally, finally past the post-Bubble hangover, and a new expansion is well underway. There's a new generation of entrepreneurs building everything from Web 2.0 apps to RFID-enabled teddy bears. I love this community, and it's great to feel the buzz generated by more than four dozen entrepreneurs in one room!

Again, my congratulations to Sanjay, and my thanks to the various sponsors for helping make this happen. My only question is... who's going to step forward to run this event next year?

Call for Companies to "Run It By the Pros"

2008-05-12T13:39:00.001-04:00

The MIT Enterprise Forum of Atlanta is hosting a “Run It By The Pros” member only workshop. This event is typically attended by 50-55 students, entrepreneurs, services providers and investors. There is a panel of experts from the area of funding early stage companies. The panel will give constructive feedback to the presenters.

The main benefit of this event for the companies presenting is for them gain critical experience and impartial feedback so they are more effective in delivering their message when present to a full audience of investors. Members attend to learn more about the process of presenting effective investor presentations and to learn about new exciting companies.

There is no cost to participate as a presenter. If you know of an early stage company (technology preferred but not necessary) that needs experience in making investor presentations, then please have them send in their business plan and investor presentation to be reviewed and possibly selected to present.

The next workshop is scheduled for June 12, 2008 and will be held at the law offices of Miller & Martin located at 1170 Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta. Deadline for submission is Friday, May 30, 2008. Send your executive summary and/or business plan to Virginia@mitforumatlanta.org. You may also contact Virginia Martin at 404-422-0330.