Upcoming Presentation: ATDC’s Brown Bag Series

October 24th, 2006 • 2 comments Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups
Tags: ATDC, organizational-culture, startups

Just a quick heads up note for those of you in Atlanta (or those that might be in Atlanta). On Wednesday October 25, 2006, I’ll be speaking at ATDC’s Brown Bag lunch series. My discussion will be about the organizational culture of startups. The discussion will be based around a number of illustrative stories. A lot of the stories will be from my Digital Envoy days but there will also be stories from other organizations that I’ve worked with or worked at. I have a feeling the audience is intentionally limited to ATDC companies and employees. If anyone has a strong desire to come and see me blabber on for an hour, let me know and I’ll see what I can do about getting you registered. If you do come, realize that I’ve been out of the speaking circuit for more than a year so I may not be as succinct as before.

New Board Gig: Coyote Point Systems

October 23rd, 2006 • Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology
Tags: board-of-directors, bootstrapped, Coyote-Point-Systems, Digital-Envoy

I’ve been slow at talking about this, but I recently joined the board of another private company - Coyote Point Systems.  Coyote Point has a great history (which you can read here) but the most impressive thing about the company is that they were totally bootstrapped from the beginning.  There are few stories out there about bootstrapped hardware companies nowadays (and fewer still that have thrived) and Coyote Point is one of them.

Some of you may vaguely recall the Coyote Point name and wonder why.  Well, my company, Digital Envoy, and Coyote Point built an award winning joint product together - Emissary.  This is when I got to know Bill Kish (CEO and CTO of Coyote Point) and the rest of the crew over at CPS.

So I’m happy to join the Coyote Point board and I think there are a lot of great things to come for the company, Bill, the employees, and all of the happy CPS clients.

Atlanta Technology Dinners

October 10th, 2006 • 5 comments Business, Entrepreneurship + Startups, Technology
Tags: Atlanta, dinner-club, networking, startups

So I probably should have written about this some time ago, but I’ve been lazy. Coty Rosenblath offered up an idea some time ago of doing a focused networking dinner for Atlanta technology type folks. I kept egging him on to get this going and we’ve now arranged two dinners. Basically the premise is to build a stronger entrepreneurial network in Atlanta through informal dinners. The main requirement for attending is that you’ve got to be a current or past founder of a technology oriented company or a top level manager of a company. Plus we need to actually know you or one of the past attendees needs to know you. Our goal is to prevent these dinners from being infiltrated by folks who add no value or who just suck up value and don’t provide anything to others. Also note that you have to pay for dinner yourself. We aren’t footing the bill nor do we have any kind of outside sponsors.

Read more »