I probably should have posted this earlier, but Startup Riot is now accepting applications to both attend and present.  The event will be February 17, 2010 somewhere in Atlanta.  I’m finalizing the venues for both the event and after party so I’ll talk about those soon.  Just know that it’s going to be fabulous in 2010.  So what are you waiting for? Go register right away!

We’re going more OTP than usual for the next Open Coffee. It’ll be August 27, 2009 from 2pm until 5pm at Roam Atlanta in Alpharetta.

If you’re an entrepreneur, angel investor, or VC you’re welcome to join us. If you’re not one of those three things, you’re welcome to stay away from this get together.

Feel free to RSVP below or on the Upcoming event. Or don’t and just show up. Whatever.

Also, do you find keeping up with these local events tough? If so, I’ve started an announcements only mailing list that you can subscribe to. Just send an email to atlstartups-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and you’ll get the announcements. I plan to keep the list postings to about one every few days at most but in no case more than one a day. Or you can just keep coming here to read the latest event scoop.

I’ll do a lessons learned post soon but a real quick one for this is in order.  I’ve finally posted the photos I took from Shotput Ventures first class of 2009.  In retrospect I should have taken more pictures and I should have remembered to bring my camera to demo day (thanks to the OpenHatch folks for letting me use their camera during demo day).

So go take a look at the previously unpublished pictures from signing day on May 20, 2009.  You can see each of the teams doing their pitch and getting their check (yes, we handed out a real check to each team).

Then go take a look at the pictures from demo day which was the end of the program on August 10, 2009.

Just in looking at these two sets of pictures I’m reminded of the work and fun I had.  Man, where did the summer go?

I’ve been thinking a lot about presentations lately.  Not only am I gearing up for Startup Riot again but I recently sat through a practice session of Shotput Ventures companies for the upcoming Demo Day.  I started thinking about doing this blog post a long time ago when I attended Venture Atlanta.  Stephen Fleming did an outstanding job of explaining why so many of the slides went horribly awry.

Instead, I’m going to talk about what can make a presentation outstanding.  In a word, it’s simplicity and clarity.  Not just of imagery and visuals but of the intended message.  I started thinking about what I could use to provide an example of how to convey a message in a simple, clear, and universal manner.

Then I started noticing how simple and clear road signs are.  There is an obvious reason why road signs can’t be visually complex or wordy – if they were, drivers would become distracted leading to potentially fatal accidents.  Your presentations may not lead to the same result but there are some presentations that have led to the loss of life.

Let’s look at an examples.

This is a pretty straightforward sign.  This driver is on I-75 South heading towards Downtown Atlanta.  Also note that there is an HOV lane starting in 1 mile on the left.  Lots of information conveyed in these two very simple signs.  How long do you think it would take a driver to absorb this information?  3-5 seconds at the most, I’d think.  Now, let’s look at the mangling that traditional slide creators would produce to convey similar information.

Oh my.  You’ve just gone and turned two signs with a total of eight words and two symbols into a slide of seventy words.  Can you even imagine road signs that looked like this.  No one would ever get to their destination.

And in a similar way, this is exactly what you’re doing to your audience when you present complex slides.  The audience gets lost and they never get to the destination you intended.  In some cases, audience members crash during your presentation and start ignoring anything you are saying or showing.

So ask yourself – are you creating visual aids that are going to be accompanied by a verbal explanation or are you creating a document?  If you intend to create a document, use a word processor instead of a presentation program.  Otherwise, you need to simplify and clarify your message and make sure that what you’re showing will be universally understood (at least by your intended audience).  Otherwise, you’ve just wasted your time and credibility by delivering a sub-par presentation.

If you want to get additional help on thinking about what makes excellent slides, I highly recommend the book slide:ology.  I haven’t finished the book but everything I’ve read so far is on the nose for what should be done.  Two things have stood out for me from the book.  First, never have more than seven words on a slide.  Second, make sure your audience can absorb the information on the slide in 3 seconds.  If you’re going to present at Startup Riot or any other event, I urge you to buy slide:ology and consider what you could change on your slides to make them convey your story rather than your talk.

Charlie Paparelli pointed me to this New York Times article which has two quotes that I very much agree with.  First Vinod Khosla says:

Mr. Khosla said his firm operates like old-fashioned venture capitalists, “where people took technical risks and really helped entrepreneurs, as opposed to today, when a lot of the venture capitalists are financial investors, more spreadsheets than technology.”

and then

“That’s what Pierre is uniquely equipped to do, because he has run operations and founded a company,” he said. “He understands what entrepreneurs are dealing with, can help them with technical problems and engage at a level that an M.B.A. can’t,” Mr. Khosla said.

This is exaclty what we are trying to do with Shotput Ventures.  We had a great kick off evening last night and I’m really looking forward to the first class starting this summer.

Wow, so Startup Riot is done for another year.  It was bigger this year than last year in terms of total attendees (300+ this year!).  Again, like last year I can’t really judge if it was a success.  So instead I suggest you read what Paul Stamatiou, Lance Weatherby, TechDrawl/Celia Dyer, Dan Melton, and Tejus Parikh, said about the event.  Like last year, I haven’t been able to find any negative blog posts on the event.

So from last year, I learned two things and I think I fixed both this year. One was taking Advil and trying to sit throughout the day to save my back and legs.  I did that this year and it helped a bunch.  Second was those folks trying to sneak in who were really service providers.  I’ll talk about that below but it wasn’t a big deal this year (or at least I haven’t heard anything about this).

One thing to address this year is if I thought the event was good.  Honestly, I thought the event ran well and everybody seemed to have fun.  But I started thinking about why I wasn’t that excited about the presentations themselves.  I’ve seen every single company present at least once, if not more times, before they got on stage.  I’ve also looked through their slides and information a bunch of times before the big day.  Add to this that I’m going to watch every presentation once I get the video in order to sync up the slides, and I’ll know the pitch better than anyone other than the presenter.

But this event isn’t for me.  It’s for you.  I don’t do this event to get anything out of it.  Sure, more people know me and that’s worth something I suppose.  On the other hand, people get upset at me and flip out when I say they can’t come or give conditions on their attendance because of how they’ve acted in the past.  I suppose the old adage is true, if people aren’t getting upset with you about what you’re doing, you aren’t doing anything worthwhile.  For the five people who got upset at me this year over a simple, little event like Startup Riot – thanks for proving that I’m doing something worthwhile.

This year I was told by someone that they had heard “mixed reviews” about Startup Riot (they probably made it up since this was in the heat of an email argument but I thought I’d take this seriously).  Since I’ve heard no such thing I decided to send out a survey timed to the exact minute the event ended (thanks Mailchimp!) with the hopes of capturing the sentiments in the moment.  I’m blown away that more than 100 people, 1/3 of the attendees, have filled out the survey.  I’m also blown away that the option to give an anonymous survey was available but only a handful took that option.  Those anonymous entries aren’t any more harsh than the other surveys and I intend to respond individually to all folks who supplied their email address.  But for now, let me discuss some of the results and what I saw as the good and bad of the event.

The Good – The Presentations

It happened again this year. Basically everyone stayed within their three minutes. The only presenter that went over was the last one of the day and I gave some leniency because one presenter didn’t show up that hour (said presenter also hasn’t responded to phone calls or emails).  That said, I view that overage as my failing, not the presenter’s.  They were a last minute addition and I hadn’t fully vetted them like some of the other presenters. I won’t let that happen again and plan to adjust the selection methodology for next year.

The Good – The Keynote

Everyone said the keynote was great. Unfortunately, there was too much going on that I couldn’t actually listen to the talk.  Fortunately Chris has posted his talk on GitHub (figures, right?).  Funny thing about that is that seven people have forked the file. I’m not the only one who finds that funny either.

The Awesome – The Sponsors

I can’t say enough about my awesome sponsors.  This year we saw the return of sponsorship by Angus McRae, Jungle Disk, Nelson Mullins, and UBS.  All four of these folks sponsored the first Startup Riot when they had no idea if I could pull off what I said I was going to pull off.  Even after seeing everything that happened last year, all four of them returned to support the community.  Because of that and the fact that all four of these groups plus our two new sponsors absolutely rock – I recommend you seek out any/all of them as your needs dictate.

Need help with insurance/benefits? The first and only place to go is Angus McRae. Even if you just have a question, they’ll help you out.

Need to make sure your data is safe and secure in the cloud? Only stop is Jungle Disk. I’ve been trying out other services but Jungle Disk is the only application I can find where I can control my encryption keys and thus make sure no preying eyes look at my data.

Lawyers are a dime a dozen – except for the awesome ones at Nelson Mullins.  These guys really care and aren’t out for just the billable hours like other law firms.  There is a reason that Nelson Mullins is the law firm of Shotput Ventures.

And finally, UBS’ Langley Respess.  Let’s face it, the market sucks.  You have a job and it isn’t to watch the market tick up and, lately more often, down.  Why not employ someone who can make sure the wealth you’ve meticulously managed to grow for yourself doesn’t disappear in a market hiccup?

These four folks rock.  If that’s all we had to sponsor Startup Riot this year, that would have been great.  But amazingly two more groups jumped onto the pile.

The folks at GTRI were ridiculous in their enthusiasm (we’re already talking about Startup Riot 2010!).  After one short meeting, they pushed through their support for the event.  We’ve also started talking about some larger initatives that will help out the entire community so stay tuned for that.

GRA rivaled GTRI’s enthusiasm for their support of Startup Riot.  With the GRA folks, I got a nice warm intro from everyone’s favorite local geek/pundit, Stephen Fleming.  With GRA, we handled everything over email because they were so certain with how good the event was going to be that they just wanted to be a part of it and support the local community.

Both GTRI and GRA rock. Both organizations have focused on their own development of technologies but this direct foray into helping the startup community as a whole is a wonderful development and I hope it leads to long term involvement that helps out everyone.

These six sponsors deserve a TON of kudos for the support and leadership they’ve shown.  Startup Riot would not be possible without their support and encouragement.

The Awesome – The A/V Guys

I can’t say enough about Flashpoint. Those guys rock the house and if you ever need an event produced, you shouldn’t even try to call anyone else.  They aren’t like your typical events folks who just try to jack up the cost on everything.  They’ll help hammer down the price and tell you when people are charging ridiculous stuff.  Just don’t ever tell them that they brought the wrong giraffe to your event.

The Awesome – Volunteers

I had so many people raise their hands and volunteer to help with Startup Riot that it was unreal.  In fact, it was more volunteers than I could effectively use.  People showed up early at the venue to help even though I didn’t ask them.  People came and helped coach companies whenever I asked them.  Startup Riot was a success because so many people pitched in to help. Major kudos to these folks.

The Good – The Venue

Not much to say from last year.  It’s a nice venue. Works well for this event. Only issue is we’re busting at the seams for the number of seats. That may dictate a change for next year.  Well that and the lousy weather.  Not much I can do about that.

If you have any suggestions on other venues, drop me a note or post a comment here.

The Good – Lunch Mixer

I was a little worried about the lunch mixer.  The big problem last year was that so many people went off and had lunch by themselves.  Lunch is a ideal time to get to know other folks.  So with the whole UNO inspired red/blue/green/yellow/wildcard dot scheme in place, it seemed like folks did go to lunch with people they didn’t know.  I did see some groups that were way larger than my dictated 4 person size but hey, as long as people didn’t go to lunch alone I’m happy.

The Fun – The After Party

Other than the threat of tornadoes, it was awesome. Not much more to say.

The Way Cool – All The Coverage

After coming home I realized I took way fewer pictures this year than I did last year.  But happily, I found so many people had taken pictures and uploaded them (with tags!) onto Flickr (many of which I’ve used in this post), so this isn’t really an issue.  In addition, there has been quite a lot of cool video that has been put up.  One of my favorites so far is the video posted by TechDrawl in their recap of the event.  I love the quick takes even though your final shot is of me dorking it up (see video below).

The Bad – The Parking

A couple of people complained about difficulty in locating parking and the cost for all day parking.  For the former, I can help out by providing better maps for next year.  For the latter, I can’t do much.  I could charge $14 more per attendee and give you free parking but that wouldn’t really accomplish much.

I really have no way of fixing this other than getting a venue that isn’t as convenient to other amenities such as food.  Unless someone knows a venue that is the same/better than Twelve and will handle our growing space needs.

The Bad – The Gatecrashing Attempts

Yeah, it happened again but we were pretty prepared for it. Really only one investment banker tried to get in the day of the event. I obviously told him no. If you get a call from an investment banker saying he was at Startup Riot, let me know.  Happy to rip people like that to shreds on my blog or elsewhere.

The Bad – The WiFi

This absolutely sucked.  There wasn’t much I could do the day of the event.  Before hand I told them we’d have a lot of people online and they need to be ready.  They claimed they could handle 200 people online.  That  clearly wasn’t true.  I’m going to start making alternate plans starting now.  Fortunately I have some potential sponsors who could help in this respect.  I will make it better next year.

The Really Bad – The Rudeness

The other big issue commented on in the survey was the lack of respect to presenters.  Yeah, I mentioned backnoise.com and Twitter as places to chat but it clearly got out of hand.  It is downright disrespectful to presenters who have only three minutes to present themselves when you have folks chatting and carrying on.  I haven’t seen all of the backnoise.com chatter but from the survey results some of it was just obnoxious for the sake of being obnoxious.  Obviously I can’t control who says what in which forum, but I can bar people who are disruptive or disrespectful.

Honestly I care less about what is said in an online forum than the out loud laughing and chattering while people are trying to present.  People don’t come to Startup Riot to see/listen to you chatter and laugh.  They came to network and hear the pitches.  I did note some of the people carrying on needlessly at the event and will consider what to do with those folks for Startup Riot 2010.

Just remember, mean people suck.  Do you really want to be mean to others?

What’s Changing for Startup Riot 2010

Well, I’ve already talked about some attendee issues.  I also got the questions on badges and company names again this year.  More than likely, I’m not changing the badges.  But I hope I’ll be able to afford nicer badges next year.  The sticker badges suck – I know that.  But they have the benefit of costing only a few cents per badge.  Given that quite a few people were approved and didn’t attend (and didn’t pay), spending a lot on a badge for a no show hurts when the cost approaches a buck/badge.  I’m planning on changing the registration method next year too so payment will be immediate upon registration.  This will help decrease my load of trying to get registrations paid for the event.

I’m considering making the initial push for attendees tiered based on past attendance.  I’m not sure how this would work but people who registered and attended this year would get first crack to get in to Startup Riot 2010.  Clearly, some of the folks who were not so nice this year may get pushed into a later tier of folks (read: not invited).  I’m not sure if I’m going to do this but I’m strongly considering favoring people who actually show up to the event.  A filled room is good for everyone who attends.

Getting a keynote was a scramble this year.  So I’m not going to wait to line up the keynote for next year.  I’ve already started working on this now.

I’m going to consider other venues for the event for 2010.  Given the growth path, I think we’re going to be too big for Twelve next year.  There is a possibility that the event will be split into two days – one as a job fair and one as a pure pitch day.  I heard some complaints about the job fair not being well organized.  Totally legitimate because I slammed that into the schedule just a few weeks before the event.  It was poorly thought out and that is totally my fault.  I’ll do better next time.

A few people have mentioned to me that I should get an intern to help with the planning of Startup Riot.  This is a fantastic idea.  I’m not sure how I go about getting an (unpaid!) intern but I could clearly use the help.  If you know of any students who would want to help at the end of this year and beginning of next year to put on Startup Riot, leave a comment, drop me a note, or send me a tweet.

So what do you think? What else was there that was right or wrong about Startup Riot?  What do you want me to add, change, or remove that I haven’t already mentioned?

Startup Gauntlet is coming up again on December 17, 2008.  That day also happens to be the first pre-screening day for Startup Riot presentation applications (see my previous post).

For those of you thinking about applying to present at Startup Riot, Startup Gauntlet is an excellent way to practice your pitch before going through the screening process.

Also remember that the monthly winners from December and January of Startup Gauntlet to get an automatic pitching slot at Startup Riot. Yes, that’s right. You don’t have to get a deck together just for me (although your eventual deck for Startup Riot must adhere to Startup Riot rules) and you don’t have to worry about coming to one of the Startup Riot pre-screenings. So go register and work on your pitches!

So a lot of people have written great posts about Atlanta Startup Weekend.  Most weren’t on the team I was on but I’ve spied one from one of the GivingTi.me team members.  I was debating if I should add to the noise and give my perspective.  In the end, I was convinced that I should.

Personally, I liked quite a few of the projects that came out of Atlanta Startup Weekend 2.  Not only was my idea one of them (GivingTi.me), but I also participated (very tangentially) in another one (Twitpay).  During the wrap up session I gave some thoughts to another one that I think has a chance to have some legs on it (Jumbis).  CloseBuy.me also has an opportunity but the other two (Seed Stage Records and Reepli) are open questions for me.  If Reepli gets bought on eBay that would be pretty cool and quite possibly the first Startup Weekend project to have a liquidity event.  That could be spun to be a badge of honor of sorts both for the founders and for Atlanta.

Okay, so some real thoughts on the weekend.  This weekend was remarkably different than last year.  Not only was last year all about one project (Skribit – which by the way is still alive and well and also adorns the left side of this site in a fancy little pop up, lightbox overlay dealio) but I witnessed a lot of people having open arguments and massive disagreements in terms of strategy in regards to the project.

This year Startup Weekend was intended to have multiple projects being run concurrently.  I’m not sure how many actually had full teams after the voting on Friday but very quickly a handful of the teams imploded.  Various reasons for this but others who were directly involved are in a better position to discuss what happened since I only heard about them after the fact.

We had some sixteen people working on GivingTi.me when Saturday rolled around (we picked up some folks whose projects had imploded on Friday evening).  It’s been proposed that the attraction of folks to this project may have been due to the fact that I already had grant money lined up for the project (thanks to the BMW Foundation Herbert Quandt).  Yeah, that probably had something to do with it but I think everyone on the project really wanted to work on something that could create a positive impact not only in Atlanta but beyond.  GivineTi.me has the opportunity to do just that.

And why do I think this was the motivation of folks working on this project?  Well, a lot of the folks have said that they want to continue working on the project and some have even approached me about what I’m planning next.  Also, not one of the folks from the weekend asked me about stock, options, or anything else.  I’m not sure where GivingTi.me will land – either as a 501(c)3 (not for-profit) or as a regular company.  If it does end up being the latter, I’ve committed to making sure that all the folks from the weekend get some shares of non-voting, common stock.  When I mentioned this during the weekend, not one person asked anything about details (why non-voting or the percentage or anything else).  That tells me these folks wanted to do this because it was something they truly believed in and not for some kind of compensation.

Another indication of believing the vision comes in the fact that over the weekend I didn’t hear one disagreement between any of my team members.  That’s right, not one.  Even given the vast differences in the experience levels within the development team and the business development/marketing team no one ever got irate or upset at anyone else.  Well, that’s a lie.  Actually on Friday it did happen with one person but once we really got underway, it was smooth sailing.  And why was that?  Was it some leadership of myself or others?  Was it sheer force of will?  Nope.  It wasn’t any of those things.  I think what it amounts to is that the folks who were attracted to this project realized that this was about helping others and thus their work on the project, and interactions with others on the project, should be about helping others.

In the end, we built a fantastic site that I could never have built by myself.  Sure there are still some issues with the site but we’ll get them ironed out.  Regardless, I consider the weekend a success because a bunch of folks got together and started GivingTi.me down the right path and along the way they helped teach one another some great things and made some good friends.  Personally, I’d start a company and work with any one of them.  And if that isn’t a good outcome for Atlanta Startup Weekend, then I don’t know what is.

I had a really great time at Atlanta BarCamp 2. Major kudos to Michael Mealling for taking the bull by the horns and organizing.  Those on Twitter that follow me have probably already seen my slides (although I updated them late last night), but for everyone else here are my slides from my talk titled “How I Built startupgossip.com In A Week (Using Yahoo Pipes)”.  Thanks again to all the people who sat and listened to me blabber on.  If I ever do another Yahoo Pipes demo, I’m going to make sure I’ve tested out the demo data well in advance so that I don’t get those same “interesting” results.  Nothing more needs to be said about that.
 

Okay folks, the time has come to open up registration for Startup Riot which will be on February 18, 2009.  We’re going to try to make the event bigger and more awesome than last time.  If you remember, last year we had 54 companies presenting 3-minutes apiece, over 270 attendees, and one fantastic after-party.

For 2009, we’re shooting for 70 presenting companies and we’re capping attendance at somewhere between 300 and 350 people.  Also note that last year we had over 90 applications to present and over 330 applications to attend.  Clearly, we had to say no to a bunch of applications in both groups.

So if you’re interested in attending, I urge you to apply early to attend or present as appropriate.  Preference will be given to those who get their applications in early.