lanceweatherby

The Chef there won "Top Chef" one year.

It sucks so bad we are changing the name.:) Sorry for the typo, can't edit.

Amendment one is just a symptom. With that your should be able to figure out one of my cons.

The only place where the word scary is involved is the title on HN. It's not in the post that it links to.

You need to read the link I provided.

This post was written by an attorney as I pointed out at the beginning of the article. Personally I am not opposed to non-competes in all forms. We have a law in Georgia already and it is fine. The amendment would create a strong non compete environment in Georgia and strong non-competes have been shown to stifle innovation. We have enough challenges down here already without this new law coming into effect.

Many legal scholars believe it is the reason Silicon Valley surpassed Route 128 as the technology capital of the world.

http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/newthinking/francomitchell.pdf

The Green Banana Papers, Marketing Secrets For Technology Entrepreneurs is a good quick read that offers practical advice on what to do. http://bit.ly/GreenBananaPapers

I reached out to the primary author. He was not aware that it was online.

While the paper has some factual errors and conclusions (I do not think that anyone within the Atlanta technology community would call it "rich in venture capital" as an example) I do think that the conclusion that Atlanta's tech sector lacks social structure is dead on. I wrote an article for the local paper to this effect last month: http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/08/startups-are-hard.html

I also think that a main point is missed within the article. Companies that leave Atlanta are not doing so for social structure reasons, they leave because the venture capital factor is based elsewhere and requiring the companies to move in order for a funding event to occur.

It was predicted that they would all leave.

You live in Akron, nobody is going to call you an elitist. :)

Being the folks to come up with the concept and having $2 million in backing from Sequoia clearly puts YC at the top heap. Clearly gives YC more choice. There are however plenty of talented and motivated people in all parts of the world.

And the answer to your question is four.

It will be interesting to see if the ones that stay in Atlanta can get funded as well as the ones that are getting SV intros (a Shotput Ventures partner lives in SF and 2 Shotput companies moved West). It's early, we will need to do an update in 90 days.

You were dead on in your comment that Y Combinator style seed funding is not regional:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=528924

Half the Shotput companies came from outside the South.

Thanks for the pointer PG. Great essay. There are like a dozen gem quotes in there. I will update my post with a pointer.

To pull directly from the article a technology startup is "measurement and leverage, where measurement comes from working with a small group, and leverage from developing new techniques."

If I pull from chunks I come up with:

A small group of people inventing a new way to solve a difficult problem that is hard for others to duplicate.

Is that far off from how you would sum it up?

If you can't convince at least one person that your concept is good enough that they should devote their time to it the idea is most likely not worth pursuing.

The challenge is prioritization.

The uniqueness of an MBA is that it teaches how to think strategically about a business.

While I can not articulate exactly 'what' it teaches, I do know that often times in the face of new circumstances and rapidly changing conditions it has enabled me to ask the right questions and create the right framework to make a decision.

What I love about startups is they require this type of thinking. It has helped me tremendously in scaling technology companies.

Here is a real example. Pretend like you are in a finance class. It's a case study. On Microsoft buying Yahoo! Determine how much Microsoft should be willing to pay for Yahoo! and the assumptions and rationale behind your conclusion. Or how much is AOL worth as a spinout of Time Warner. The core of the answer lies in something called the Capital Asset Pricing Model and it is as every bit as complex as the fixed point combinator for which YC was named.

A little more practical and more marketing aligned, doing real market research for a natural foods store to determine if they should expand their footprint to other locations or just increase the size of their current store. It took over a month to design the questionnaire before the prof deemed it acceptable.

With that said, the real challenge, and what any top school does, is teach students how to prioritize. They give you so much work that you can not possibly get it all complete at the level of excellence in which you want to operate so you have to learn when something is good enough and move on to the next pressing issue. Which, BTW, is pretty much what you need to do in a startup as well.

In what may be heresy here on HN I am going to partially disagree with PG. Regional YCs may indeed be of the nth quality bucket, but that does not necessarily doom them to failure anymore then not attending Stanford or MIT dooms a hacker to failure.

The proof as they say is in the pudding. TechStars seems to be doing just fine so far. Let's see what Shotput's births before we call their babies ugly.

The Logistic Regression Markov Chain developed at Georgia Tech to predict results of NCAA tournament games does a good job at picking both upsets and late round game winners. A bit soft in the middle rounds.

Amit Ranjan the co-founder of Slideshare, called it an "inspirational masterpiece." I suppose I could have gone in and written something up but at this point just should leave it alone.

It's not on fire. It has turned into a healthy discussion. What I am hearing is that lots of hackers have issue with moving to ATL due to perceptions with tolerance. Fair enough.

Now if we ever started writing $1 million checks it would be interesting to see how people would vote with their feet. In my day job I get inquires from all over the world from people that would move to Georgia for a little help.

Thanks for the article that inspired me and the spirited discussion.

They are in Atlanta as well. One of the strongest organizations in the city is TiE Atlanta.

I am formally attached to 3 early stage startups outside of my day job. In total these startups are comprised of 50% White and 50% Asian cofounders.

Another that I helping is founded by a young lady out of Ghana.

To say that minority populations are not well represented in the Atlanta startup community is not a statement based on first hand knowledge.

I don't know how in the heck an article answering the questions that PG posed turned into a string of comments about racism and calling people meatheads.

But since someone opened the door and let the big elephant in the room, I am going to go ahead and admit that it's standing there. The sub-culture of technology startups is dominated by white males. Minorities are not represented at the same proportion of their general population percentages anywhere in the country. I am not saying its right and we should all work to correct the issue. But it is. Look at the YC companies. Look at the TechCunch50. Look at Demo. Saying that it's just Atlanta is unfounded stereotyping.

It would be much more beneficial to discuss Atlanta and other cities on the criteria that PG laid out. In my article I pointed out that Atlanta could be more tolerant. The city is not alone.

Wifi Cat is the world’s first WiFi repeater integrated into a cat collar. It uses patent pending energy harvesting, the cat's movement recharges battery the battery. It spread's WiFi throughout your home and enable you to track your cat using your browser in real time.

At this point it's all about execution.

1Password solves the problem pretty darn well for me.

The best for a startup to enter a market is indeed a highly targeted way. But when it comes to branding the best route for a startup is a master branding strategy.

When I started EarthLink's mobile business I actually met with Al and Laura Ries the authors of "The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding". Their advice. Call it EarthLink Wireless.

I have been involved with over 500 startups over the years. I have never seen a sub-branding strategy work for a technology startup. What prompted me to write the article was one of the companies that I am working with (Flux Media) is changing their company name to their product name (Centrafuse) because the use of the two different brands was creating confusion to their potential partners.

YC companies Omnisio, Reddit, Xobni, Scribd, Loopt, Dropbox, Tipjoy, and Justin.tv to name a few all use a master brand strategy. My guess is that nearly all of them do. Perhaps we should ask HN.

Exactly.

No startup should start side activities until they have the one thing they are focusing on completely in hand.

Disqus is blog a blog commenting system. One they get that figured out they can go and do something else. Disqus "the name of our second product function."

Come up with a decent concept and team and then get funded by YC.

I would not just give me 50% for walking in the door. I wrote a long article addressing this a short time back: http://bit.ly/StartupEquity

I can only speak for those I know.

Both Skribit and Twitpay are incorporated.

Skribit will hire its first full time person in January upon closing a small round. The company has significant user traction: http://siteanalytics.compete.com/skribit.com/?metric=uv

If those are the metrics the answer is zero Startup Weekend companies are successful. I would say it is too soon to tell for many. Somewhat like a YC company at the end of a session.