Lance Weatherby of ATDC and Socialytics wrote a post today entitled Nobody Told Me where he ranted about how there are too many startup activities in Atlanta and not enough people "creating products, getting customers, and building companies."  After writing a long comment which his blog wouldn’t accept for some reason I decided now would be as good a time as any to start blogging again. What follows is the comment I originally wrote for Lance’s blog:

As someone who started a monthly Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs meetup back in Jan 2007 I feel like this post paints a target on my back. Hopefully that was not your intention?

What may not be obvious is I have been agonizing over the issues you described for over two years but not sure how my efforts could evolve to help. At the end of last year I finally realized how my efforts could positively affect execution and as such I made the changes to AWE that I did, i.e. renaming AWE to Atlanta Web Marketers and also launching Startup Atlanta.

First, one thing that I obviously wasn’t able to make clear to you (and others?) was that Atlanta Web Marketers is NOT targeted at Startups and listing it in this context is doing it a disserve. AWM is targeted at small and medium sized businesses, non-profits, government agencies and replicative entrepreneurs, NOT on innovative startup entrepreneurs with a goal of helping them market their products and services better on the web. FYI, there is a huge demonstrated need for people who are effectively operating their organizations to learn how to better market on the web and that’s the market need that AWM is targeting. AWM meetings is all about execution those people in those organizations, and by focusing on that target market it becomes a business itself and running the events are execution. So please take AWM off your list of Atlanta Startup events, as it’s not. 

Next, Ignition Alley events are for the most part not startup-specific events either. Some are but most of them are targeting the same market as AWM events. It’s as unfair to list Ignition Alley events as being part of the glut of startup events as it it is to blame people who live and work intown as being part of the metro Atlanta’s rush hour traffic problem.

Continuing, there is Startup Atlanta and it is NOT an event; it is a (soon-to-be) non-profit who mission is to study the ecosystem, identify how to grow it and as much as possible be a catalyst help others execute on on advancing the ecosystem. Yes Startup Atlanta will run the #OnStage event monthly (which I think you misnamed as "OnStartup" in your post), it will run roundtables, it will run task force meetings, and it will probably run other events. However, unlike the former Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs events all of Startup Atlanta’s activities will be measured by how well the activities focus startup entrepreneurs on executing and/or growing the ecosystem support needed by startup entrepreneurs to execute and not providing new ways to waste time.

Specifically let’s look at #OnStage. It’s modeled after the NY Tech meetups that according to those I’ve spoken with in New York has been very effective in driving startup execution in the New York area. It’s an event that can give some local entrepreneurs exposure for their startup rather than how most have toiled in obscurity. As a requirement for presenting at #OnStage startup entrepreneurs must demo their offerings somehow (NO powerpoint) so all those who haven’t executed well enough to have something to show won’t qualify. In addition #OnStage allows the audience 10 minutes of rude Q&A forcing presenting entrepreneurs to be well prepared with a viable business model or to come across looking rather foolish to the community. Finally #OnStage rewards startup entrepreneurs who are doing the best job of executing by selecting winners and getting those winners more exposure which hopefully will mean more customers, partners and/or investors.

Beyond that, Startup Atlanta will only be promoting events that have as a goal to either advance the ecosystem or help startups execute better, and we’ll be focusing on metrics as much as possible.

And while Ben Sabrin and those like him may know all they need to execute well without outside help not everyone who could otherwise execute successfully knows everything they need to succeed. And that’s where targeted, smaller events come in including some we plan for Startup Atlanta. I’ve also noticed that ATDC has a plethora of such events which you didn’t mention including "Circles", "Brown Bags", "Open Coffees", and more. While they too add to the glut of events I actually expect they are of the type that will help startups execute better (well, maybe the first two named and possibly others; though not sure about Open Coffees.)

But while I think while your criticism would have been very well placed about this time last year today it’s a little late because we as an ecosystem have evolved. For example, I understand that StartupChicks is doing some really fabulous events focused on execution for their constituents (but as I lack the requried chromosomes I can’t give a firsthand testamonial.) Capital Lounge has renamed to StartupLounge Atlanta to refocus, according to my memory of my discussion with Scott Burkett, on execution rather than on raising capital. And Startup Gauntlet is focused on perfecting a pitch; again, execution and not something you can repeatedly attend. StartupRiot is as I understand it in large part focused on both getting local attention for startups and gaining attention from investors outside of Atlanta who actually write checks, and that is something many local startups badly need to execute as well. I believe most of these evolved because their organizers identified a need to focus more on results and execution.

And some of the other events you mentioned are industry or technology specific too, not startup-specific. So you do Mobile Monday, AWsome Atlanta, SoCon, and ProductCamp all a disserve by listing them here. (As an aside, you didn’t mention ATLRUG; it’s inline with AWsome so why not? As for ATDC/TAG Entrepreneurs and Venture Pipeline I don’t have enough experience with them to comment.)

So Lance please do get to know the value each event and it’s associated organization has to local startup execution and learn which events are startup-related and which are not. Casting doubt on the value certain activities bring may end up harming the creation of products, the gaining of customers and the building of companies more than it helps. 

-Mike Schinkel
Executive Director; Startup Atlanta
Organizer; Atlanta Web Marketers
Partner; Ignition Alley Atlanta Coworking 

P.S. Personally speaking, I spent 2007 through 2009 getting to know people in the Atlanta startup community and to build relationships both as an event host and by attending as many related events as I could. I had never done this locally during my prior two decades and my ability to grow my business beyond $12 million annually greatly suffered because of it (and I expect others who rarely or don’t create relationships in the community suffer an inability to execute as well.) But my New Years resolution for 2010 is to focus my event hosting and attendance on only those events that will help achieve the execution goals I’ve set for Startup Atlanta, for AWM, and for myself. To your point Lance, I’d recommend startup entrepreneurs do the same. 

@lance, @sanjay, @sburkett, atdc, atlantawebmarketers, awsomeatlanta, bensabrin, brownbags, events, ignitionalley, lanceweatherby, nytechmeetup, onstage, opencoffees, productcamp, roundtables, sanjayparekh, scottburkett, socialtyics, socon, startupatlanta, startupchicks, startupcircles, startupgauntlet, startuploungeatlanta, startupriot

This month at the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs meetup group I organize we hosted two sharp email marketing professionals: Sandi Karchmer Solow of I Send Your Email and Ben Chestnut, co-founder of Mail Chimp, a successful Atlanta-based Email Service Provider. Sandi presented Email Marketing 101 to the group, and Ben regaled us with his story of how MailChimp came to be.

Sandi gave us a really great base level of overview of the email marketing landscape and explained how its critical to correctly opt-in your subscribers and to give them exactly what they asked for, and only what they asked for. Otherwise you loose trust and the fallout is worse than anything you could gain. Oh, and Sandi was a real trooper to speak this month because she’s about seven months pregnant. So good luck to her and her soon-to-be-newborn.

As for MailChimp, evidently it was a side project that Ben and his partner’s web consulting company implemented to keep a client who wanted them to manage his email broadcast from hassling them, but they didn’t fully embrace it as their primary offering until many years later. And the month after they fully embraced it their revenue exceeded every prior month’s revenue they’d seen life-to-date for their business! Ben told us how MailChimp has a focus on simplicity and when we reviewing his prices we found MailChimp to be very price competitive, especially for email lists of less than 100 which they send for free!

Now most marketers have heard of ExactTarget before but many may not have heard of MailChimp, and based on MailChimp’s low pricing, it simple-to-use interface and its fun and irrerevent name, many people might think that MailChimp is only for businesses with tiny email lists. But most in the audience including myself were shocked to learn that they have successfully delivered some of the largest email broadcasts in the industry!  Ben told us about a major software launch announcements where they sent out millions of of emails in just about 30 minutes! (Ben said the client asked never to be named but believe me, it was major!)

What was especially interesting was when member/attendee Jason Prance mentioned during Q&A that he’d been using both MailChimp, for personal projects, and ExactTarget for a 100,000 name work mailing list, and that he loved the former and really disliked the latter. He then said if he had his druthers he’d be using MailChimp for work but couldn’t switch without re-opting in and loosing probably half his subscribers. To this Ben replied that all he’d need to do is provided his ExactTarget reports showing them being a responsible emailer and then he could easily move his 100k list to MailChimp. Sold!

Anyhoo we had a great time, enjoyed learning about email marketing, and look forward to future Atlanta Web Entrepreneur meetups. Oh, and I want to thank both Sandi and Ben for taking the time to make such a memorable evening for us.  It really is great to have such nice people who are willing to help their peers and who are offering such worldclass services so reasonably priced, all here in our hometown of Atlanta GA. Go Atlanta!

Visit Flickr to see all photos I took for this event.

P.S.: This was NOT a paid endorsement for MailChimp. We invited Ben to speak about MailChimp because one of our members that we really respect recommended him very highly. Plus Ben turned out to be a really great guy and there were actually several members in attendance who already use his service and love it. Evidently, MailChimp really kicks ass!

ben chestnut, email marketing, events, exact target, isendyouremail, mailchimp, meetups, people, sandi solow

I’m at the Fox Theatre in my hometown of Atlanta today checking out the Adobe AIR Bus Tour Summer 07. It’s nice to be at the first event nationwide. I’m attending at the behest of a friend who thinks it going to be the "next big thing." I’m skeptical. I fear yet another proprietary attempt to empower developers to craft unique custom web interfaces to provide desktop functionality as a layer over web technologies, and that’s not a compliment. These types of things, especially when looking at the black box nature of opaque Flash SWF files, do their best to ignore those things that make the web work, i.e. stateless URL-addressed resources. The reality of Adobe AIR remains to be seen… P.S. It would have been nice if Adobe had consulted me to ensure that this event was more convenient for me. I mean, I actually had to leave my home and cross the street to attend. Adobe, Please! ‘-)

adobe, adobeair, blogging, dasblog, drupal, events, php, webarchitecture, wordpress

You gotta love that some at Microsoft actually have a sense of humor! From the PopFly FAQ (emphasis mine):

Why did you call it Popfly?

Well, left to our own devices we would have called it "Microsoft Visual Mashup Creator Express, May 2007 Community Tech Preview Internet Edition," but instead we asked some folks for help and they suggested some cool names and we all liked Popfly.

events, humor, mashups, microsoft, popfly, web2.0

Last night was the third meeting of the Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs, a Meetup group that I started this past December. Although the first two meetings in January and February were "just getting started" outings, this was the first event that made me think "Hey, we can really pull off something great here!" And that is why I finally decide to go ahead and blog about it [1].

I’ve been in Atlanta for most of my life and the positive, community-oriented, grassroots entrepreneurial tech culture thriving in San Francisco and Boston and has been all but none-existent in the modern era. Atlanta has been a Fortune 1000 town [2]; its high tech community has either chased big business dollars or been of the "get rich quick" dotbomb variety [3], or both. And those who prostrate to major corporations or indenture to venture capitalists are rarely of the "rising tide float all boats" ethos interested in the types of business communities I’ve yearned to be involved in.

Most readers of this blog know that web technologies have evolved to the point anyone with reasonable intelligence and enough passion can create a successful online business; no deep technical knowledge and only a tiny amount of startup capital required. That level of empowerment has unleashed latent entrepreneurial aspirations worldwide. The new-style online businesses people are creating may or may not be a jackpot like YouTube has been for its founders, but they can provide a great living for those involved.

And that excites me. But what really excites me more is, with events like SoCon07, Podcamp Atlanta, and others it’s evident the community-oriented entrepreneurial web ethos that I’ve so longed has finally arrived in Atlanta!

I won’t take any credit for Atlantans new interest in building agile online businesses as none would be deserved. But I will say I’m now doing what I can to help catalyze this transformation of Atlanta’s entrepreneurial web landscape in hopes to see as supportive an ecosystem emerge as those found in the aforementioned Boston and San Francisco.

Wish us luck!

Footnotes

1. For a rundown of our third meeting, see my next post at PaperbackSwap founder speaks to Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs.
2. Atlanta’s Fortune 1000 include Home Depot, UPS, Coca Cola, BellSouth (now of AT&T), Delta Airlines, Southern Company, SunTrust, Genuine Parts, and Cox Communications to name a few.
3. Atlanta’s notable exceptions to the dotbomb moniker have been Mindspring/Earthlink, JBoss, and Internet Security Systems.

atlwebentrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, events, flickr, meetup.com, photos, podcamp, Web, web2.0

Well, yes as I’ve already said, I’m not a super-timely blogger. I should have blogged this long ago, but ah well. Anyway, Amber Rhea of The Georgia Podcast Network organized a Podcamp here in Atlanta for this weekend March 16-18 2007 at Emory University. An as of yesterday when I asked, Amber said that she had 185 people registered! Wow. Another event like SoCon07; I can’t wait!

But this one is going to be special for me as I get to hold my first discussion on Saturday about User-Centered URL Design. What’s that got to do with Podcasting, you ask? I’m not sure either, but Amber assurred me that attendees would be interested. :-) But seriously, podcasters has many of the same issues to address that everyone publishing on the web should consider including usable URLs for their audio files as well as the website that hosts them.

I look forward to some likely discussions!

atlwebentrepreneurs, conferences, events, groups, meetup.com, people, podcamp, podcasts, urldesign

I’ve never really blogged before about Atlanta because (except for this) I’ve never felt there was much interesting happening here, at least not from the perspective of things that interest me to blog about. But that’s finally changing!

I’ve been in Atlanta for most of my life, and my professional career has spanned exactly 20 years next month. I’ve also been in the entrepreneurial high-tech side of things but for the most part have always felt on the outside looking in. Sure there has been a lot of high-tech companies focused on serving our fortune 500 crowd, and there are tons of real estate entrepreneurs. However, I’ve never felt like there have been others interested in developer and web-related startups like I have always been. That is until now!

Several weeks ago (okay, I’ve never been a timely blogger…) I attended an unconference called SoCon07 put on by Sherry Heyl, Leonard Witt, Jeff Haynie, Josh Hallett, James Harris, and Jonas Luster (if I missed or overcredited anyone, I apologize in advance.)

The event was actually incredible. Held in the nether regions of Atlanta (okay, that’s OTP a few miles) at Kennesaw State University. There were somewhere over 200 people in attendance, and the Friday night before there was a dinner held for any interested attendees. It was incredibly rewarding to get to meet so many other bright and passionate people interested in web-oriented startups and/or social media here in my good ole’ hometown of Atlanta, GA!

I’m going to shout out for a handful of other people I’ve met recently who were at SoCon07. Someone I had met socially last year, Grayson Daughters of The Spacey Gracy Review/blog and Producer and one of the Personalities for the TrueGritz satire site was busy doin her thang.

And then there was Amber Rhea and Rusty Tanton of the Georgia Podcast Network as well as the organizers of PodCamp Atlanta. And of course my good friend Eric Winter of Webicus. As well as many others I just met and whom I hope to soon get to know better.

amberrhea, conferences, emory, events, podcamp, socialmedia, socon07, urldesign, web2.0

A Fresh Cup

Ok, for those who have been keeping up with Mike Gunderloy this is old news but I just ran across it. Mike is one of the most prolific writer/developers I know and one of those rare breed that can evidently learn new technologies in no time flat.

Mike has been working with Microsoft technologies for about fifteen years, but it seems he’s gotten fed up with Microsoft. Even though he is continuing his blog of links to info and tools of interest to .NET developers at The Daily Grind, he has started a new blog named A Fresh Cup where he explores his search for an alternative development platform.

Here is an except of his initial post:

…I’ve spent the bulk of the last fifteen years developing some amount of reputation and expertise in the Microsoft universe…

Unfortunately, over that time I’ve also come to the conclusion that, even though it is staffed largely by smart and ethical people, Microsoft itself represents a grave threat to the future of software development through its increasing inclination to stifle competition through legal shenanigans….

…I can’t afford to just walk out on a career that brings in good money. But I rather desperately want to find an alternative. This blog will record some of my explorations as I hunt around in other corners of the software world, trying to decide if there’s a viable business plan for me that can include weaning myself off of Microsoft software.

So it seems like I’m not the only one who has gotten frustrated with Microsoft as of late.

blogs, entrepreneurship, events, microsoft, people, socon07

This morning at around 8:15am the old Wachovia Building on 615 Peachtree Street in Midtown Atlanta, Georgia USA was imploded using controlled demolition techniques. This was filmed from North Avenue just east of Piedmont Road. Check it out!

events, photos, video

After attending The Future Of Web Apps, I looked around for fellow attendee bloggers and while searching found Chris Messina’s post about the lack of diversity in the speaker lineup.  Several commenters then started getting riled up to the level of a virtual lynch mob with comments like:

Damned if I’m going to give hundreds of dollars to conference organizers who couldn’t get off their butt and mix things up a bit.

In interest of full disclosure, I do need to point out that I am a white male. OTOH, anyone who knows me well knows that I really seek out diversity, especially in my personal life, and that generally the type of people I least like spending time around are white males! But as I already posted, I loved this show. And I think the Carson did an excellent job with such a small staff, so I posted this comment:

I agree in principle with this post, but I have a different view of it (which is ironic, because I would normally be pushing hard for diversity.) I found this conference to be one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended, and I lost count at 50 conferences in my professional life.

It was also by far the best value at $147.50/day (and I even got a special offer for a 15% discount!) Lastly, his company is tiny (3 people?) and they are attempting to do a tremendous number of things for such a small company. I have seen many other conferences run by much larger companies do a much worse job in almost every area so I was AMAZED at how damn good this conference actually was, white man or not.

Could they have done a better job in diversity? Hell yeah. Did they do an incredible job in what they did? ABSOLUTELY! Did Ryan come across on stage as being sincere about wanting to address concerns and constantly do a better job? It appeared so to me. Were they probably overwhelmed by getting the conference implemented and possibly had the stress of organizing it cause them to accidently overlook some idealistic and feel good but hard to implement aspects? Probably. Do you think, now that it has been made a point that they will look to improve the situation in advance and do a better job of recruiting diversity for their next conference? Almost definitely.

So I would propose that before you collect up a lynch mob for this one oversight (”She turned me into a Newt!” “A Newt?!?” “Well…I got better.”), maybe you could consider this post and thread a suggestion for improvement that I’m sure Ryan & Co will see, and then give them the benefit of the doubt until and unless they fail next time. Fair?

A little while later I got an email from someone at Carson thanking me for my comments and saying:

You got it bang on the money, except that we are a 75% female company, soon to be an 80% female company ….

So I took the opportunity in reply to give my suggestions both to address this issue and also generally to improve the conference, as follows:

Thanks for writing. You are welcome.  You guys did an excellent job, as you know my opinion already.

Suggestions:

1. Ask the community to nominate speakers via a forum, and then use some kind of poll software to let the community vote on who gets to speak with the caveat that not everyone voted for will accept or be able to so they should vote on a larger pool than you actually need.  That will also cause the community to notify the speakers and make your job of contacting them a lot easier.  If the community nominates 90% white male when you announce in advance you are looking for diversity, well then…
2. Have a conference that ONLY has people other than White Males speak. Enage the community that is bitching about this to help you promote the conference.  Have this conference in Atlanta at The Fox Theatre: I can help; I live across the street. :)  This could offer a serious challenge to the community to put their money where their mouth is. Get them all to do referrals and then we can track who has the most referrals and shame the vocal ones who have few or no referrals.  If you don’t do this, I might. :)   BTW, here is a list of women speakers in tech.
3. The worse part of your conference (for me) was lack of person-to-person networking opportunities.  It was totally hit & miss. Some thoughts (admittedly random):
   • Set up a tagging system in advance for attendees where they can tag both their involvments (what they work on), their experience, their attributes (who they work for, their title, etc.) and their interests for the conference.
   • Announce meeting locations (you could call them "A", "B", "C" or use some other naming system) so people could coordinate in advance to meet or coordinate during the event to meet. 
     Have the system make suggestions on who they should meet based on their tags in order to kick start the meeting process.
   • Set up "birds of a feather" sessions for 1/2 day based on the interest tags where people could gather to meet each other. Appoint moderaters who would announce ground rules, keep things going, get everyone to say who they are.
4. Similar to #3, I wanted a chance to talk to some of the speakers offline but I could never find them afterwards. Schedule a time and place where the speakers would be available after their talk for people who want to meet them.
5. I loved the laminated badges, EXCEPT!  It was almost impossible to figure out who was who.  Maybe use landscape format and for their name and company make the type
   REALLY BIG

   so that we don’t have to feel like we are staring a people or have them think we are staring at them to figure out who they are and what company they work for.

6. Have an area where vendors can exhibit using tables only, and don’t charge them much to be there ($500?) Have rules that disallow everything but computers, handouts, and swag (i.e. no booths, even desktop ones.)  Get them a wired connection. :)
7. Create a clear and obvious signal when the sessions will be restarting. I found myself many times in a break and not realizing that sessions had started again.

P.S. While writing the email I googled to find Chris’ post and instead came across Mike Monteiro’s rant entitled The Future of White Male Apps. I was going to leave a similar comment there as well, but stupid VOX evidently won’t let me leave a comment unless I have a membership, and when I "requested an invitation" it told me that I would get one "as soon as we have a spot available." Sheesh! And to think I previously got an invite, tried it, misunderstood how it was handling things, and then deleted the account!

UPDATE: Chris Messina saw this post and offered me an invite to VOX so I could comment on Mike Monteiro’s post. Thanks Chris!

blogs, conferences, diversity, events, people, web2.0