Welcome to SL #39! In the spring of each year the StartupLounge crew packs up our studio and heads down to midtown Atlanta and records live on location at the ATDC’s yearly Entrepreneur Showcase event. This is always a wonderful event which features a new wave of graduating technology companies, and a new class of up and comers. This is our third year covering the event, and the energy this year was through the roof. Recorded live on-location at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Atlanta, May 29th, 2009.
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Shownotes:
Guests on this show included:
- Cindy Cheatham, ATDC
- Andy Ibbotson, Synthis
- Jonathan Goldman, Platform Technology Ventures (in addition to discussing Suniva and VentureLab, Jon addresses the rumor that is going around about Stephen Fleming’s choice of apparel in the office)
- Melanie Brandt, Technology Economic Development, Gwinnett County Chamber of Commerce. Melanie stops by to chat about CCP Games/EVE Online and the gaming initiatives happening in Gwinnett County. She also drops a clue about Asante Bradford’s recent trip to Korea to scope the gaming scene and do some recruiting.
- Bart Foster, SoloHealth (startup spun out of Ciba Vision/Novartis), joined briefly by Lance Weatherby (ATDC) – discussing SoloHealth, bootstrapping the company with involvement from customers and partners, fund raising in the current economy
- John Willis, CloudCamp , discussing CloudCamp, Amazon’s EC2 cloud solution, Twitpay, Hadoop, Erlang/Map Reduce, and Atlanta as a cloud market.
- Adam Wexler, Rank’em (new music startup coming out of University of Georgia), talks about Rank’em, as well as the challenges that UGA entrepreneurs face living an hour and a half from Atlanta, and often in the shadow of Georgia Tech, how he recruited a technical team to work with him (he isn’t a developer), placed second in UGA’s Top Entrepreneur competition,
- Jon Birdsong, another UGA grad and founder of Relate Media, talks about what is happening at UGA/Athens
- Jeff McConnell, Atlanta-based angel investor and one of the key members of AngelLounge – talks about the current angel investing landscape in Atlanta and the Southeast.
- Todd Merrill, Global Crypto Systems, talks about the progress of his company since joining the ATDC last June
- Charles Ross (Director, ATDC), reflects on the day’s events, and provides an update on the ATDC seed fund and the new GRA (Georgia Research Alliance) seed fund
- Chris Hanks (Director of the University of Georgia’s Entrepreneurship Program), talks about UGA’s Top Entrepreneur competition and the latest happenings in Athens
Miscellany:
Enjoy! To play it, use the tools at the top of this post – you can play it via the embedded Flash player by pressing the big play button at the top, or download it to play on your computer or MP3 player.
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Enjoy!
