Some of you may be familiar with Quora, the new Q&A site created by two former Facebook employees a few months ago. It’s just reached the attention of the Wall Street Journal, which is a good intro to the pros and cons of the site.

Unlike Twitter with its 140-character limit, Quora allows for long-form discussions. Some questions draw responses that are equivalent to multiple white papers. I tend to favor brevity in my writings, but I’m not sure that’s a virtue in this case.

What is fascinating to me is that Quora is a look into the inner thinking of the technology elite of San Francisco and Silicon Valley area. Although participants are international -- as are many of the topics -- you can see that the race is on to build or extend personal brands via erudite contributions to Quora. Its system of allowing answers to be voted up or down adds to the sense of competition among the cognoscenti in that region.

Many of the questions are around topics related to startup companies. Some are very specific to existing successful companies and are often answered by the CEO’s themselves. Others get into the nitty-gritty of why one company succeeded while a similar one failed. The site is heavily weighted toward the technology industry, but I did see two long threads where the questioners were considering suicide and those responding were trying to intervene. General societal questions on issues like politics don’t seem to stir much interest; I suppose those have plenty of other good homes in the blogosphere. And, I don’t see too many wacko questions on there either. Quora has moderators, and it’s rather self-policing as well.

Read the rest of this post »

Reading Brooklyn-based Jordan Cooper’s blog post about market changes in seed stage valuations got me thinking about comparing his guidelines to what we might see in the South or more particularly Atlanta. He makes the point that an entrepreneur who strays too far outside these ranges is showing warning signs of bad judgment. But, there is some guesswork in the process, and in our region we are more prone to number crunching than buying into concepts.

I encourage you to read his full post, but I’m going to borrow his structure here for my purposes.

Read the rest of this post »

With this week disrupted by the Atlanta ice storm, I’ve spent time pondering how Americans are spending time on the Consumer Internet. (I'm no gamer, so that topic's not included here.) To me, we have four tiers of Internet aptitude: 

1) The uber plugged in users of all media who seem to understand how the various newest tools fit together and who can participate in them with credibility and erudition. I think of people like Robert Scoble (@scobleizer) at Rackspace, who makes his living on such expertise. It probably helps to be in one of the centers of the Consumer Internet like San Francisco or New York where personal interactions provide added comprehension of the latest offerings on the market.

2) The early adopters in other cities with plenty of knowledge workers and who are willing to experiment with new tools that come to their attention. I know many of our readers are on Twitter with some frequency, are checking in on Foursquare now and then, and may also now be moving over to the discussions on Quora. But, when I take informal surveys at investor meetings, I find very few hands raised when I name some of these products and ask who’s tried them. That helps explain our regional reluctance to invest in these opportunities.

3) The rest of us from all interests and all walks of life who are online and have at least used eBay, email, websites, Craigslist, Facebook, Amazon, and/or smart phone apps somewhere along the way. I don’t profess to have the statistics on this, but all ages and all types of individuals who have Internet access are being touched by these widely used tools and services.

4) Those who don’t have access or just don’t care. If you are reading this you take for granted your high-speed access and all the wonders that brings your way. You’ve forgotten what it’s like to dial up and work at modem speeds. You also can afford this access. Not everyone is geographically able or financially able to enjoy what to them would be a luxury. And, not everyone has communication gifts or a bent that would stir them to jump into an online experience that involves writing, thought, and interaction. There are millions of folks to whom the TV is an adequate form of all entertainment and knowledge.

Read the rest of this post »

It was a pleasure last week to hear Mike Eckert, new Executive Chairman of the Atlanta Technology Angels (ATA), speak to an angel group about his plans for ATA and his views regarding the local “ecosystem” for funding early stage companies. Eckert, former CEO of the Weather Channel and Pathfire, is an active investor and speaks from both experience and diligent examination of the topic at hand. ATA has invested quite a bit of money over its dozen-year history, but activity has slowed to a trickle in recent times. Eckert is working hard to re-energize ATA and to bring about better coordination with investing groups in the city and even in neighboring states.

A particular focus is defining what is “fundable” and communicating that to entrepreneurs. There appears to be strong interest at both the seed level and than again at the product with traction (revenue) level. A common theme across many investors I’ve talked with recently is that seed funding generally is available primarily for serial entrepreneurs. There’s not much enthusiasm for investing in OJT on how to start up a company. The gap between seed and traction seems to be reserved for friends and family.

More specifically, ATA classifies seed deals as investments of $100K or less, primarily local to Atlanta, preferably with an experienced entrepreneur and a thoughtful and relatively capital light plan targeting a potentially large market. The entrepreneur must be willing to accept fairly standardized ATA terms, have reasonable valuation expectations, and be receptive to help from ATA members with relevant expertise. The ATA’s next level of interest is basically a $200K minimum investment in a typical series A situation where the product is working, there is a paying customer (at least at the Beta level), two or more active managers are on board, and a growing market can be had. It is important to note that valuation is limited to $3M, and the life cycle of the investment is planned to be 3-5 years. (Many angels are currently locked into decade-old deals where the math is really working against the ROI, even if there is a ultimately a successful exit.)

Read the rest of this post »