Southeast VC

SEVC - Quick Recap

David and I spent the last 2 days at the Southeast Venture Conference. The 7th annual conference was in Charlotte for the first time. 

The conference was completely sold out and I was told there was a long waiting list. Anyone that attended yesterday's lunch and listened to the keynote by Bill McDermott, CEO at SAP can talk about how packed it was.

I was impressed with both the quality of the companies that presented and the number of investors there. I also liked the mix of investors. Lots of angels, but also VCs and PE from all over the country.

I met a bunch of new entrepreneurs at SEVC. This pulled out a number of Charlotte entrepreneurs that I haven't met yet. And of course, it was good to see a lot of familiar faces.

So, big thanks to Eric and Scott and the team at Tech Media for pulling it all together. I know these things take a lot of effort.

Southeast Venture Conference - Charlotte

We're looking forward to the 2 day Southeast Venture Conference, which will be held next week in  Charlotte. It is the first time Charlotte has hosted SEVC. I was in Charlotte yesterday for a few hours and there is definitely a good buzz going around about it.

If you haven't been to SEVC before, check out the agenda and speaker lineup. We've been active in trying to help out, inviting over 15 of the panelists.

This is one of my favorite conferences of the year and the guys at Tech Media always do a great job.

And if you're an entrepreneur and want to connect there next week, email me jason AT southcap.com.

Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Intel and Grotech Coming to Raleigh for Entrepreneurs' Series

Join us for Entrepreneurs' Series: Venture Outlook in Raleigh the morning of January 30th. 

Check out the lineup and to register here. 

Panelists include:

• Jed Carlson, President and Co-Founder, ReverbNation
• Brian Carney, Principal, Harbert
• Andy Dreyfuss, Piedmont Angel Network
• Mark Friedman, RTP Capital
• Collin Gutman, Partner, Acceleprise
• Dayna Grayson, Partner, NEA
• Scott Kupor, Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
• Mark McDowell, Partner and Co-Founder, Acta Wireless
• Don Rainey, General Partner, Grotech Ventures
• Mark Rostick, Director, Intel Capital

David and I have hosted Entrepreneurs' Series for years now. Topics have varied and we continue to get great feedback from attendees, so we keep doing them. 

If you have questions you think we should ask the panelists, let me know here in the comments section. 

Startup Summit

If you haven't registered for Startup Summit downtown Raleigh next week, this post will save you a little bit of money.

It is $95 to go and if you use "eseries", you will save 20%. 

Check out the list of speakers here. It is a loaded 2 day program with out of town national VCs, angel investors and successful entrepreneurs. 

This is the first year of Startup Summit. It is on the front end and in the same location of the well known Internet Summit which is also worth signing up for and attending. Internet Summit was definitely built to have a national feel. Meet and network at Internet Summit this year with 120+ speakers from companies like Microsoft, Twitter, Adobe, Google, ExactTarget, Cars.com and AOL. 

And some of our own portfolio companies are involved including ChannelAdvisor, BrightContext and ReverbNation.

I hope to see you at both Startup Summit and Internet Summit next week! It will be a fun week here in Raleigh.

WeddingWire Raises $25 Million

Congratulations to the team at WeddingWire. Two days ago, WeddingWire announced they raised $25 million from Spectrum Equity. 

We met Tim Chi CEO of WeddingWire at one of our Entrepreneurs' Breakfasts in Reston Virginia over 5 years ago now. We kept up a great relationship over the years and finally invested a little over a year ago. 

Recently they were named to the Inc 500 list.

The company is in Bethesda Maryland and their 150+ employees are moving by the end of the year into new space in Chevy Chase. 

And the company continues to hire. Check out their open positions here.

BrightContext

We announced our investment in Arlington, Va-based BrightContext. They provide a cloud based platform to filter and perform calculations on streams of data in-flight and they power real time data communication in apps. This is our third seed investment from Fund II and our fourth investment in the Mid-Atlantic region.

We've known John Funge and Leo Scott the two co-founders of BrightContext for over 5 years. John and Leo built two successful technology companies, both being acquired by larger public companies.

We originally met John at one of our Enrtrepreneurs' Breakfasts at Panera in Reston, Va. My partner David stayed close to John after that. Maybe even glued to him. Interestingly enough, it was the same breakfast we met Tim Chi, CEO of WeddingWire, another SCV portfolio company.

The company stayed in stealth mode for a bit, but launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last week in San Francisco. Check them out here.

 

 

 

So, congratulations to the team at BrightContext. We are a very proud investor.

Seed Capital

We hosted another Entrepreneurs' Series on Tuesday last week in Raleigh and we focused all of it on raising seed capital. With more new companies sprouting in the region, we are getting asked about sources of seed stage capital more frequently. 

So, we decided to tao our network to show just a few of the options available to entrepreneurs. We had almost 200 people register and had three panels:

- Accelerators

- Angels and angel groups

- Founder/CEO stories

We also included some out of town angels and accelerators to fly in from Northern Virginia, DC and Baltimore to participate. In total, we had 13 speakers.

To kick things off in the morning, we had Bob Young, co-founder and former CEO of Red Hat talk about raising capital. I couldn't think of a better person to do this than Bob. First, Red Hat is probably the most successful tech company in our region and Bob was the guy responsible for fund raising during the company's early days. Red Hat's funding came from angel investors, strategic investors (Compaq, IBM, Netscape, Novell, Oracle, SAP and Dell) and from VC firms Benchmark and Greylock.

For those that couldn't join us, check out Joe Procopio's summary. Thanks Joe! He lists out some of the key takeaways. 

Missed this one, but like to get on our list for a future invite? Go here.

Hackathon

I was one of three judges last Friday afternoon at the First Annual Automated Insights Hackathon. Thanks to their CEO/founder Robbie Allen for inviting me to participate. I really enjoyed the opportunity. 

As background on the format, their Hackathon started last Thursday at 10am and went to 5pm on Friday. They provided dinner on Thursday night and lunch for everyone on Friday.

Everyone in the company HAD to come up with 1-4 ideas and submit them before Thursday at 10am. At 10am on Thursday they wrote down all the ideas on a whiteboard. Each person got 30 seconds to describe their idea. At that point, everyone had to sign up for the idea(s) they wanted to work on. Each team had to have at least one developer and one non developer. No one could sign up for more than three ideas. 

The goal is to have a presentation ready for the panel of judges by 3pm on Friday. Live demos were encouraged.

On Friday afternoon our judging panel of three listened to about 12 four-minute pitches and ranked them on their overall idea, revenue potential and synergies with other products at Automated Insights.

I really like the idea of a company like this doing a Hackathon. From what I saw, here were some of the benefits:

1) Fresh ideas bubbled up. It got people out of the daily "grind," got the creative juices flowing and forced everyone to think of new ideas that benefit the company. I think it is a good forum for people that have been "sitting" on an idea for a while but for whatever reason haven't talked about it. It helped those ideas bubble up and showcased them in front of their peers and the management team. 

2) Enhanced presentation skills. I think it helps people work on their presentation skills. Presenters had to sell to everyone why their idea made sense - market size, how it impacts users, how it results in revenue, etc. So, not only were the teams presenting a demo, but they presented a real business case.

3) Built teamwork. People interacted on a team with others that they might not normall interact with. I saw people have fun and I think it encouraged teamwork.

I'd be curious to get other's opinions on hosting a hackathon like this. Have you tried it at your company? Has it worked well? What was the outcome? 

Entrepreneurs' Series

Thanks to everyone that came out last week for Entrepreneurs' Series in Raleigh. As always, we put out a survey afterwards and the feedback was over the top positive. 98.1% rated the content/speakers we had as "excellent" or "above average" on a scale of excellent/above average/average/below average/poor. 

We had a packed lineup including 10 speakers that included VCs from Boston, Palo Alto and DC. And we had founders/CEOs from five different companies share their tips on building companies and raising capital.

Founders that participated were from Maxpoint, Netsertive, Bluestripe Software and Windsor Circle. These were all the guys that were responsible for raising their first round of capital from firms like Madrona, Trinity, Greycroft, RRE and Valhalla. 

The morning was capped with the founders of Canvas On Demand offering advice on building a startup. The two were funny, always offer great tips and gave everyone that attended a $100 gift certificate to Canvas On Demand. 

We will continue to think of other topics for more events in the future. If you have topics you think we should host, let me know.

And if you'd like to be added to the list to get emails about future events, go here. 

RDU to SFO

Great news for the region!

An announcement was made today about a direct flight to/from Raleigh to San Francisco.

From this, I think we will see a boost to:

• west coast VCs being more willing to invest in NC
• west coast companies being more interested in buying startups here
• easier for companies in NC and west coast to partner

I've been hoping and talking about this ever since I became a VC 11+ years ago. It will help reduce the friction of west coast companies/firms working with NC-based ones.