During school, I struggled with what to do, what company to work for, what industry to be in.  I felt pressured and pushed in different directions.  I looked at a lot of interesting options.  Got six figure offers from big name companies.  But I never felt pulled towards something.

I needed that pull.  And then one day I realized I was in the rare position of being able to do something I love.

A quick background.  I grew up building stuff.   It started with electronic bulletin boards and became web sites. Started a web dev shop after college.  Coded and did management work at big sites like CNN.com and SI.com.  Got big corporate experience.

Then, I got an MBA.  While in school, I worked at a startup accelerator and at a venture capital firm.  I learned a ton and basically got a boot camp education on starting a technology business.

As graduation neared, I realized all my past experiences were taking me down an entrepreneurial path.  I just needed to follow it.  But doing so isn’t easy when you’re an MBA student watching your classmates take high-paying, cushy jobs (or so they thought). But the pull was too great.

It started casually enough.  In early March, David Sung and I cornered Lance one day in his office to talk ideas.  Lance sees a lot of startups and has a lot of ideas.  We suggested he start pursuing his ideas, planting seeds and seeing which ones grow.

One of those seeds was what we called Socialytics, a social media analytics application.  In April I did a bunch of market research.  Research said there was opportunity.  And so in May we decided to build a prototype.  I excitedly went into coding mode and had a working prototype built by the end of June.  It solved our original problem and showed the potential of what could come next.

In early July we demoed it to a few alpha users.  They gave us some positive feedback and direction.  We decided on a plan to move the project forward.  Development, market research and alpha testing continues.  It has great potential to turn into something big, but like all good opportunities, it is accompanied by a great deal of risk.

But the pull doesn’t care about risk.  It cares about passion.  The passion of building something new.  The passion of attacking a market opportunity.  The passion of challenging yourself to beat the odds and do something great.

These new changes are being driven by ATDC’s new boss, Stephen Fleming, who is reshaping the organization to meet the challenges of assisting startups in an age where it takes a weekend, $50 and a bunch of cloud services to build a new company.

We are all very excited and energized by these changes and are looking forward to better assisting Georgia’s entrepreneurs.

Yes, the new ATDC is open for business.

• 01 – Introduction
• 02 – 4 ways to fund a startup
• 03 – The venture equity cycle
• 04 – Picking the right investors
• 05 – Venture capital in the southeast
• 06 – Value drivers of a successful startup
• 07 – Other attractive elements of a startup
• 08 – Writing your business plan/presentation
• 09 – Seven deadly sins of business plans
• 10 – The VC meeting
• 11 – Developing your pitch