Techstars Demo Day always promises high production value, and as one of the many events on Day One of Atlanta Innovation Week, it did not disappoint. From polished remarks by the Techstars team to the resonant pitches from all 10 founders in the cohort, the show was smooth and easy to consume for the traditionally frenetic crowd of investors, mentors and startup enthusiasts.

Payvmnt — Solving last mile delivery providers’ last mile problem by building the most accurate maps and routes.

Varkn — Simplifying parking at the airport by connecting airport passengers to their fleet of on-demand valet drivers and affordable parking facilities with the goal of providing a park and retrieve from terminal parking service.

My Panda — Empowers busy and ambitious women by helping them delegate tasks to a community of trusted assistants from within their hyper-local community.

Personal note: 😄 their tagline, “Liberation through Delegation.”

Illoominus — With the adage, “you can’t improve what you don’t measure,” Illoominus is bringing data analytics to DEI officers everywhere.

Metric Mate — Brings more accountability to everyone’s fitness journey by transforming strength training equipment into SMART equipment that allow users to automatically count reps & sets.

Cookonnect — Make family meals more about family by connecting them with personal chefs while providing chefs with back office applications to run their business.

Reveler — Connecting sports fans to their tribes at bars & restaurants — creating stadium-like social game experiences.

Medsembly — Digital mentorship-driven career resource tool for students pursuing careers in the healthcare industry starting with physician assistants and expanding to nurses.

Whirl — A dating platform that harnesses the power of friends to vet potential dates.

Palmly — Matchmaking app for people and churches.

I had been working with little to no rest since 2010, the year I came back from a depression episode that sidelined me for 15 months. Even if the pandemic had not happened, I was burnt out.

I broke my no-asshole rule one time too many. Years of working alongside demanding, and sometimes narcissistic personalities at a break-neck pace had taken its toll.

I took a step back from the rat race in January with no urgency or desire to hop on to the next thing despite overtures. I decided to give myself a break. This was unfamiliar territory for me.

With the exception of organizing TEDxAtlanta in Q1, I spent time on me — improved my craft with courses from Pavilion, read a bunch of books that I had been putting off, visited galleries, museums, enjoyed live music, and even took to gardening.

I reconnected with the startup ecosystem and coached some excellent founders like Rejoice Jones and Dalero Berkeley who participated in the Atlanta Tech Village pre-seed accelerator. I also spent quality time with Sid Mookerji and Karen Robinson Cope when we served as judges at a TIE pitch competition.

In June, everything changed.

I was introduced, serendipitously, to a startup from Techstars Los Angeles who was conducting customer discovery calls. The concept that Liquid CEO Saujin Yi was building her company around was commercially exciting. And, the purpose was uncannily aligned with my values system. It wasn’t long before I began formally consulting with them and got to know the rest of the predominantly female team. In September, I joined Liquid as their CMO.

Today, we usher in the next phase in the company’s journey with a new website and a bold mission to power ONE Million liquid businesses: Agile businesses that thrive using a global network of vendors, freelancers and suppliers in addition to their full-time employees.

We believe that agile businesses are the key to making work fit the needs of everyone and every business. And as the ranks of agile businesses grow, so will opportunities for the people who want to do good work for more than one business at a time and want the choice and control over how and where they work.

Liquid is building what we believe will be the operating system for agile businesses.

To start, we’re streamlining the way a business’ finance, operations and talent management teams work with its vendor and supplier networks. The Liquid platform simplifies contracting and global payments while ensuring financial controls and compliance. Our customers reduce the volume of emails in the contracting process by 75% and save finance and ops teams dozens of hours each month of invoicing and payment admin.

The next 12 months will be exciting as we put this latest round of capital to use on our product roadmap and getting more businesses to #GoLiquid.

I will remain in Atlanta where we will build our East Coast operations. If you know an agile business that wants to get more done, or if you want to help create a liquid world, connect with me and check out https://www.goliquid.io

Life-long Civil Servants

My heart goes out to former Ambassador Yovanovitch who has to relive her experience of being bullied, threatened, and her reputation smeared.

It is reminiscent of someone who tries to do the right thing in the workplace, following policy and living up to the company’s values only to learn bit by bit that their CEO is a person of little integrity. And the company VPs are all in on the corruption.

If you aren’t paying attention to the hearings and/or dismissing it as political theater to pay attention to the witnesses and their testimony. Then place yourself in their shoes but put it in a workplace context to make it real.

Would you still think the hearings are partisan-driven? Would you continue to vote in those lawmakers who maintain that America’s interests are being served to this administration’s best abilities according to the laws of this country?

Before you comment, please try to put party affiliations on hold, read, watch and evaluate without parroting CNN or Fox or any other 3rd party.

I’ve always been a proponent of making my passion also my vocation and I’ve been fortunate in my career to be able to do just that. Making something from nothing is never easy. Finding true product/market fit is tricky. But it has been invigorating being around startups teams and being a part of them. Every new day brings new challenges, each month its trials and tribulations. Entrepreneurial environments are where I thrive.

So why am I leaving all this behind to join a relatively mature company?

Avertium is special. The company and was founded when growth equity fund Sunstone Partners acquired and merged three award-winning cybersecurity consulting services companies into one Avertium earlier this year. The founding companies have been operating exclusively in the cybersecurity consulting and managed detection and response space for 20 years but the entity that is Avertium is new.

The opportunity to be at the forefront of melding of three cultures, affecting positive change and contributing to the protection of the most important assets of our generation: Consumer and corporate data, was hard to resist. And, my peers on the executive team are talented, passionate and above all else, individuals of integrity and character. I am honored to work alongside them.

The incumbent marketing team is small but tenacious. It’s been a pleasure working with them as they usher in a new chapter in their respective careers. Together, we will provide the relatively under-served mid-sized companies with content that will help them improve their company’s security posture, by connecting them with each other and by sharing best security practices.

As I enter into this new chapter in my career, I do plan on staying connected to the innovation ecosystem through TEDxAtlanta and its umbrella non-profit organization, Ideas into Action. As I contemplate the bridges to be built between cybersecurity, the startup ecosystem and the global TEDx community, your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Still in the throes of developing your product? Busy fulfilling promises made to beta customers? Then paying attention to the agreement sent to you by your marketing freelancer or creative agency for that new corporate website or that new logo is the last thing on your mind, right? Big mistake.

Unlike outsourcing product development efforts, most entrepreneurs don’t pay too much attention to contract terms like ownership rights and copyright laws when outsourcing their design projects. The general assumption is that their company would have full ownership rights to all designs and design files created since these are “paid for.” The truth is a little more complicated.

Works Made for Hire

An entrepreneur, we’ll call him Al, signed an agreement with a visual design agency for what is known in the business as a visual identity package and a corporate website designed on Wordpress. He assumed that his company would own all project deliverables: Wordpress theme, logo file, business card vector files, letterhead and presentation template files, etc. But what he didn’t notice in the contract was that the agency specifically outlined that works created by the agency were not “works made for hire.” Additionally, the contract also outlined that works created by the agency was licensed to the company for use in perpetuity but only in its original form.

What did this mean?

Quite simply, Al’s startup did not own the works created nor could he make changes to the works without notifying the agency, who as the sole owner of the work, was the only party able to make changes.

Al could use the website theme, logo, business card files, etc. but every time a new employee was hired and new business cards needed to be printed for that employee, Al had to pay this agency $100 (their hourly rate and hourly was their smallest incremental invoicing rate) to add the name and title to the business card file. The agency was the only entity that could make layout and design changes to the theme at $100 for design and $150 per hour for CSS or code changes.

Al could have full ownership rights but for a price. Al basically had to pay twice for the work or keep paying the agency’s rates. The only way for Al to get out of “agency jail” was to buy the copyrights to the work.

How to Stay Clear of Copyright Jail

This may not seem like a legal way for a freelancer or agency to conduct business. But it is. It may not be ethical but it is perfectly legal. To ensure that you don’t find yourself in Al’s shoes, here’s how to get yourself up to speed so that you can ask the right questions of your agency to be and/or your attorney next time you have to review a contract when outsourcing a design project.

Here’s an excerpt from the circular from the U.S. Copyright Office defining what is Works Made for Hire. The full circular can be found here.

Section 101 of the Copyright Act (title 17 of the U.S. Code) defines a “work made for hire” in two parts:

a. a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment

or

b. a work specially ordered or commissioned for use

1. as a contribution to a collective work,

2. as a part of a motion picture or other audiovisual work,

3. as a translation,

4. as a supplementary work,

5. as a compilation,

6. as an instructional text,

7. as a test,

8. as answer material for a test, or

9. as an atlas,

if the parties expressly agree in a written instrument signed by them that the work shall be considered a work made for hire.

Also helpful is LegalZoom’s suggested agreement for Works Made for Hire projects. This must not replace consultation with your legal counsel but it is helpful in helping start a conversation with your attorney.

Building a startup is a team sport. The single biggest mistake a founder can make is to try to go at it alone. The second biggest mistake is picking the wrong team. Industry research firm CB Insights’ postmortem of failed startups lists this as the #2 reason for failure.

So what do you do if you find yourself in the position of choosing a co-founder or first employee(s)?

Reading books like Jim Collins’ “Good to Great” help. Advice like “surround yourself with the best people” and “get the right people on the bus” sounds good but frustratingly abstract. Here’s another way to look at it.

If you are evaluating more than one person for a role, say a technical lead or a business lead, and all are fairly evenly qualified, don’t automatically select the one most functionally proficient or who agrees with you. Be sure to take the candidates’ values into consideration. Do they align with yours?

There was once a startup with three co-founders. All three were talented in their respective functional areas. They were college mates and decided to launch the startup together after spending time in Corporate America. Two had equal equity positions and the third a slightly smaller stake. Things were moving along. There were the usual startup bumps but nothing too catastrophic.

Of the three, two were more fiscally conservative than the third. These two also possessed lower risk thresholds. When things were going well, these two went along with some of the practices considered unusual for a cash flow negative startup. The company had a policy of automatically upgrading everyone to the latest laptops, tablets and phones whenever a new model was introduced, the rental of a luxury vehicles for every sales call road trip was also standard operating procedure and there was a company-paid social every other month.

Then the company hit a major roadblock. A decision made by the team did not pan out as planned impacting revenue. The less fiscally conservative of the three, who also had a higher risk tolerance, was sure that the set-back was temporary and that continuing business as usual was critical to maintaining culture and engagement. This caused strife among the founders which bled into the employee ranks and morale suffered. Performance suffered and the investors took notice. Things went quickly downhill.

The fallout wasn’t just layoffs, investors brought in new leadership and the three no longer are friends. Had the three shared similar values, and communicated openly about concerns, the company could have weathered the set-back more productively and things could have turned out differently.

Bottom line: when interviewing co-founder candidates be sure their values are aligned with yours. Getting the job done matters. But how a job gets done can mean success or failure when things are not going well.

A SaaS startup in town hit $1 million in annual recurring revenue — often considered a significant revenue milestone for startups with a SaaS offering — and threw a party to celebrate with employees, investors and friends of the company. The party was held at a popular , in this case a microbrewery and the 150 or so guests had a great time. Seems normal enough, right?

Well, the act of celebration drew criticism from certain prominent members of the startup community. Their beef? Some said this celebration was unnecessary and made the startup seem provincial. Others didn’t see the significance of celebrating this revenue milestone making the comparison with the sale of enterprise software licenses which in the 1990s and early 2000s could run in the seven-digits. Yet others thought it a waste of funds.

Having worked with founders of SaaS startups and having had to make enterprise software sales in the early 2000s, I offer a different point of view.

The economics of software has changed tremendously in the last 12 years. While it is much easier to “set-up shop,” meeting buyer expectations of being able to subscribe on a month-to-month basis makes it much harder achieve $1M ARR. For startups with offerings that are priced in the hundreds of dollars per month, this revenue target is even more daunting. But hitting it would imply that a startup has worked through product and operational issues and is ready to scale. The implied expectation is that the next $1 million in ARR would be reached in a shorter time than it took to reach the first.

So, yes, it is absolutely necessary to celebrate milestones. Even if simply for employee morale because milestones are just markers along the way to fulfilling the company’s vision. It would behoove founders to understand that it takes a motivated team willing to walk through fire together to get to the next one.

But the expense to be applied to a celebration is one for debate. While I haven’t witnessed anything rivaling the over-indulgent parties of the late 1990s, what are parameters for the scale of celebration?

Academic Achievements Over All

Its been 5 days since my arrival in the island nation of Singapore and the country of my birth. I have reconnected with my family, friends and met new acquaintances from the startup community here.

In my conversations with friends from high school and junior college, the topic would inevitably turn to education, academic achievement and more specifically their kids’ grades in relation to career and a “good future.” While my friends in America, for the most part, don’t ascribe to the “give the kid a trophy for showing up” philosophy, some come really close to the classic definition of helicopter parent. But they don’t quite discuss their children’s academic and hence socio-economic success with as much intensity nor do they seem to participate as personally in their kids’ education.

Kindergartners are routinely enrolled in tutoring sessions. It isn’t uncommon for grade schoolers to be engaged in one-on-one tutoring sessions 3 to 4 times weekly including weekends. And, at the tender age of 12, children are “streamed” into programs that will determine their academic fate.

Curiously, there is a recognition that the sole focus on grades by parents and the educational system is not healthy. Parents and administrators alike — the very people who help create this pressure-bound environment — cite the prevalence of suicide by students in countries like Korea, India and China that stress academic success over all else. And in hush tones, parents share the tragic incidences of suicide by local children who just can’t cope with the pressure. But still the environment persists and that, in my opinion, the greater tragedy.

Here’s a related TEDx Talk on motivation and learning:

I met a self-described “global marketer,” I’ll call him “Bob,” recently at a hackathon and our conversation turned to one of the ideas/projects that had placed in the top three spots at that hackathon. The problem that the project, we’ll call it “E,” would address is facilitating better conferences that offer multi-track content.

Basic idea: Project E would gather data about the attendees’ movement at the conference and analyze that data to optimize the conference experience. A tag would be attached to each attendee name badge and these would be read by units placed throughout the conference. Each tag would be associated with their respective attendee’s profile. Each attendee’s movement would be trackable.

The assumptions:

1. Attendees who leave sessions prematurely are doing so because of a poor speaker.
2. The number of attendees participating in a particular track is an indication to the organizers of that track’s resonance.
3. The data collected can be used to make event logistics decisions.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the use of geolocation data to inform programming decisions, making data-driven decisions to organize better conferences seemed like a reasonable idea.

The Issue: But what Bob and I could not agree on was how much disclosure to provide the attendees. Collecting uniquely identifiable information and pairing those with the movement of paying customers, seemed intrusive without transparency and full disclosure. Bob’s position was to include disclosure in the terms and conditions i.e. the fine print “just like they do in software” because “nobody reads those anyway.”

How prevalent is this mindset among marketers? Is it ethical to “inform” a paid customer of the data you are collecting on them in a non-transparent way?