The city of Atlanta, and the Southeast generally, has been in need of more sophisticated seed stage capital. So I was thrilled to hear about the formation of Shotput Ventures. I don’t know a ton about the fund at this point, but the group’s site has the following description:
“We are a technology startup accelerator fund that focuses on capital-light web services companies and assists in the conception phase. We invest $5,000 per team and $5,000 per founder as part of a coordinated program that will have eight companies in the summer of 2009 in Atlanta.”
While I don’t know much more than that, I do know several of the fund’s partners well. All are impressive veterans of the Atlanta tech community - David Cummings is the founder and CEO of both Hannon Hill and Pardot and is an expert in building marketing automation solutions. Sanjay Parekh was the founder and CEO of Digital Envoy and is also the founder of Startup Riot and Startup Dinner, both important institutions in the Atlanta start-up community. Allen Graber founded Hypermart, and as a founder of Atlanta Technology Angels, has been an investor in several successful start-ups including Spi Dynamics and SearchIgnite. David Wright founded GameSpy which was later sold to IGN where he served as CTO. He moved to Atlanta from the Valley and founded JungleDisk which was recently sold to RackSpace. Wayt King was a founder and General Counsel at N2 Broadband which sold to Tandberg a few years back. Suleman Ali founded Esgut which sold to Social Gaming Network a few months back.
We wish them much success and look forward to working with them in 2009!
Stay tuned…
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Evan Kramer 01.16.09 at 8:51 am
I am so excited to hear about Shotput Ventures. Giving back to fellow Entrepeneurs is truly inspirational as it is part of the evolutionary gauntlet to success and mentoring. My only skepticism lies with experience. As an entrepeur myself several times over and also on the invesment end working at a venture arm of a large media conglomerate back in the boom of the Internet, we saw a lot “incubators” get established. Out of the incubation, it appeared that the Entrpeneurial spirit was not as challenged as the more traditional environment. With a few thousand dollars in a gunshot approach, an entrepeneur is merely an idea looking for validation. However, going through the experience of validating demand and fundraising with operations, employees, etc. the true spririt of entrepeneurism is tested.