Lisa
Welcome to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. I’m Lisa Calhoun, a founding general partner at Valor Ventures. And today we are talking to two amazing, currently active venture capital investors right here in Atlanta, Emery Waddell and Mike Becker of Vocap. Welcome to the program! Glad to have you both.
Mike Becker
Thanks, Lisa. Appreciate you having us on.
Emery Waddell
Yeah. Excited to talk about the Atlanta region.
Lisa
A lot of people know about Vocap, but even more, people don’t. So, share a little bit more about how long you’ve been in Atlanta and a little bit about the mission of the firm and what you like to invest in?
Mike Becker
Sure, yeah. Lisa, this is Mike Becker, happy to take that one. Vocap Partners was actually originally founded by my other Managing Director partner, Vinny Olmstead. I’ve known Vinny for, gosh, 9/10 years because I invested in Vinny. I got to know him as an operator and as an entrepreneur and became a huge fan of his. At the time, I was also an entrepreneur and operator and had co-founded another Atlanta-based technology startup with several other folks here in Atlanta. I was kind of in the trenches with him building a business. Around the 2009 time period, I exited the business that I was in and continued to work for the company that bought us. Vinny continued to grow and grow the business that I invested in, and eventually got it to a size and scale where he and one of the investors in that business, Pat Welsh decided to form Vocap. A couple of years after that, after I’d completely gotten out of the business that we had sold, they said, “Hey, let’s expand the fund, and let’s open up an Atlanta Office.” And so Vocap Partners were actually fully born at that point, we were Vocap ventures prior that then became Vocap partners. That was the beginning of 2014 and the beginning of our presence here in Atlanta. Emery joined our team about a year after that. We have offices, both here in Atlanta and down in Florida. Our focus, just very briefly, we’re early-stage technology-focused. We 100% pour our attention into software and software-enabled businesses. Most of what we’re investing in is business software. We tend to be, from an early stage perspective, we’re mostly series-A investors. You’ll find us occasionally doing a Series-C plus, but a lot of what we’re doing is series A investing. We do a little lower volume of deals than you’ll find some other VC funds do and that’s explicit because of the mandate when Vinny and I got really going with Vocap Partners. What we appreciate out of the VCs that invested in our businesses was when they actually took the time and effort to assist us, right? We all know certain things really well and other things we don’t know very well. As an operator and as an entrepreneur, I appreciate it when the people around my boardroom weren’t just somebody I reported to and gave information to, but actually jumped in and helped me out in the critical things that I needed. We structure our fund to be able to do that. At least we structure our funds so that we’re not sitting on 10 to 15 boards, and that we have both the time and the availability to really put a lot of energy into helping our companies grow.
Lisa
I know that founder-centricity is one of the things that I was first attracted to with Vocap when I met Emery a couple of years ago. Is there something behind the name that we should know in Atlanta? Does the name have a meaning or a secret code?
Mike Becker
Yeah, well, actually, it was pretty simple. When Pat and Vinny got the funding going, they sat around and decided what they were going to name it, it was actually Pat that said, “Well, Vinny Olmstead. Capital. VO. Cap. Vocap.” And that’s where the name came from.
Emery Waddell
Yeah, Vinny claims to this day that he wanted to name it L capital. But now L capital. I don’t know the reason behind that but here we are with Vocap.
Mike Becker
Yeah. And so Vocap ventures became Vocap partners when I joined. But the name originally comes from Vinny Olmstead, my partner.
Lisa
That’s great to hear that history. What do you guys love to invest in? Can you take through a couple of portfolio companies or the types of things that have attracted you in the past?
Mike Becker
I’d say we have a pretty tight focus on a couple of core areas. I’ll let Emery speak to the part of this, and I’ll hit part of that as well. But the three core themes that we focus our time on would be the future of work. Within that, I think productivity, intelligent workflow automation, learning and development upskilling, and rescaling predictive and prescription intelligence, creator enablement, supply chain optimization, are all core future of work and pushing things forward. The second theme that we focus a lot of time on is science itself. Both I and Vinny Olmstead come from marketing technology backgrounds in our own companies that we created. We believe our focus around the science of selling has two core pieces. Number one, we look for the companies that are innovating and we invest in them. But number two, by becoming experts on that, we can help all of our other companies and what they’re doing with marketing and sales. Science of selling as you know, that’s around sales and marketing, ad tech, customer relationship management, customer data platforms, eCommerce enablement, those are all core interests for us. The last transformation in healthcare. Emery, I don’t know if you want to kind of hit that one a little bit.
Emery Waddell
It’s no secret that healthcare has historically lagged as an industry vertical in terms of software adoption. There are good reasons for that. There are very reasonable regulations and security and in general inertia, but we believe that there’s a huge opportunity over the next 10 years to really bring it from a laggard to, in some ways, a leader in terms of the innovation that’s happening and delivering health care and the payer-provider administration. Some of these actually tie into the productivity side of what we’re talking about. Even the science of selling, as Mike mentioned, is a really good tie-in between all three of these buckets for us. You think about that digital front door for hospitals, and there’s very much a kind of revenue generation component to it. There’s a bunch of areas where we see interesting opportunities, and we collectively spent a lot of time in healthcare. It’s a vertical that we know well.
Mike Becker
Vinny’s background, he was a partner with Mercer on the healthcare side. And then Pat Welsh, who is our largest LP co-founder in the fund, was the founder of Welsh, Carson, Anderson & Stowe, which is a private equity group that has invested over 24 billion in healthcare and technology companies. We got a lot of background in that area and it is a core focus. Lisa, you asked about some examples. I’ll give you a couple on the future of work right here in Atlanta, we’re investors in Blue Ridge. Blue Ridge Global is a supply chain planning company. They’re focused on demand planning, supply planning, multi-echelon inventory optimization, pricing optimization. They have been a great success story right here and a strong growth company. More in the growth stage now, we invested in the early time period. Jim Burns is the CEO over there and has done a phenomenal job of building that. They really are innovating how things are planned, forecasted positioned, and bringing both the workflow automation and optimization, but also now with their neural network, and some of their machine learning kind of reinventing how a lot of this planning is done for distribution, specialty retail, and now, manufacturing as well.
Lisa
We sure learned we need a lot of that through the pandemic.
Mike Becker
The funny anecdote on that which I think we can all relate to in our pandemic lives. Distribution, they’re very heavy in food and beverage, and I’ll speak specifically to wine and spirits. If you go back to the beginning of the pandemic, distribution customers were heavily servicing, both retail, as well as the kind of restaurant bar segment. You can just imagine what happened at the beginning of the pandemic, right? All of that volume that was going through those bars and restaurants basically came to a screeching halt. But guess what we all did? We all went home and went to our local retail store and stocked up on wine and booze. Massive changes in the supply chain, right? Everything that was going in one direction shifted in another direction. That’s really the beauty of technology though is you can’t forecast a pandemic, but what you can do is optimize the supply chain and the reaction to it. And that’s Atlanta technology. I mean, that’s what’s going on with companies here in Atlanta. They are driving industries forward and really supporting core things that we all touch and enjoy every day.
Lisa
Yeah, that’s so true. That brings up a point of research. Emery and I talked about it briefly before. Last year, 2020, the National Venture Capital Association was compiling some research about how the deal flow is going across the country. One of the big surprises of 2020 I mean, no one was surprised that deal counts were dropping, no one was really surprised that impressions were shifting about what the future might look like. But the fact that the Southeast was the only region in the entire country that increased in its deal volume was a shocker, I think, to everybody but the southeast. I’m really curious about what you all think about the trends that are playing out right here in this region.
Emery Waddell
I’ll add something to that. Lisa. I was just perusing back through some data before we jumped on here. Sometimes, I think it’s helpful to zoom out even further and look where we’ve come from in the last 5 or 10 years as an ecosystem. Just to throw some directional numbers out, seed deals, series-a deals, and C plus call it growth type rounds of 25 million and up, all of those have doubled in terms of the annual pacing. Georgia-based VC funds being started have doubled per year. Over that time, non-Georgia funds investing in the region, specifically Atlanta, more than doubled in that time period. I think that’s pretty powerful when you zoom out and look at it that way. It’s funny it from the outside, I get this a fair amount, almost like this sense of Atlanta’s kind of an overnight success story in terms of the tech scene. And it’s kind of funny because if you’ve been on the ground level of this, this has been in the works for a long time. But I do think that it has, officially if you want to call it that, arrived on kind of the national and even international scene, it’s really exciting to see.
Mike Becker
I can reflect on that as an entrepreneur and as an investor. Because when Chris and I were starting our company, there were maybe three people in town you could talk to.
Lisa
Did you talk to all of them, Mike?
Mike Becker
Yeah, we did. If you look at it now, there are legitimately at least 15 that you can talk to and granted all of the funds and towns have a little bit of age and stage and focus differences. That’s just the people that are headquartered here, are based here, and have a physical presence here. The number of venture firms from either the Northeast, or Midwest, or the West, they’re going like, “I want to find Atlanta companies.” I mean, when we’re talking to those funds, everybody’s calling us saying, “Hey, do you see what’s going on? I keep hearing about Atlanta.” It’s really exciting to see. You could say it’s kind of counterintuitive. Lisa, you know I’ve been involved with venture Atlanta in the conference for a long time and a large part of my role is about attracting outside capital to Atlanta into Georgia and the surrounding region. And you’re like, “Well, why would you do that? Right, because you’re trying to put money into these companies.” But a rising tide lifts all boats. Investing into this ecosystem, whether you’re an entrepreneur, whether you’re an investor, whether you’re a service provider, if you invest in the ecosystem, you get paid back. Because everything grows. The first entrepreneur starts a great business, his middle managers get great ideas, and they sprinkle out and start new, great businesses. And Valor and Vocap capitals have great opportunities from there.
Lisa
I do think that it’s great to see our venture ecosystem grow. We have room for dozens, hundreds, literally more of insurance investors. For those VCs that are listening, the water’s great, y’all come. However, I will say I want to see the southeast up its game when it turns on things like public plans, being able to invest in the venture capital that they have in their backyard. And that’s something where I think we can play a more elevated game on the legislative side. That’s neither here nor there. I think it’s all part of the transformation of the ecosystem. One of the things that I really liked about the data trends that I was just talking about, too, is that our region was the only one that didn’t see massive inflation. We saw some inflation but not massive inflation and valuation. I think it’s really interesting to see our very livable environment here in the southeast. Good value for your lifestyle translates into high valuations, but not as high as you see right now in other regions.
Emery Waddell
I think that’s the key point there, Lisa. I think it’s worth unpacking a little bit. I think COVID has accelerated that in terms of the livability and the cost of living, especially when you see markets like San Francisco, like New York, where maybe you have a lot of really strong talent that had original ties to this region that, frankly, 5 or 10 years ago, the ecosystem looked a lot differently different than it is now in terms of opportunity. They moved to those places, and now they’re starting to keep their head back to what’s going on. They’re looking at that, and also not to mention the cost to build a business here. It’s a pretty attractive proposition. I think you’re seeing some of that. I don’t have data behind this, but I have a distinct feeling that the city is retaining a lot more of its university graduates, especially in the kind of tech arena than it used to. I think that’s a really key point.
Lisa
It’s a great point. Valor’s had an internship program for the last four years- spring and fall. We get some of the coolest talents, and then they get their jobs, and they go off generally to New York, and San Francisco, which is awesome. This last year, 2020, they did their internship, they got their job, and they stayed right there, that apartment that they were in. They may be working in a company based in San Francisco or New York, but they are still here, and they’re really not interested in leaving, and their employers now open the door to maybe you don’t have to leave. It’s a bit of a new world. Another to your point, Emery, quick story. I’m not going to call out the company name because I don’t know if they are headlining the story or not but we have one prodigal portfolio firm from fund one that was funded out of their local city, which was not Atlanta. In the seed round, Valor was involved as were other southeast investors, the company moved to New York to grow, and it got to a nice stage. This last year, they moved back. I think there is a lot of that going on. It’s not really in numbers, but it’s very much a kind of current reality.
Emery Waddell
Yeah, that’s a good thing. I mean these are seasoned people that have gotten really good experiences reentering the ecosystem. I think San Francisco will always be a major hub. Same with New York and others, but I think there’s room for others, too. And Atlanta is a prime example.
Lisa
I definitely do. Ecosystems can get arrogant. I think Atlanta is generally humble in nature, just like the whole southeast actually has a humility thing. But I look at London’s story over the last few years as they’ve gone through Brexit, as the financial capital of Europe. They no longer are, and a lot of that business has effectively moved most of it to Amsterdam. It does seem like it happened in the last year, there’s been a lot of talks, but the actual Exodus just happened. As great as San Francisco is, I do think that it’s possible to lose a mandate. It’s interesting to watch the development adventure in 2021. I’d be curious to know what kind of themes you are pursuing? What are you excited about in your backyard?
Mike Becker
Atlanta’s kind of developed its chops around FinTech and cyber. I think we then came on pretty strongly with what David did on the part outside and you know, their sales and kind of some of the major tech pieces that have come in. But I’m increasingly feeling like we’re a pretty well-rounded market at this point, Lisa. Instead of being a one or two-trick pony, where you go to Atlanta to see what’s going on in cyber, or you just go there to find out what’s going on at FinTech. I’ve already mentioned the supply chain. If I just take that kind of future of work category, I think we see a lot of different innovation going on that is across that spectrum. That is impacting that category “right here in our own backyard.” You may not knock on somebody’s door in New York and they go like, “Oh yeah, Atlanta.” And they are thinking of these other categories as somebody local. Again, I wouldn’t necessarily point to it as one specific thing. Emery, you may have some, but for me, you can find almost all of that innovation across the three themes that we’re focused on. Lisa, you can find it right here in Atlanta. We see great healthcare companies. We see great companies working in and around tech, and the science of selling, and we see great companies in the future work.
Emery Waddell
Anecdotally, you’re starting to see more and more breakouts that don’t fall into the classic categories. Cypress.io here is on a great tier, Flock Safety, Padsplit. I mean, these are models, and these are technology categories that are not historically strengths for Atlanta, but these companies are doing very well and start to become more and more name brands. It’s exciting to see diversification.
Mike Becker
And I think that’s supported by a number of different things. When you go back to that ecosystem comment, right? And you look at where we were 10 or 15 years ago in terms of just the infrastructure supporting things and where we are now, right? One floor down from us here is the ATDC and the ATDC has been going for 30 plus years and is still growing strong. That’s awesome to see. But when you start to look at all of the different innovation hubs for the major Fortune 500, what do we have like 13 here in Atlanta now? When you look at the fact that you can go to different areas of the city, you can go to Buckhead, and you can be in the Atlanta Tech Village, you can be down here in Midtown at ATDC, there’s a different kind of hubs of the technology community that have grown in all different areas of the city. Then you look at things like Techstars coming. I’ve been a Techstars mentor now, I guess this year if I do it again which I’m planning on, my fifth year. But you see a lot of those companies, you’ve heard TechStars, they’re bringing companies into Atlanta that aren’t Atlanta based in many cases. They look around and they’re like, wow. Look at the support systems, look at the quality of the mentors, look at what I’m able to connect into both on the enterprise business side and on the tech ecosystem. That wasn’t around five or 10 years ago.
Lisa
What would you say, differentiates Vocap in terms of maybe something you believe that a lot of other VCs that you find in our area wouldn’t believe? Or things that you do and platforms that you have that really add value for founders in a unique way?
Mike Becker
Emery, you can add to this. But I’ll go back to the comment I made earlier. One of our foundational pieces, when Vinny and I were getting Vocap started was just reflecting on our own experiences as entrepreneurs. Whether you’re a first-time entrepreneur or a serial entrepreneur, the simple reality is you have a base of knowledge and a skill set that you’re good at. Now you need to go build a company that has a much broader base of knowledge and skillsets than you have. And coming into that, as an entrepreneur, you often feel like you’re being asked to reinvent the wheel. You know you’re doing things that other people know how to do, and have done a bunch of times and can probably do more efficiently than you. But when you’re starting a company, you don’t have all those resources. You don’t have that full team. When I come back to why Vocap or what’s unique about what we’re doing, we’re certainly not the only venture firm that has operators as core partners that are a part of it. But we are, I think one of the few that really focuses our time, energy, and effort around being that party that can spend the time with an entrepreneur, and can help them with those gaps, either in their skill set, in their available time. If we have an entrepreneur who’s saying, “Hey, I’ve got a great product line, but I really haven’t scaled sales and marketing before. Can you help me think through that? Can you help me identify that first hire?” Right? Whether that be just getting my first ad up or whether that be getting my VP of sales in place. You’ll find us jumping in and helping with the interviewing. We do a lot with our blog and put out information. Do you want to see how we interview a VP of sales? Go to our blog and read that, right? You want to see when we’re doing an interview, and we’re getting around reference checking and how we think about reference checking, and how do you get past the fluff and understand if somebody’s real? Well, we’ve put that down in our blog as well.
Lisa
That kind of information is so priceless. As a former founder myself, but also working with our founders, it’s just those types of “this works.” You know, you can find your own way to do it. You can put your own spin on it, but this follows this basic line. It’s not rocket science. It’s business, it’s been around a few 1000 years, we use different tools. The basic processes and moves are fairly consistent. But it’s a mentorship process. You can go to business school, I did. I don’t know if y’all did. I think you probably did. But they don’t teach operations. It is a little bit more like a journey than work.
Mike Becker
That’s definitely true. You brought up mentorship and my view on that is, if Emery and I are doing our job, we’re both imparting the knowledge we have and we’re listening well. Because every one of our entrepreneurs teaches us something. The beautiful thing about being a VC, right is you get to act like you’re really smart, because you go work with a whole bunch of smart people, and they do something really great. You observe it, you go to your next entrepreneur and you say you might want to think about this, right?
Lisa
Time is definitely a key benefit of the job.
Mike Becker
It absolutely is. I think being able to combine the scars on our own back of what we did wrong, and helping people avoid those scars with what we see going right, and how those things are working. Again I think the key piece there, though, is you have to have the time to invest, right? If you’re not available, if you’re on 10 boards, if you’re going a million miles an hour on other things, you can’t really help that entrepreneur that much. We really try to put our money where our mouth is relative to investing the time.
Emery Waddell
And the one thing I’ll add to that, which is sort of an overarching comment, I think everything that Mike said rolls up into this. But Mike mentioned at the very beginning, we focused primarily on that series-a stage. These letters get confusing, and a lot of people mean different things when they say that, but what we mean is really kind of a post-product market fit where you’re starting to get repeatability in that go-to-market.
Lisa
I think most people get balled up on that, too. So let’s break it down even further. How did you know it when you found it? Let’s imagine. A lot of our listeners, their founders, and a lot of them have businesses. Every business that’s cash flowing is successful in my book. It’s just what type of success we are talking about. How scalable is it? So let’s break that down.
Emery Waddell
It’s a very tricky thing to pin down. I think there’s a lot of inputs, maybe proxies are the better way to frame it. But revenue is just one. It’s the quickest shorthand that is easiest to latch on to. But it’s just one. Other things that we look at, let’s say it’s a B2B bigger ticket size item, have you gotten one or more reps up to quota? And consistently productive? Do you have a system? You don’t have to have everything figured out? But can you plug somebody in and make them successful in that system?
Lisa
That is an underappreciated and such a critical point about being ready for growth. I just want to underline that. Can you plug a qualified person in? And get them up to quota because you’ve got the demand and the product at that point. That’s a really interesting place and so that’s where Vocap invests.
Emery Waddell
To finish that thread, where I was going with that is, we get up every day. We focus on that crank of growth, if you will, from the point where you think you’ve kind of got it clicking to let’s build a foundation to really hit hyper-scale. And that’s really where we are based on our collective experience. Mike, Vinny, and others on the team from the operating standpoint, but also the cross-pollination of what Mike alluded to, analogies, learnings from the different companies at that stage, we really do spend the time on that. The foundation for scale operationally is critical. It’s where we see a lot of companies go wrong at that stage.
Mike Becker
In revenue isn’t the perfect proxy, because we’ve all seen $5 million revenue companies who don’t have a lot of repeatability in what they’re doing. We’ve seen $1 million revenue companies that are very highly repeatable and are ready for that kind of “pour water over the top and grow.” Building a company is part art, part science, right? As you’re going through the initial finding of product-market fit, there’s a fair amount of art in that process, and trial and tribulation testing. As you start to get the beginnings of that product-market fit, you know what you’re selling, you know who you’re selling it to, and you’ve done it enough times that there is some flow to that, right? That’s where You really can bring science to bear. We try to help our entrepreneurs really think through that science project. And that science project hits in a couple of different areas, it might be how they think about where they’re investing their product resources and their engineering, and why they’re investing in there, and why that’s likely split to get the best return through to the sales and marketing side. As I like to quote my old partner, Chris, he was big on talking about walking the course backward, right? From a funnel perspective, you can think of that classic funnel-shaped piece. It’s like, “Alright, what do I need flowing on the top?” “Where do I need it in each part of my stage to get a certain predictable outcome at the bottom?” Taking an individual account executive and getting them up to quota is the first proof point that I can teach somebody to do what I as a founder have been doing, perhaps with a cult of personality in my Rolodex, right? Because the cult of personality Rolodex doesn’t scale?
Lisa
So true! Oh, my God. What you just said is a mouthful of truth. Mike, I want to have you lead even more into that. You know a lot about building that repeatable, scalable sales function. I mean, from series A or C to on, tell us some things you know, about making that work right. I mean, really pick anything, but if the conversation starts, what are some of the questions people miss in hiring their first really significant sales leader that’s not the CEO?
Mike Becker
Great question. I will tell you that that sales leader hire is one of the hardest ones, I’ve made mistakes doing it, or companies have made mistakes doing it.
Lisa
I’ve made these doing it. Yeah, it’s hard. It is legit hard.
Mike Becker
It is really hard. For those that want to see the interview questions I asked to try to identify that leader, there is Hiring A Kickass VP Sales on our blog, you can check that out. But to get specifically to your question around how you think through those pieces, let’s just talk about how you start it, right? You’re an entrepreneur, you’ve got an idea, you identify a pain point, you go out and have those exploratory kinds of customer discovery calls, you get to that you say, “Okay, I’ve got an MVP that is then translated into something I can actually sell and make money for.” Usually, at that point, the founder is the one who knows the industry, they know the space, they know the pain points, they’re good at waxing poetic, and they’ve gotten a few people early adopters that are believing in them. Great. You got revenue moving. What’s the difference between that and a repeatable machine? Well, a lot. You’re going from the cult of personality sale to a cookie factory is the way I would espouse it. Cookie factories have printing machines in specific shapes, and they stamp them out, and they stamp them out repeatedly. The exercise of going in between those things starts off with understanding that message. That core messaging. What am I saying that is getting people to take my phone call, take a meeting, actually take a look at my product, and ultimately adopt it.
Lisa
I love where you’re going. I like bringing out your expertise here. I think it’s gonna help a lot of our listeners, that core messaging, which is such a critical part of a repeatable sales process. A lot of times that gets outsourced or outsourced inside away from sales into outsourced marketing or a marketing department. There’s a lot of popular places to hide that baby. What do you think is most effective in the early growth stage where you are focused? Have you seen some things that have compelled you to think this works best?
Mike Becker
Well, look, I’d be remiss not to point out that the first thing you got to figure out is, to use the euphemism, your ICP, your ideal customer profile, because when you’re attacking his face, typically, most opportunities that entrepreneurs are chasing are pretty broad, right? There’s a lot of different areas you could go to. Usually, when you go through customer discovery, you talk to a lot of different people. You might find you talk to 100 people, five of them buy from you. But even within that five, you’ve got to identify who is the one who most needs what you do, and is going to be the quickest to adopt and the easiest to get up and going. Most entrepreneurs when they’re trying to scale to go from those initial sales to scaling, don’t spend enough time trying to understand where that ideal customer is and who that ideal customer is. If you spread yourself too thin, you’re going to waste a heck of a lot of time and you’re going to get really frustrated. Honing in on the ICP would be the first thing once you get that ideal customer profile. And yes, Lisa, you may have worked with outside marketing groups, and you might have somebody who’s running demand gen for you or doing some things because you can’t afford to hire full-time people, but you got to have 1) What’s my core message? 2)Who am I trying to get it too? Okay, once you’ve got there, as a founder, the first thing you need to do is sit down and grab a piece of paper. Every time you make a sale, write down what you did. What did you say? What are people responding best to, right? This is going from cult to personality to process, right? Because you have to science it yourself and understand what it is you’re doing so that you can teach somebody else to fish. Most entrepreneurs get so comfortable in what they’re doing, they don’t write things down. They don’t analyze the pieces that are working, right? They just feel very proud in themselves. Look at this, I can speak and somebody buys from me. Then they go hire an account executive and they say, go do this. And the account executive says, “Do what? What do you want me to do?”
Lisa
“The entire business again?”
Mike Becker
That’s exactly right. And that new account executive does not know your industry as well, most likely, right? Even if they know your industry well, they don’t know your product, they don’t know the pain point as well as you do. If you don’t document what you’re doing, and if you don’t analyze why it’s working for you, you’re going to have a really hard time teaching somebody else to fish. And look, you may be so good that it doesn’t matter for a while, right? Maybe you can get to a million in ARR. Maybe you get to 2 million in ARR, right? Maybe you got a ton of relationships in the enterprise and you can go get to 5 million in ARR like we just talked about right just off your own Rolodex. But ultimately, it will catch up to you. It’ll catch up to you and at that point if you haven’t really said, “What am I saying? Who am I sending it to? And why is it working?” And really documented that into and started to create what you know sales would call a playbook, you’re going to have a hard time teaching somebody else to do it.
Lisa
Those are some pearls of amazing wisdom. I’m looking at the time I know you guys have busy lives and are helping your entire portfolio. I want to be respectful and end on time. But before we go, any final thoughts for Atlanta founders who are listening to this wisdom? How can they get on the program with Vocap? The blog is wonderful. We’ll be sure to post the link in our notes, especially the specific one that you mentioned, but also the blog in general. Is there anything else our founders need to know for?
Mike Becker
I think and I’m going to just pay a compliment to Atlanta and the region here. One of the things and you said earlier, Lisa, that really resonates with me, you mentioned the word humble, right? This ecosystem collaborates. I have not found this to be the case in the northeast, we spent a fair amount of time up there, no offense to my friends up there. I have not found it to be as much as the case on the west coast. I think a lot of the ecosystem down here really wants to help each other and really wants to prop each other up. My main thing I would say to entrepreneurs is first off, there are over 15 funds based right here in town. Pretty easy to get to know and understand who they are, what they focus on, and why they focus on it. We have a phenomenal group of service providers here. We have multiple, both law firms, accounting firms, everybody else, those people know everybody, right? If you’re an entrepreneur, and you’re trying to build your business, you know it may be a little hard to get every VC in town to take your phone call but it’s not that hard to connect with a lot of the service providers. They have a lot of pearls of wisdom, whether you’re dealing with Nelson Mullins or Morris Manning or DLA on the legal side, whether you’re dealing with a lot of our great law firm accounting firms here in town. These folks not only help you with their specific expertise, but they know everybody in town, and they can help you get connected. Spend the time getting to know service providers, spend the time researching, and understanding the firms in town where they focus. You don’t need to call all 15, just look at our website to understand where we’re spending our time. I think the thing I would be remiss to point out is there are a lot of entrepreneurs that have created a lot of great businesses here in town. If you look at it, our unicorn club is growing. If you go all the way back to kind of ISS, but you got Airwatch, you got Witness and Radiants, and a lot of the early companies. Now you look at Calendly and what they’ve just accomplished. We got OneTrust, Greenlight, Pindrop. As an entrepreneur, get to know the middle tier of those companies. Those people have phenomenal networks. They’ve just seen scaling gone. And yet Kyle Porter can’t talk to everybody in town, right? He’s a busy guy. But he has a lot of people at SalesLoft that have a lot of wisdom on how to grow businesses. Get to know the middle tier there and those guys are going to be able to help you as well.
Emery Waddell
Just that there’s so much we didn’t even cover about our ecosystem. I was actually intending to bring up the whole entertainment side of Atlanta. I think there’s a really interesting potential merger and making up a word of those communities.
Lisa
See, that’s the thing, this ecosystem is growing so fast and early stage, of course, I believe that’s where the action is. Calendly, SalesLoft, Kabbage, those are 10 to 15 year overnight successes, as the founders will be happy to tell you. But you know, the Kabbage and the Calendly of the next 10 years. They’re sitting in early-stage portfolios, a lot of them. It’s really fun to continue the conversation with Vocap and have you back on the program in a few months and share what you’re learning and doing in the ecosystem.
Emery Waddell
We’re big fans of Valor, what you guys are doing and in addition to your Startup Runway and big fans of what you’re doing.
Mike Becker
Appreciate all the contributions you do to the ecosystem.
Lisa
Wow. Likewise, we’ll have you back soon.
Lisa
Thank you for listening to the Atlanta Startup Podcast. You know, we’re not just a podcast, we’re a community, and we’d love to see you at one of our digital or physical events, go to valor.VC and sign up for an event that makes sense for you. We have events for founders and the investors who back them. Another event you might enjoy is Startup Runway. The Startup Runway Foundation is a Valor organization that provides $10,000 grants to founders who are women or people of color building next-generation software products. Applications are free and we’d love to hear from you at startuprunway.org. And as always, thank you so much to the organizations that make this podcast possible. Not only Valor Ventures, but also Write2Market, a tech marketing and PR agency in Atlanta, Georgia, and the Startup Runway Foundation and Atlanta Tech Park Valley’s headquarters, and also headquarters for over 100 local entrepreneurs, building global businesses. See you next week. Please bookmark the podcast and join us.
