Introduction: Welcome to Five & Thrive: a weekly podcast highlighting the Southeast’s most interesting news, entrepreneurs, and information of the week, all under 5 minutes. 

My name is Jon Birdsong and I’m with Atlanta Ventures. 

For those of you who need a five minute break from testing out ChatGPT, we have you covered for a few minutes.  

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Acquisitions in the Air: Just recently it was publicly announced that Radiance Solar, one of the largest commercial and industrial solar engineering, procurement and construction contractors in the Southeast was acquired by Bravo Infrastructure Group. Radiance was started in 2007 and had over 40 employees. CEO, Jamie Porges led the process and is planning to start his next big thing in solar. Keep an eye out for the product hitting the solar market soon. Congrats to Jamie and team. 

‍Companies Worth Applying To: A major announcement this week came from Joshua Silver, co-Founder of successful Atlanta company PatientCo which sold to private equity a few years ago. Josh has launched a new company called Rainforest that is hiring the first few employees including sales, marketing, and product managers. Rainforest allows you to grow revenue by embedding payments into your product - without ops and compliance headaches. Josh is a seasoned vet in the payments space and a company to give special attention to if you are looking to join something early with proven leadership and experience.   

‍Product Launch of the Week: We’ve covered the company XComms on here before, which sends company wide alerts to desktops and corporate computers. Oftentimes, emails and texts do not suffice when it comes to communicating imperative, time-sensitive information. XComms customers have thousands of employees and with the setup of a few alerts, can notify an entire organization instantly. Well, their new product is a piece of hardware that allows you to send that alert in with the click of one button. When I saw the product, I immediately thought of Mr. Burns from the Simpsons. All you need to do is press one button to notify a large organization of an important message. Well done to XComms pushing product!  

Another major feature launch in an existing product is the partnership with T-Mobile and the Bark phone. What a massive win for the Bark team! As a friendly reminder, Bark is a safe and secure phone built for kids that helps parents monitor content, manage screen time, set location alerts and much more. Now they have the power of T-Mobile behind their go-to-market efforts.  

‍Company Coming Up: Looping back around to the solar industry, this company coming up is one put on your solar powered radar and it’s called Wattch with two “t’s.” Wattch enables observability, intelligence, and control for any renewable energy system. So going back to Radiance Solar, all of the implementations they’ve done over the past several years could use Wattch to make sure the hardware is up to speed and maximum efficiency is generated from the implementation. Wattch is headquartered out of Atlanta was founded by Alex Nussey. As the solar installation market heats up, keep an eye on Wattch.

The second company coming up this week is out of Tampa led by Patrick Johnson and it’s called Vantage Sports. For all the folks out there with kids seeking to excel in sports, the moment you start, several bottlenecks present themselves. Let’s take for example, baseball, you’ve got to find a coach or assistant coach in the league your son is playing in and see if they’d be open to additional coaching and schedule it around their likely busy schedule. Well, Vantage Sports has created a marketplace of credible college athletes who have the time and flexibility to coach. Now there is a ready, qualified, and curated market of coaches set to provide the additional coaching and training needed to get the athletic scholarship we all want for our children.  

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 Annnnd, that’s 5 minutes.

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Thank you for listening to Five and Thrive. We provide 5 minutes of quality information, so you can thrive in the upcoming week. Please subscribe to the show and spread the good word! 

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Resources discussed in this episode:

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Acquisitions in the Air: Radiance Solar

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Product Launch of the Week: 

XComms

Bark & T-Mobile 

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Companies Worth Applying Too: Rainforest

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Company Coming Up: 

Wattch

Vantage Sports

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