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. 

Welcome everyone to episode 31 of Five and Thrive and the last one of 2022. Outside of the Braves making major trade plays last week, there was some movement in the tech space as well which we’ll cover shortly but before we get there, we did want to highlight some valuable and insightful pieces of content that spoke the most to us from the investment perspective. Also, if you’re looking for a recap of all of Atlanta Ventures’ investments in 2022, we’ll link to the news portion of our website which goes through the year's investments and we’ll also link to the sign up page to our newsletter which Jacey Cadet sends out monthly on all the specific investments, news, and more. 

3 Pieces of Content We Really Like: I’m not putting out a listicle or Top 10 List. But since we started producing this podcast back in June, there are a few pieces of content that really resonated with us. We’re only offering 3 to enhance the gravity of the recommendations. 

The first one is TwentyVC where Martin Escobari of General Atlantic shares his wisdom and insight around why markets matter most, how to remain a disciplined investor, what they look for in due diligence and much more. I liked this interview because it was so normal. Martin makes his opinion clear on several topics and it all seems so cogent and well thought out. 

The second is an article coming from Mark Suster of Upfront VC titled: What does the post crash VC market look like? Mark wrote this in July of this year and there are some timeless themes put into actions specifically discipline and focus. Suster argues in times like these, there are only two things a VC firm can do: either go very big or get very focused. Upfront is does the latter. He walks through, with metrics, how they’ve kept their strategy consistent of writing checks early at an amount and price point in a very specific ballpark regardless of all of shifting and shiny objects out there in the macroeconomy. A good one to read.   

Our third is back to TwentyVC this time Harry Stebbings interviews Brian Singerman of Founders Fund. Brian is a pro’s pro and goes into a significant amount of information here including FoundersFund investing style, the overall mismatch in public vs. private markets right now. By the way, this was recorded in October of 2022. Brian also talks about how venture capital is investing in the best entrepreneurs building the best companies at the best possible price. Pretty simple, yet so hard. Worth a listen for sure. 

Market Opportunity To Watch: 

As y’all know, we love sparking startups out of the Atlanta Ventures’ Studio and markets are the biggest factor to success. One market opportunity we are excited about over the next 5-7 years is around solar panels and more specifically solar panel installations. As more and more consumers and businesses install solar panels due to either cost and energy savings, maybe with the help of government incentives as well, there will be an increased number of solar installers. Software will be needed to organize and streamline those services as demand increases. A market to watch for sure.  

Raise a Glass:

Lastly, as mentioned above, there were deals made into the final holiday hours of the year, maybe even one more between now and the new year but Qualytics out of Orlando went through the Engage program and just closed a $2.5M round led Tech Square Ventures, who’ve we’ve highlighted before on this podcast as well as Knoll Ventures — both firms out of Atlanta. Qualytics solves the massive problem of scattered and unorganized data within the organization. When this happens, even the smartest folks in the room are not informed enough to make meaningful, strategic decisions. Qualtyics helps companies manage data quality at scale. Imagine millions or billions of data points scattered across several applications, the opaqueness and confusion can compound quickly. Well done to Founder and CEO, Gorkem Sevinc on closing the round before the final bell of the year.  

Annnnd, that’s 5 minutes.

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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Atlanta Ventures News from the Year: 

https://www.atlantaventures.com/resources/news

https://www.atlantaventures.com/newsletter 

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3 Pieces of Content We Really Like:

Martin Escobari of General Atlantic on TwentyVC

Mark Suster of Upfront VC - What does the post-crash VC market look like?

Brian Singerman of FoundersFund on TwentyVC

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Market Opportunity to Watch: Solar Panel Installations and Installers

‍Raise a Glass: Qualytics Raises $2.5M