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. 

‍

Beta Product of the Week: This beta product of the week is called TabNam and is led by CEO  Daksh Gupta. Tabnam started as a class project at Georgia Tech back in 2021. In 2022 they were one of 6 finalists on PBS’ Inventure Prize and won the $100K 1st Prize Klaus Startup Challenge. They also went through Create-X Launch. They are revolutionizing how businesses talk to their customers with AI. Email feedback forms only have a 1% submission rate. With TabNam, customers reply 30x more with their AI Chatbot. If you’re interested and a retail/restaurant/consumer services business reach out to Daksh Gupta on LinkedIn today.

‍

Youtube Video of the Week: A few weeks ago, Brian Chesky, Co-founder and CEO of AirBnB gave an insightful interview at Stanford’s Business School. When I was listening to this, I still had to pinch myself. Youtube is not even 20 years old, still nascent in the timeline of education. Before this platform, information like this interview was behind the ivory towers of elite higher education. Now it’s available to the world for anyone who can make time. Alright now that I’m stepping off my soap, let me share three unique insights from the interview. 1st he share the best piece of advice he ever received which was to build something 100 people absolutely love. If you focus on 100 raving customers, and do it in a market that is vastly wide like travel, you can create a behemoth business. Second, take a look at your product today and what a 5 star experience would be, now let your mind take you to what a 10x experience would be. Brian goes through several examples for an AirBnB guest. Lastly, he answers difficult questions around AirBnB and how that affects affordability as well as the epidemic in America around loneliness. This interview is a must listen for anyone looking to build a product in a new market and get very in depth answers and stories to how Brian views the world. 

‍

Product of the Week: I came across this product from the Overline team and it is called SlipRobotics right here in Atlanta. The value prop: take dock loading hours and turn them into minutes. They have an innovative piece of hardware that provides quick and automated trailer loading and unloading. The forklifts and box crates are being streamlined. The company has 19 employees and has been around for a few years. Check out their explainer video from the link in the show notes.  

‍

Companies Worth Applying To: Atlanta startup PadSplit is the nation's largest co-living marketplace, helping to solve the affordable housing crisis - one room at a time. They do this by by creating safe, attractive, and respectable co-living environments. They are currently hiring including Miami, Dallas, and more. 

‍

Raise a Glass: This week it was announced that ketteQ, led by Mike Landry, raised $9M from Vocap Partners and Circadian Ventures. Founded in 2018, ketteQ is software that sits on top of either AWS or Salesforce.com and provides end-to-end visibility to make data-driven decisions. Their software creates dynamic models and scenario planning, allowing a broad range of customers to optimize their inventory, logistics, production, material and service parts operations. Customers today include Carrier, Trimble and Coca-Cola Bottlers of Japan. Congrats to Mike and team as they add more fuel to the tank. 

Annnnnnnd that’s 5 minutes! 

Beta Product of the Week: Tabnam

Youtube Video of the Week: Brian Chesky Interviewed at Stanford

Product of the Week: SlipRobotics

Companies Worth Applying To: PadSplit

Raise of the Week:ketteQ raises $9M