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. 

Products of the Week: This product of the week comes out of Charlotte, NC and it is called MakeMine. It has become increasingly difficult to manage supplychain especially if you are a popular Direct to Consumer brand or Wholesale brand. Keeping up with the emails, PDF’s, calls, and more with customers is overwhelming, not to mention the lack of visibility into where the product stands in the process. Well, MakeMine is a one-stop platform that allows brands to build, manage, and scale their supply chain without increasing operational overhead. This is done with MakeMine’s software which syncs products, onboards all your manufacturers, and monitors production cycles all in an effort to streamline efficiency.

I came across another fascinating product recently called Novel. We all know and likely spend time looking at short term videos via Instagram, Youtube, or TikTok. Well this company is bringing the experience of short-form, shopable video to the ecommerce world. Grant Kerwit is the co-Founder and COO and they have built a product that integrates into your Shopify store and allows you to connect with your Instagram, TikTok, or Youtube short to the front page of your website. This extends your content ROI, improves site conversion by 63%. They have freemium models and scales upwards from there. If you’re looking to leverage short-term 

Job Change Alert: Big news this week on the Gimme CEO front. After 8 years, Cory Hewett, Founder and CEO is transitioning from CEO. Long time friend and co-Founder, Evan Jareki taking the CEO reigns from this point on. Cory is pursuing new opportunities in electrification initiatives, emerging tech (like AI and computer vision), and community development. He’s looking to connect with companies and founders in those industries so reach out to him! LinkedIN is in bio. 

Congratulations to a great Cory on an amazing run and best of luck to Evan as he continues to push the business forward! 

Keynote of the Week: This past week, we had our first Atlanta AI Meetup with much success. One of the keynotes we highlighted came from Tomasz Tunguz of Theory Ventures. Some of the highlights include a Goldman Sachs report that AI will increase GDP 300x more than that PC. So the importance of AI and its projected impact is nothing to ignore. Then Tunguz goes into a compelling framework that had me contemplating several aspects to this iPhone-like innovation. The four areas of focus for startups include: layer, markets, moats, and AI depth. The layer revolves around how your AI startup approaches AI: is it an application, a platform, or infrastructure? Each one of these could be a whole presentation within itself. The second area of focus is the market. With all of the major players: Salesforce, Adobe, and Microsoft launching AI products weekly, time is of the essence. The third area of focus revolves around your moat and the competitive advantage one is able to create. Examples include access to proprietary data, a better algorithm, distribution (although that is tough against the incumbents). I believe an early MOAT can be around focus. There are so many applications and avenues that companies can take on AI, if you are the best at one thing and iterate on it better than anyone else, a tremendous advantage will be had. Lastly, the final area of focus revolves around the depth of technology you bring to the problem being solved. From plug-ins to agents to your model on top of other models, exploring the technical depth of an AI solution is essential to how disruptive a startup can be. There is going to be so much tire kicking with the latest AI plug-in or prompt over the next decade and we’ve already seen so much of it already, yet a product with strong technical depth in conjunction with a deep product-market fit, well that is where the real GDP gains will occur.    

Raise a Glass: Big news out of the Triangle from Teamworks led by Zach Maurdies. Teamworks is an enterprise SaaS provider for collegiate and professional sports organizations, has raised an oversubscribed $65M Series E funding round led by investment firm Dragoneer Investment Group. Congratulations on the raise the increased the fuel to go even faster!  

Annnnnnnd that’s 5 minutes! 

Product of the Week: MakeMine, BeNovel

Job Change Alert:  Cory Hewett of Gimme

Keynote of the Week: Four Questions for Startups Building in Generative AI - Tomaz Tunguz

Raise a Glass: Teamworks raises their Series E

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