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.

Companies Worth Applying To: The market is on fire with Greenzie, an Atlanta Ventures company. Greenzie adds autonomous operation to commercial zero-turn mowers which reduces labor costs, increases productivity, and enhances safety. Clients range from universities like Texas A&M, Georgia Southern University, and Purdue to traditional lawn maintenance crews. They are hiring two business development reps. If you are, or you know someone self-starting and eager to drive revenue, apply right now - the job description is in the link below! 

Another company hiring today is Intown Golf Club. There are two roles open and these roles do not avail themselves often. First is an Operations Manager of Interior Design. This role is responsible for overseeing the day-to-day operations of the design team and ensuring the team runs smoothly and efficiently. It will include working with leadership to negotiate, buy, and store all the interior design assets and collateral. The other role at Intown Golf Club is a Development Associate. This role will assist the Development leadership on building out new locations and ensure all existing locations are up to the IGC standards. 

Company Coming Up: This company coming up is out of Raleigh-Durham and is called ResultId. Continuing on the AI theme from last week, ResultId works with companies to leverage their proprietary data by applying AI to it and generating insights that would take a data scientist weeks. The data they focus on ranges from product data, to customers success data, to research data. Insights from their analysis help craft narratives so you can build, market, and sell better. And I just love how they have the domain name resulted.com (as it sounds) but then redirects to their company name which is spelled as ResultId

Podcasts of the Week:  The podcast of the week comes from YCombinator titled How to Build An MVP with Michael Seibel. This podcast is only 17 minutes long but it succinctly describes the iterative process required to build an MVP. It reminds much of how much a different skill uncovering a market niche, building a first prototype, gaining your first 100 raving customers and iterating on the process is so much different than operating a business post product market fit on towards scale. MVP’s don’t start with customer surveys or market research. They start with one raving fan, then another, and then another, and it’s way better to have 100 people who crave your product than 1000 who are lukewarm fans. If you are thinking about starting a company or building a product or community, this is a must listen to.

Blog Post of the Week: Jason Cohen, aka A Smart Bear, published a banger of a blog post titled “Excuse me, is there a problem?” He wrote around 8000 words about how to dissect a problem you’ve uncovered from a business perspective. He brings in TAM equations, flow charts, and qualifications and more. I can’t recommend this post enough and quite frankly, I’m still digesting it. We put the link in the show notes.   

New Fund Announcement: Big news coming out of Atlanta, Dallas, and New York this week. Braemont Capital closed their inaugural fund with $525M of committed capital. Well done for the team and their Managing Partner, Robert Covington, and local leader, Beau Allen. Braemont invests in technology and software companies across the country. We covered a deal they did not too long ago with Orlando based RedTeam software acquiring Nashville-based Paskr.

Raise of the Week: Three Emory graduates are building Axle, the API for insurance companies and they just closed a $4M round. They are taking the playbook from Plaid – which was also co-founded by an Emory alum – and running with it in the insurance space. Imagine a user connecting their insurance account through Axle and immediately seeing if someone is up-to-date and to the extent of the insured. Before Axle, fleet managers, lenders, and gig services relied on legacy systems, paper, and long phone calls to verify personal insurance information. Today, it’s one simple API call. Congrats to the team on their raise and success out of  YCombinator! 

Annnnnd that’s five minutes!

Companies Worth Applying To: Greenzie and Intown Golf Club

Product of the Week: ResultId

Podcast of the Week: How to Build an MVP with Michael Seibel

Blog Post of the Week: Excuse me, is there a problem? 

New Fund Annoucement: Braemont Capital

Raise of the Week: Axle, a Universal API for Insurance

‍