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: Keyfactor, headquartered out of Independence, Ohio has a large and strong presence in Atlanta starting with their CEO Jordan Rackie and they are hiring. Keyfactor is hiring a remote sales manager among several roles. Keyfactor issues, manages, and protects machine identities across 1500+ businesses to ensure digital trust throughout every machine and transaction. We have put a link to their jobs.

Event of the Week: Mark your calendars for June 15th. Jim Stallings of PS27 out of Jacksonville is hosting the Black Founders Forum at the University of North Florida. It is a full day event with keynote speakers, a pitch competition, panels, networking and more. Who should attend? Investors, angels, African American entrepreneurs, and professional services providers as well. Jim and the PS27 team are top notch so mark your calendars today.  

Podcasts of the Week: If you are trying to wrap your head around AI and more specifically ChatGPT, Cal Newport, the author of Deep Work, has a fantastic episode on his Deep Questions podcast. Some of the questions asked and explored include:  How does ChatGPT work? (And should we worry about it?) Is there anything AI won’t do better than humans? How will AI end up disrupting knowledge work? Should I quit web development before AI eliminates the industry? Will AI create mass job loss in the next five years? The TLDR in all of these is no, it’s not coming for all of our jobs…at least for awhile. All of these questions and more are discussed and explored in this highly recommended podcast. We put the link in the show notes. 

Feature Launch of the Week: While some of the specific feature launches are less headline worthy, I love them. Here’s why, because these are the mini-milestones that lead to the headlines. It’s fun to highlight raises, exits, and events, but the day to day grind is demonstrated through mini-milestones and one of those include features launched. We covered FlowPath a few weeks ago and here they are again with a major product enhancement around mapping and layouts. As a quick reminder, FlowPath makes facilities management software simple and this enhancement now allows their customers to visualize their work orders and upload floor plans, images, and more to create detailed maps of their facilities. Check out the extensive blog post with product demo in the show notes.  

Raise a Glass: We have two of them this week out of the Carolinas. The first comes out of Greenville, South Carolina with the company called ScopeStack led by COO Andy Vanasse and CEO Jon Scott. Cultivation Capital, co-founded by Cliff Holekamp, led the $1.5M round. ScopeStack was founded in 2018 and ScopeStack provides a B2B platform that manages scoping and pricing for IT services. Likely a company hiring very soon as well. Congratulations to all involved on the next chapter of the story. 

The next raise of the week comes out of the Raleigh-Durham triangle with Levitate raising $14M in their Series C. This round was led by Bull City Venture Partners. Levitate is a communications platform that streamlines anything from email, texting, calendars, notes, and more into one platform to manage it all. They have 4000 customers and $10M in ARR. Congrats to founder, Jesse Lipson on the next phase of the business.  

Annnnnd that’s five minutes!

Companies Worth Applying To: Keyfactor 

Event of the Week: Black Founders Forum

Podcast of the Week: Cal Newport’s Deep Questions: Thoughts on ChatGPT

Product Feature Launch of the Week: FlowPath’s Mapping and Building Layouts

Raise of the Week: ScopeStack, Levitate

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