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The Atlantic magazine is doing a great set of features on startup companies in the Southern US. This Tuesday they came through Atlanta and Sarah Rich and Alexis Madrigal got to meet with a bunch of the movers and shakers of the Atlanta startup community. Here is the first of Alexis’s stories on the topic, titled “A Visual Guide to Atlanta’s Startup Scene”

He was also kind enough to tweet out the names of a few companies he got to talk to and who he’ll be profiling in the coming days for The Atlantic’s website. For those of you who want a sneak peak, you can go straight to the companies’ websites and get a feel for what it is they offer.

We&Co
N4MD (pronounced informed)
Leading Spaces
TripLingo (if you’re in Atlanta, care about startups, and HAVEN’T heard of this company, you may want to re-evaluate how you’re going about following the scene)
Scholr.ly
RappidApp
Wynsum Arts

I don’t know people at all these companies, hell I probably don’t know people at MOST of them, but they’re helping propagate the Atlanta startup culture and for that I applaud them.

Happy exploring!

In certain small circles patents have started to lose their appeal and are instead being viewed as a detriment to innovation. This has been going on for a couple years now and some in the tech industry like Brad Feld have really been leading the charge.

This American Life just did a great hour-long program on this called When Patents Attack! that covers the shady world of companies who horde patents for the sole purpose of bringing lawsuits. The main focus is Intellectual Ventures, likely the biggest patent troll out there and headed by former Microsoft exec Nathan Myhrvold, and their collection of hundreds of shell companies used to hide ownership and bring lawsuits.

You can get the program through the link above, through iTunes, or read a full transcript if audio isn’t your thing.

If you don’t think that the patent system has been perverted into a business killer, please take an hour to digest this report. It’s disgusting to think what has happened to a system that was initially created to promote innovation.

And you know that awesome new Spotify service everyone has been talking about since they launched in the US last month? Now they’re feeling the full brunt of the patent troll too.

ATDC, Atlanta’s best startup resource, could have been in some trouble after some restructuring that happened lately.

Lance Weatherby left to go be in charge of sales and BD at Half Off Depot.

Keith McGreggor went across the hall to go lead Georgia Tech’s VentureLab (which is a great program that has a terrible web presence so I won’t like it here.)

What’s a startup accelerator to do when you start losing catalysts? You go out and get some awesome Entrepreneurs in Residence. The new EIRs are Jamie Bardin, Tim Dorr, Hezi Moore and Blake Patton.

I don’t know much about Hezi and Blake outside of their bios in the link, but I do know Tim and Jamie to different degrees. I’ve seen Tim around at a number of the startup events and hackathons in Atlanta and he’s always a huge help to anyone who needs it. It’s a great fit for someone who is already so plugged in to the community and is generous with his time and knowledge.

Jamie actually hired me in to the job I have now and was one of the big reasons I accepted the position. Now he’s in a great position to help other people, and anyone who is lucky enough to work with him is going to be very happy.

I struggle to find much worth a damn in this infographic put together by Ron Conway.

65% of >$500M exits (or “potential exits” as though that’s a reliable measure) were from founders < 30 years old. How about telling us what percentage of the 300 respondents were founders < 30 years old? If 75% of the people in the survey were young then the actual takeaway from the data is the opposite of what is displayed here.

How about average or median returns for age profiles? How about a spread of what the exits were as well as the percentage of crash-and-burn companies.

Or, God forbid, how about just a simple “If you had invested in each of these companies at their first round valuations, here is what your return would’ve been” broken down by the criteria?

Such smart people. Such bad use of data.

Evan is a smart dude, and occasionally he blogs. Sometimes it’s about playing jokes on Canadians who confuse his twitter handle with a famous Canuck, but sometimes it’s gold. His post yesterday deconstructing the way people go about choosing a job is one of the latter.

I think every college student would be well-served to have some guidance on how to choose a job or a career. And the problem starts way before college; high school students pick colleges, which are long term expensive decisions, basically on a whim. It all seems kind of insane looking back.

Company cultures, hierarchies, job roles, products, businesses and dozens of other factors that will impact your daily life, probably making the difference between being happy and miserable at work, at never formally taught or even discussed. I think it’s one of the reasons that startups seem so magical to so many, because they appear to break rules when in reality they just do things differently and the rules were never there in the first place.

This is remarkably true for me. My first job out of undergrad was pretty underwhelming from a culture standpoint. While that alone didn’t drive me to smaller, younger companies (I had been interested in them for a good while) it certainly accelerated my path to working at them.

And I don’t disagree that there is a problem. The paradigm at Tech (for IEs) seemed to be: interview with Coke/Home Depot if you kinda like supply chains, otherwise one of the various consulting firms. Take whichever one offers you the most money. I managed to stay out of that cycle, but still didn’t get it right.

So I’m not sure how you go about teaching these ideas. I knew I didn’t want to be an electrical engineer after doing a co-op semester. I knew I didn’t want to work for a 100,000 person company after 6 months of politics blocking our projects that had a proven ROI and tons of operational support. Could I really learn those things without being truly exposed to them?

Maybe that means the answer is more internships. Work for whoever you can when it’s still early enough that no one thinks your just bouncing around jobs. I did 3 internships during my 2 years of grad school, plus other little projects on the side.

That’s the only way I was able to figure out what I was passionate about and know the kind of workplace I wanted to be a part of.

First, let me be very open about one thing: I think Bill Gross is a top-5 entrepreneur of all time. First guy to do paid search, has started 5 billion dollar companies, and always seems to be out front of the next big idea. He’s brilliant, has accomplished a TON, and has given great insight every time I’ve heard him talk.

I am unabashedly proud of the fact that I’m one of the only 266 people on Twitter that he’s deemed worthy enough to follow. Bill Gates, Steve Case, Arnold Schwarzenegger, me, Jack Welch, etc. It doesn’t quite make sense, and must be entirely due to me tweeting about his talk at the GreenNet conference last spring, but I’m running with it.

This week he was Mark Suster’s guest on This Week in Venture Capital. It’s 80 minutes packed full of great stories and advice for anyone involved with running a business and eclipses the episode with rapper/entrepreneur Chamillionaire as my all time favorite.

Take some time, throw on some headphones, and give it a listen.

Khan Academy is an organization that freely distributes instructional videos on all kinds of topics from algebra to organic chemistry. It’s kinda similar to my old company Flat World Knowledge in that it’s goal is to make access to educational materials free to anyone who wants them, only it focuses on video rather than textbooks and actually operates as a non-profit.

Well in an effort to make these videos more easily available to people and cut some of their bandwidth costs, Khan Academy has teamed up with BitTorrent to distribute over 2,000 videos they’ve produced. Click that link to read more from the great blog Hack Education.

This is an awesome idea on a number of levels and I’m glad to see more examples of how the BitTorrent technology, which is constantly vilified as solely a method for illegal file sharing, can be used for legitimate purposes.

Last year I put up my New Year’s Resolutions for 2010. They were as follows:

1. Read 50 books
2. Dunk a basketball
3. Systolic BP below 120
4. Start a stats website

The final tally is:

1. I read 34 books total in 2010: the 33 posted here, plus Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh. Overall, I read 12 fiction books (2 more than the 10 I aimed for), 11 business books, 5 “about me” books, 4 sports books, 1 comedy book, and Art of War which I don’t know how to classify really.

I also have some partially finished books. I’m about 80% of the way through How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie (which is awesome), halfway through the haunting short stories of Raymond Carver in Where I’m Calling From, halfway through Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, and at least a few pages in to The Essential Drucker, a collection of Peter Drucker’s thoughts on business. The real lesson here: don’t read a bunch of books at the same time.

2. Nope. Probably made negative progress in this one over the course of the year.

3. Yup! First success. It was a mixture of medication, diet and exercise, but I got it below 120, if only for a moment. Hopefully this keeps me on the “heart-not-exploding” path.

4. Boom. Is it the kind of stats I thought it would be at the start of the year? Not even close. Does it count? You bet it does.

So there we go. 2/4 overall and I’m going to count the books thing as a pretty good showing considering how rarely I read books before this year. The dunking thing though, yikes. I only have so much longer where this is even reasonable so if I want to do it ever again, it better be soon.

And now, on to 2011!!!

This year’s resolutions have a little different flavor to them. I’ve identified 4 of the most important areas of my life (and a fifth category for “other”) and then found something to do/improve in all of them. With that in mind, away we go:

Health – Run a half marathon
“What a weak goal,” you may say. “You have a year, why not do a full marathon?” Well, Mr(s). Overachiever, by doing it this way I still have the option of doing a full if I want to. Besides, while I have run semi-seriously from time to time (mostly when not getting rushed to emergency rooms with a busted appendix) there is nothing in my history that makes me think running 26 miles is a good idea. If this first part goes well, we’ll re-evaluate.

Mind – Create a mobile app
This was the hardest one by far to come up with. In fact, I’m not even sure I like it enough to fully commit to it yet. I’ve always been proud of being a relatively smart and knowledgeable person, but just how do you go identifying some way to improve that without testing? I think my 50 books resolution last year was a pretty good compromise, but I didn’t want to copy it.

So how does this connect with mind? Well, I figure there’s a whole lotta stuff I need to learn to make this happen. Some of it I’ve already started, a lot of it I will learn as I go. However, this is a learning exercise for me so I’m putting it here. I’m not trying to make money on it (although I won’t turn it down) so it’s not business, and I already have a really good “other” resolution so I didn’t want to put this there.

Business – Get paid by 20 people
The absolute bare minimum of revenue from that number of clients would be ~$36,000 for 2011. Not enough to live off of certainly, but we have pretty solid reason to believe that we won’t be only doing the bare minimum of work for many of our customers. I didn’t want to set a public revenue goal (although we are talking about one internally) just because I don’t want all you people coming around asking me for money (or realizing how broke I am)!

For the purpose of this exercise, a single company using us for multiple jobs counts as 1 client. However, if that single company is dealing with clients of their own (such as a 3PL or consulting firm) then each different client of their we do work for counts separately. We have a huge meeting coming up next Tuesday, so this goal could either be really easy or really hard after that.

Friends/Family – Stay closer to those important to me
I’m awful at this and have been for quite some time. There was a summer in early high school where I barely saw my friends from school because I never called them, thinking that if they wanted to hang out with me they’d call me. I’m certainly better now than I was then, but I’m making a point to improve even more over the next year.

Other – Figure out my life goals
Ted Leonsis was on Bill Simmons’s podcast (The B.S. Report) recently. You may have seen the post I made quoting him about how owners who give away tickets are killing their teams. Well he also has a public list of goals that he want to accomplish during his life and a running scorecard of how they are all doing. I like that a lot and therefore am going to do it myself.

Since a list of goals I want to accomplish over the next 60 or so years of my life is going to be pretty comprehensive, I feel like I shouldn’t rush into making it. So, instead of just thinking for a day and throwing a bunch of stuff out there I’m going to do this a little slower, making sure that I’m covering all my bases here. It will almost certainly be broken up into categories like Ted’s, so any suggestions on categories that need filling or goals that need doing would be great starting points for me.

And that’s the plan for 2011. 5 goals, all reachable, but all a significant improvement over where I am now. Let’s see if I can better 2010′s completion rate.

An interesting pair of articles from the past few days about whether or not it’s worth it to take a pay cut to work at a startup.

First, Ellen Beldner says ‘No’ with some very well thought out reasoning.

Suppose I worked there at a salary cut of $50k per year for the 2 years until the startup has an exit event. I’ve invested $100,000 in the startup via lost earnings. (Remember, if the startup tanks, I lose my money too.) As a design-type person, let’s assume I was one of the first 10 employees and got 50 bp of equity. That means I’ve paid $2,000 per bp. On the other hand, the VCs who contributed $2m for 40% (4,000 bp) are paying $500 per bp. If the founders take, say, a $100k / year salary cut, they’re each investing $200k for, say, 10% — or $200 / bp.

If I’m going to get bupkes for bp as a non-founding employee, then I want a full salary. If I’m investing, I should get a comprable equity cut to other investors.

Daniel Tenner isn’t quite so sure, however, and lists out a number of other things than salary you’ll want to consider including:

Career development

Working at a startup will not only allow you to learn things that you wouldn’t learn while freelancing or working at a large corporation. It also allows you to meet people that you wouldn’t otherwise bump into. It is not uncommon for the founders or investors of startups which previously employed you to invest in your startup, when you decide to start one.

Passion

Compared to a market rate job at a large corporation, the right startup can give you the opportunity to work on a cool product that you can really be passionate about. I would add that, unless you feel that the product is that awesome, you probably shouldn’t work on it.

I’m pretty solidly in the second camp. I took a (pretty major) pay cut to go work at Flat World Knowledge for my internship summer and got to do more, learn more, and work with better people than I could have ever hoped for.

At this point I am getting paid basically nothing on my main business (although obviously 50% equity is worth something), and taking rates on my contract work (I still gotta eat while we build our business) that I know are below market rate in order to work with the same kinds of companies.

It’s not that simple of a decision for most though, so I hope people really take a good hard luck at it before just jumping in.

Whenever people ask me about my background leading to me starting a business I always tell them the same thing:

I started out college as an electrical engineer for a year, did a co-op semester and hated coding all day. Switched my major to industrial engineering, worked a couple years in logistics/supply chains but couldn’t wake up every day passionate about moving boxes. Went back to get my MBA to learn about business and focused on marketing and entrepreneurship.

And now I’m here, coding all day to help people move boxes.

Yeah, I know.

I think the big hang up for me wasn’t so much that I hated what I was doing, it was that I hated being able to see what was wrong with the process but having no way to change it. I mean, I could (and did) make little changes here and there but the major inefficiencies still sat there unaddressed, and it was way outside of my sphere of influence to initiate those reforms.

And so here I am; back to working on the things I once thought I hated, and loving it.

The other thing I always seem to come back to is education. I grew up around family members who were educators at all levels (aunt – elementary school, mom – high school/elementary, grandfather – college professor, step-aunt – college professor) and it’s always had a huge appeal for me. In fact, we’re actually working on a slight redesign of liquidWMS right now to make it the most useful and cost-efficient inventory management tool (tracking things like books, furniture, computers, etc) for schools.

There were two articles I came across today thanks to my twitter feed that got me thinking hard about education changes again. Take a few minutes to check them out and try to think about how you can help redesign education in this country.

1. The Rise of ‘EduPunk’ (Inside HigherEd)
2. The Education Manifesto – Michelle Rhee and Adrian Fenty (WSJ)