Venture in the South

In this Episode, Paul and David review some of their experiences with bullying, opportunistic actions, duplicity and rarely outright fraud. While these things are no common in our experience, they do happen and we relate our owns experience. We try to provide useful guidance for both Angels and Founders on how to avoid and minimize these risks. This underscores our general emphasis on good diligence in investing since it's much easier to make money if you don't loose it. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email [email protected]. If you like our show, it really helps us if you rate, review and please subscribe. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to HAVE FUN, MAKE MONEY AND DO GOOD.

Matt Bailey, VentureSouth's market leader in Greensboro NC, provides some of his greatest contributions to angel investing from serving on the boards of early-stage companies. In today's episode, he shares some of his experiences mentoring CEOs, serving as a sounding board, providing ideas and connections, and keeping a board operating cohesively even during challenging times.

HealthyCell launched with a stem cell product that failed to gain traction but led CEO Doug Giampapa to a dietary supplement innovation that solved three big problems with supplements: Pill swallowing concerns, absorption, and taste. The HealthyCell's Gel supplement formulation has found impressive consumer acceptance in the Direct to Consumer channel as well as in a subscription model. Doug is now breaking into retail on the back of dramatic sales growth coming out of the pandemic and looks to 2 or 3 x sales again this year.

Startup Investors try to focus on great business ideas with market traction, great teams and a scalable business model. But the ultimate goal of an investor is an EXIT! This is when the investor gets their investment back with a profit (hopefully). This might be an acquisition, an outright sale or rarely an IPO. This show is all about the Exit waterfall, that is how Exit proceeds are distributed among investors. We'll cover some of the tricky aspects of calculating individual investor's share of exit proceeds and problems to avoid. If you have questions or comments, please reach out at ventureinthesouth.com or contact me at [email protected].

Kwipped started in 2014 as a B2B ecommerce marketplace for equipment renting/leasing/buying with great success. They then discovered 2 major friction points in the sales process, matching financing to the customer risk profile and seeking financing approval at the end of the purchasing journey frequently made the journy pointless if financing was not approved. Kwipped solved these problems by creating a new platform for Point of Sale (PoS) rapid online financing approval (Approve) from multiple providers and moved it to the beginning of the purchasing journey. Now the Approve platform is growing ~200% YoY with hundreds of vendor customers and near zero churn. As Approve has become 50% of revenue and the lion's share of revenue growth, Kwipped has changed their name to Approve and is looking to continue their rapid growth.

In this interview I talk with John Sterling, a cofounder of Datasteam. Founded in 1986, Datastream provides asset management software, integrated procurement, and supporting services to organizations and facilities worldwide. John was VP of sales there for 20 years until Data Stream ultimately exited at a valuation of about $230MM. He has now written a book about getting started in sales, titled Sales for Noobs and hosts a non-profit online resource for those new to sales, Noob School. He offers insights for founders getting started in sales, what to look for in sales talent and when and how to start a sales team when one is no longer enough. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email [email protected]. If you like our show, it really helps us if you rate, review and please subscribe. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to HAVE FUN, MAKE MONEY AND DO GOOD.

It's the ultimate goal of both founders and investors to EXIT and early stage investment at some point. Bit this requires planning and preparation to create an optimal exit. In this show we talk about strategies for founders and investors to prepare for and optimize EXIT planning. If you have questions or comments, please reach out to ventureinthesouth.com or contact me at [email protected]. If you like our show, it really helps us if you rate, review and please subscribe. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to HAVE FUN, MAKE MONEY AND DO GOOD.

In this interview I talk with Michael Stevens, CEO of Joi, an ecommerce platform that enables easy live purchasing via Video Chat platforms. Michael started his journey in politics with modest pre-revenue funding for an idea (Crowdr), a video fund raising platform for political candidates. Learning from that experience he pivoted Crowdr to Booster to focus more on ecommerce and spent 12 months in Salt Lake studying multiple ecommerce platforms (which interestingly seem to concentrate in Salt Lake). Learning from that, he pivoted again to Joi which empowers real-time ecommerce on live video chat platforms, sort of like QVC or the Home Shopping Network but live streaming. He raised his initial funding pre-revenue with just an idea and we talk about that as well as his perseverance/resilience on that journey to get to Product Market Fit with Joi. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email [email protected]. If you like our show, it really helps us if you rate, review and please subscribe. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to HAVE FUN, MAKE MONEY AND DO GOOD.

In today's show I interview Preet Singh about LifeFurnish and their journey into 3D prototyping that is disrupting the design industry. Starting with synthetic image generation of home furnishings and eliminating the need for photo shoots, LiveFurnish has progressed to digital prototyping. They enable non-professional designers to create exquisite high resolution photo renderings that allows vendors to evaluate potential products before even a physical prototype is produced. The home furnishings industry has embraced the technology to reduce cost and increase sales and LiveFurnish is now experiencing exponential growth. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email [email protected]. If you like our show, it really helps us if you rate, review and please subscribe. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to HAVE FUN, MAKE MONEY AND DO GOOD.

This show is all about how startup valuations are determined, what the critical metrics are to consider and the 'Art of Valuation'. Paul talks about his experience negotiating valuations and the strategies he has employed to reach an equitable deal that balances founder and investors interests while maximizing the opportunity for success. We discuss both the math and the art. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email [email protected]. If you like our show, it really helps us if you rate, review and please subscribe. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to HAVE FUN, MAKE MONEY AND DO GOOD.