People are getting back to building a business and selling things, says Georgia Tech’s Stephen Fleming

By Allan Maurer

The economic downturn hit Atlanta as hard as anywhere in the country, says Stephen Fleming, vice provost, Economic Development and Technology Ventures, and executive director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech.

Fleming has a diverse and relevant background to be helping Georgia Tech stimulate and nurture Atlanta startups. He has more than 14 years as a general partner in private equity and is currently a member of the Seraph Group‘s investment committee. Seraph invests in early stage firms.

Stephen Fleming, Executive Director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at Georgia Tech

He worked in operations for tech giants AT&T and Nortel and venture-funded startup LICOM.

He’s a founding member of the Space Angels Network and is an investor in three private aerospace companies.  In Atlanta, though, he’d be happy to see any number of startups take off like a rocket.

Like the rest of the country, tells us, “Atlanta went through a rough patch after the bubble burst. A lot of entrepreneurs got hurt. The recovery has been bumpy, not a straight line, but we’re doing better.”

No shortage of entrepreneurs

A lack of sufficient local venture capital remains an unfortunately true mantra in Atlanta, he says, but adds, “There is no shortage of entrepreneurial activity. We’re seeing more startups, business plans and commercialization than we ever have.”

Tough economic times combined with that lack of early stage venture money means that “Companies are trying to find multiple paths to getting capitalized and started, from angels to bootstrapping.  In certain areas, it’s getting back to starting a business and selling things.”

Georgia Tech would like to spread its support for startups statewide

When a lot of venture money was available, people built businesses around that, he says. “Now they’re going back to customer funding.”

That won’t work for creating a new vaccine, he quickly adds, or a semiconductor chip.

But starting an Internet business is “100 percent more capital efficient than ten years ago. You don’t need a couple million in cash. The price of entry is dramatically lower. The result of that is that it lowers the threshold point so people can say, ‘If I max out my VISA, I can do this’.”

In any event, he says, “Venture capital is not a panacea, although some add a lot of value.”

While just about every venture firm claims to offer value-added backing, not all do, he says.

Not every startup wants an office in downtown Atlanta

Fleming says most of the startup activity he’s seeing falls into “a handful of buckets.”

“Probably the one with the most activity is around various aspects of mobility, hardware, apps to run on mobile.”

But there is also “Still a lot of unexplored territory around the Internet and we see a lot of companies exploring those.”

Clean tech has been hot for five years now, and will be significant for a long time, Fleming says. “Various aspects of environmentally sensitive or alternative energy technology will be a growth area for a generation.”

Fleming says that part of the challenge Georgia Tech faces in fostering innovation is to “Get beyond bricks and mortar.”

It currently has a whole floor in the Centergy Tech building in downtown Atlanta for its Advanced Technology Development Center startups and wet labs for fledgling biotech firms. But Fleming echoes what new ATDC director Nina Sawczuk told us in an interview in a previous TechView Atlanta column.

“We want to add a couple of other cities and get to the point where we can serve people who don’t want an office or don’t want one in Midtown Atlanta,” he says. “It’s a scaling challenge and it’s not a trivial task. I don’t have a model in mind because I don’t know of anyone doing this on a statewide level anywhere. If we can prove this, it could be a model for a lot of people.”
 
Stephen Fleming’s blog and web page: academicvc.com

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