Noro Moseley Getting All Social

Greg Foster and Alan Taetle of Noro Moseley Partners recently went on StartupLounge to talk about a host of subjects around the startup and venture capital world.

During the show Alan mentioned that he is keenly focused on getting involved with the entrepreneurial community. As I previously wrote, Noro is working with and ATDC towards this end.

More specifically he announced that ATDC and Noro are working to create quarterly "acceleration" sessions that will enable entrepreneurs to get in front of such folks as the Atlanta Technology Angels, Imlay Investments, Noro, and Tech Operators. This would create an opportunity for early stage companies to get good advice on moving their business forward and exposure to local early stage capital.

NMP is also looking to attract other funds to the area and believes there is an opportunity to provide local startups with exposure to West coast firms such as Benchmark, Sequoia, and Trinity. The general thought is that ATDC can open up its weekly brown bag sessions to the broader entrepreneurial community once a month and have these folks can come in and reverse pitch their business. Again providing exposure to entrepreneurs as well as insight into how VCs in other parts of the country operate.

All of this is in its formative stages. Both Alan and I intend to attend Open Coffee on Wednesday before CapitalLounge and would love to hear your thoughts on how to move these initatives forward in a way that will help the Atlanta startup scene.

Comments

Thanks for being proactive on this issue Lance. I personally think this is a great thing. I hope it happens.

One question I would ask is what Noro's goal is in this process. Greg Foster told us they will make 7 early-stage investments out of the current fund in the next 3-4 years and, since their geography is more than Atlanta, there likely will only be one early-stage Atlanta deal per year for them. And they certainly don't need more deal flow. What's their objective by getting more involved and in luring more top-tier VCs to Atlanta?

Will Sequoia, et. al. invest in deals Noro turns down?

Paul Freet | Aug 25, 08 at 05:05 PM

Paul - first of all, the numbers I threw out that day are high level and directional, not hard and fast. As you might imagine, while we actively manage the portfolio and think through how many of a certain type of deal we want in the portfolio, we won't turn down a good deal just because we've "reached our quota" of a certain type of deal (sector or stage). No such quotas really exist. The reality is the entire community benefits from having more funds reviewing deals in and around Atlanta (and the Southeast in general). We only have capacity to do a certain number of deals in this fund which means, by definition, other investors will, in fact, do deals in our backyard. That's a good thing. The more deals that get done, the more likelihood there will be some real winners - that improves our region's batting average and attracts more money to the area, and the flywheel gets going...

We will contribute by a) doing our share of deals locally and b) marketing the community to other funds with which we have relationships. We will also co-invest in deals with many of these funds (both in Atlanta as well as other parts of the Southeast) which makes our dollars go farther and introduces other funds to the area. Hope this helps...

Greg Foster | Aug 25, 08 at 06:34 PM

Looking forward to it!

Knox Massey | Aug 26, 08 at 03:55 PM

Noro Moseley Getting All Social

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