We have been working closely with Yahoo on a number of fronts and we’re pretty excited about the Yahoo YQL integration in Titanium we released in the 0.8 release. More stuff will be coming soon.

Here’s a video that Yahoo Developer Network (YDN) featured about Appcelerator and Yahoo on their blog. Enjoy.

Today was a historic day in computing history. While the techno-geeks will argue for the next several months what this really means and what the Apple iPad is missing or why it’s only a large screen iPod Touch, I’m going to be focused on what I think this really means to some key industries and how Appcelerator can help. From my perspective, web developers are talking up and overwhelmingly are planning new application experiences for the new iPad. We surveyed just a small sample of our community of developers and found that over 90% of them plan on building an iPad application in the next 12 months.

But what’s probably more interesting, and certainly makes sense seeing the iPad today, is that this new device offers new innovations that could be much different (and quite possibly, better) than the existing iPhone/iPod.

We are seeing huge opportunities for developers to build applications that really leverage the unique and native device features of the iPad. Today, Steve Jobs demonstrated the new ebook system built-in to the soon-to-be-released iTunes “bookstore”. But, think about the application possibilities for publishers, media companies and companies such as ad agencies and interactive digital agencies can create. In fact, Steve Jobs might have single handily gave a life-line to the entire media world as it struggles to find a monetization model as they move from traditional print to digital. With over 175 million users ready with credit cards in the iTunes ecosystem and more than four years of micro payments of .99 and beyond, Apple may be able to turn over an industry struggling to find a path to transactions. The iPad offers an experience and consumer base that is already purchasing digital content and an compelling advantage that the normal web doesn’t offer. Users on the desktop web have had over 10 years of conditioning of “Free”, adding “Paywalls” to their websites are already offering significant challenges for some publishers. The iTunes ecosystem may be their new savior.

What’s also different spending the day with the Tablet SDK is that most of the current 100K apps will be completely re-tooled for the new device. While Apple is reporting (and in fact, in today’s testing with the SDK, fulfilling) that they’ll run all apps in the App Store unchanged, it’s very clear that apps will need to be rebuilt completely to take advantage of the new UI, new native features and the use cases that will be more appropriate for the new iPad. In fact, I think in less than 6 months after the devices are available for purchase, most of the apps that are used on the device on a day-to-day basis will be new iPad versions. It’s clear from the way the “emulated” iPhone apps are running on the tablet that developers will quickly move to change their apps to better adapt and that user’s will quickly find paths to one’s that take full advantage of the new device. This offers both a challenge and huge opportunity – not quite the same opportunity as the original iPhone – but close.

I’d advise developers and publishers that are on the iPhone today to start now at moving their apps. If you’re not on the bandwagon, you’ll really want to get on to it today. In either case, you’d really benefit from checking out Appcelerator as a way to help you move quickly to the new device and preserve your existing investments.

What are we doing at Appcelerator to support the iPad?

Like all iPhone apps, your Appcelerator Titanium-based apps will run on the iPad as-is in emulation mode. Today, we verified that the upcoming 0.9 release runs great both under emulation mode as well as the full native mode. We’ll have more details about that soon but we’ll be fully supporting new iPad projects in the 0.9 release and expect full support for the iPad native features soon thereafter. Because of the Apple NDA, we’ll not be able to talk specifically about the native features we’re working on for the iPad, but they’ll be awesome.

So, I’ll have more on this soon. I promise to try and blog more these days…

I’ll leave you with some parting thoughts I shared with Robert Scoble the day before the announcement.

Today was a very busy day. I spoke about Appcelerator Titanium at the O’Reilly/360 Inside Mobile Conference in San Jose and later served on a discussion panel with Daniel Brusilovsky (Teens in Tech, Techcrunch), Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) and Christian Sepulveda (Pivotal Labs).

I then spoke tonight at the iPhone Business Meetup in Santa Clara. Tonight, I spoke a little bit about iPhone and the Enterprise and gave some perspective on the opportunities and challenges for developers considering iPhone in the Enterprise.

Below are my slides from the presentation. As always, I generally try and post all of my public presentations on my Slideshare Slidespace.

iPhone in the Enterprise offers a lot of interesting opportunities and some big challenges today. However, some of the challenges are not just inherent in iPhone – they are overall challenges of a rapidly changing marketplace. We’re seeing a massive change in the dynamics of the mobile ecosystem. These changes aren’t just with the emergence of iPhone and Android – new mobile devices that have changed the smartphone marketplace almost overnight – but also in how these new entrants are disrupting carriers and handset manufacturers. In addition, we’re seeing new mobile handset entrants like HTC and Dell Computer also come into play. Of course, we’re also seeing old players like Palm make a play with WebOS in a very exciting way.

It’s an exciting time to be a web developer. I believe web technologies will continue to emerge as the most important pieces of the technology landscape. It’ll be fun to watch how this emerges. I think in the next 24 months we’ll see some pretty big ecosystem changes.

If you’re considering building an iPhone and/or Android application, please consider taking a look at our Appcelerator Titanium product. Titanium allows you to build native mobile applications using web technologies. That’s right – HTML, JavaScript and CSS. These are technologies, tools and skills you have today.

I gave a talk this week at the Mountain View JavaScript meetup hosted by Google at the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California. Thanks to Michael Carter who hosts this event on a monthly basis. The event was also video recorded by Google and is being made available on Youtube, although I don’t yet have a URL for it. Below are my slides from the talk, available on Slideshare.

If you haven’t yet tried Appcelerator Titanium, I would encourage you to do that now. It’s a pretty awesome product and makes it much easier and faster to bring the world of desktop and mobile applications to Javascript / Web Developers. Titanium Mobile provides a web platform for building native iphone and android applications using web technologies.

Today, Titanium Mobile is still in private beta. However, if you’d like early access, please email me or get in touch with me through Twitter and I’ll be glad to activate you.

Appcelerator vs. Software Interrupted

The Appcelerator team has been hard at work over the past few months coding away into the wee hours and today we are incredibly excited to announce the preview release of our new product – Appcelerator Titanium™. Titanium is an open source platform for building applications using standard Web technologies (like HTML, CSS, and javascript) that extends functionality outside the browser and brings next generation applications to the desktop and mobile operating systems.

We’ve created a little video about the vision of Titanium we thought you’d enjoy:

When we say extended functionality we aren’t messing around. Web applications built with the Titanium SDK can support local file access and storage, native integration with the desktop environment, and both online and offline operation. The Titanium SDK is part of the Appcelerator Platform, so you can even leverage Appcelerator’s message-oriented architecture, pre-built integration with all the leading server-side languages and frameworks, and rich set of UI controls, layouts and themes for building desktop apps. Titanium makes coding super easy, because you can use your existing Web development skills to build apps that can be quickly deployed to Windows and Mac desktops (and in Q1 of next year, Linux). With these traits, we believe Titanium will enable a whole new generation of innovative rich desktop and mobile applications.

Now let’s get a little more technical – at the heart of Titanium is an innovative new open source, cross-platform runtime engine that provides application developers with native access to the computer’s desktop or the mobile device via a robust set of APIs. Built on top of WebKit, Gears and Chromium, the Titanium Runtime Engine provides developers with a powerful, free and open platform for building cross-platform applications using standard AJAX.

If you are craving more information, check out the following links:

• Titanium Homepage
• Download
• Demo Applications
• Titanium Screencasts
• FAQ

After you’ve had a chance to download and play around with Titanium, please help us out and post your feedback and suggestions to the Appcelerator community in the new Titanium group, or feel free to email me at jhaynie AT appcelerator DOT com.

Code Strong!

(NOTE: this is a cross post from my Appcelerant blog post).

I gave a talk last night (December 2, 2008) at the SD Forum’s Java SIG in Palo Alto, CA.

The subtitle of the presentation was: “How the web has gone beyond the browser and we’re headed back to Client/Server”. I’m including the presentation slides below:

OK, this is a shameless plug, but what’s a blog for?

We’re announcing our Fall Appcelerator training schedule today.

We’re going to be offering training in Atlanta, San Francisco, Minnesota, Chicago and NYC.

We’re also partnering up with Frank Cohen from PushToTest to offer some AJAX testing as part of the training.

In addition, our Minnesota training will be led by author of the upcoming Manning book: Appcelerator In Action, Kevin Whinnery. Kevin has been a very active member of our community.

So, if you’re thinking about adding web2.0 or AJAX capabilities to your website or already knee deep in loads and loads of Javascript and need some relief – consider coming and let us show you an easier way to do it. Building great apps doesn’t have to suck as bad as it does without Appcelerator.

Also, if you’re a PHP lover and use Zend – one of the most awesome Zend PHP frameworks around – you might consider checking out our Zend/Appcelerator Webinar event on October 15th. The title: ‘Get “Rich” Quick : Building Ajax-based RIAs with Zend Framework and Appcelerator’.

We’re also sponsoring the upcoming ZendCon next week in Santa Clara, California (September 15-18, 2008). If you’re planning on attending, please stop by our booth and we’ll give you a free t-shirt!

Today, I had the new tenant orientation at our new cool digs in Mountain View, California.

Our office is located in downtown Mountain View on Castro Street. The location is pretty amazing. The building is 12 stories (I believe) and houses a few other familiar names like Red Hat and WSO2. In fact, WS02 is directly next door, which is awesome, since they’re a partner of ours. How cool.

The office is still being finalized but we should be able to move in this Friday. Today, they put the first coat of paint on the walls.

The office is pretty much ready to move in. The previous tenant had ugly yellowish colored walls and we needed a little Appcelerator colors on some of the walls to help liven things up a bit.

The office is on the 8th floor of 444 Castro Street.

So, you’ll get some amazing views of Mountain View and the surrounding areas from the office. The office is on the corner of the building and you have sunlight from all points in the office.

The most wonderful thing about the office, beside the location, is the location. It’s just 4 blocks from our new house. No more Georgia 400 commuting every morning!

At this point, they should be done with the painting for our move in on Friday. Of course, the most important part of any move-in for a technology company is the Internet service. We are hoping that will be complete on Friday since the building as on-net access and is already provisioned. We are getting a 10 MBps pipe so we should have good access to the internets.

Before I start this long-winded post I want to give a disclaimer for everyone that attempts to spend the time to read this: this post is my thoughts based on my viewpoint and will hurt some people’s feelings. I’m trying to give an honest account from my perspective. Think of it as a constructive exit interview. If you don’t like it or disagree, that’s fine — I can appreciate that. If I step on your toes, I’m sorry – but I feel like I need to say a few things to help clear the air and hopefully give some perspective.

As most people have heard as of last week, I have decide to relocate my family and the Appcelerator headquarters from Atlanta, GA to Mountain View, California – in the heart of silicon valley. There have been a whole host of reasons for this – some I will attempt to explain here. I am going to also attempt to outline some thoughts on what I think Atlanta needs to do to prevent others from doing the same.

Appcelerator and Atlanta

First, it’s important to know that Appcelerator will continue to remain in Atlanta and will continue to invest in Atlanta. We have around 12 employees still in Atlanta (only 4 people, including myself, from Appcelerator made the move), we will continue to have an office and hopefully we’ll grow the local Atlanta office.

Jeff and Atlanta

If you didn’t know, I’m an Atlanta-native. I was born in Gainesville, GA and most of my family still remains in or near there. My family and I will continue to be back in Georgia quite often as we can. I love Atlanta for so many reasons. Also, it’s important to know that this is not the first time I have left the area. Each time I left and came back, my horizons have expanded and I’ve been blessed with new opportunities. I first left Atlanta in 1989 to join the U.S. Navy and spent almost 4 years in Tokyo, Japan (with brief stops in Chicago, IL and Whidbey Island, Washington for training). I left Atlanta again around late 1996 for Jacksonville, Florida and returned in 1999 to join Jeff Levy in starting eHatchery – just as the dot com boom was happening. I’m leaving 9 years later and I plan on returning one day. I hope when I return next time, as before, my life will be improved and I will have grown professionally and personally. And, that’s the challenge in front of me and my family.

I’d like to talk with you about why I decided to leave and my perspective on the startup climate in Atlanta.

A little background

I’ve been doing the startup and tech entrepreneurial thing in Atlanta since around 1993. My entrepreneurial experience actually goes back to 1983 when I was quite young. My first company was called Bizzare Software. My step-brother and I tried to make a go at games for the TI-99/4A when we were teenagers (the first game we tried to make was a break dancing game). We ran out of memory since we only had 16K if I remember.

However, since 1993, I’ve been part of 3 fairly decent size VC-funded ventures and associated in some way with many many more. I have personally been involved in raising around ~$35M in venture capital from at least 6 different venture funds and lots of local angels. So, from one point-of-view, I have some experience doing the startup thing. In fact, to be honest, I’ve raised a lot of money and been involved in losing most of it to date. It’s not fun losing other people’s money – at least, not to me. I don’t like losing my own money and I really, really hate losing other people’s money – especially when I know they’ve invested in me personally. At eHatchery, my parents personally invested $250,000 of their own money as well. Yeah, that really hurts. At Vocalocity, we raised a lot of local money (and West Coast money as well) and we didn’t have the outcome Mike and I should have achieved. There were some very odd and unusual circumstances that eventually caused an eventual premature acquisition that I can’t talk about. However, we should have done better. I still feel very unhappy about how we ended that chapter.

Failure, probably as much if not more than success, really shapes a person. I’m a very driven individual if you don’t personally know me — and I’m very passionate. However, I’d like to think I’m also self-aware and always thinking a lot about how to improve myself and my organization. I work hard, demand exceptional results and don’t like to give up. I’m a serial entrepreneur. I would do what I do even if I never made money. I don’t really do it for the money — I’ve calculated before that I would have made much more money I would have had a “regular job”. However, I hope I never have to get a real job. I will do this till I die most likely.

When I started Appcelerator with Nolan Wright almost 2 years ago after Vocalocity – I had no idea ultimately what we’d come up with. However, I knew 2 things: I wanted to start another software company and I wanted to eventually get a shot at raising money and succeed at creating a great return. There were a lot of specific life-lessons I could apply this time around and things always seem to go much smoother with each venture. I think failure really helps you avoid pitfalls – and much faster.

From the outset, I had a very specific plan about how I wanted to grow the company, even though we had no idea what the company would do. I had a few specific objectives:

1. I didn’t want to raise outside investment until we had a product, revenue and customers
2. I wanted to raise money from a reputable venture firm that believed in what I was doing and fit my style
3. I wanted to make sure than when we raised money, we had our stuff together and we had options

We accomplished all 3 objectives.

Appcelerator has been an amazing ride so far, even though we’re just getting started. It feels like everything we’ve set out to do, we’ve done. Not always at the speed I’d like, but certainly, with results that basically have matched expectations.

People around me know that I had very specific ideas about how things would come together with our first investment. However, I really struggled with one major issue: what to do with the local investor community. That’s probably a really strange issue for some locals, I understand. I’ll try and explain.

I don’t have the patent on the prevailing opinion about local VC community. The opinions and frustrations are real and they’re not something that we should just ignore. There are pretty big problems with the local startup community. Here’s what I think are some of them:

• Local VC money is mostly non-existant. It’s a supply-demand problem essentially. Low supply of great startups and some big hits, very little demand. (Note: I didn’t say lack of money)
• The local community is a relationship-based economy. It’s who you know … The ‘ole boy network. The valley is a meritocracy.
• We have no real track record of big successes we can tout. OK, let’s stop using ISS, JBoss and Mindspring. JBoss didn’t raise any local money, ISS was started over 12 years ago and most young people have never heard of Mindspring
• What few winners we’ve had, they don’t feel compelled (or even obliged) to re-invest / give-back to the local community

Local Investors

We don’t have any real early stage venture investors in Atlanta. OK, investors, go ahead and get pissed and stop reading if you’d like. But, it’s the honest truth. Noro-Moseley is one of the largest and oldest firms in Atlanta. They have some good guys there (Greg Foster has recently joined and he seems like a great guy) like Alan Taetle. However, I’m sorry to say this, these guys aren’t early stage guys. They don’t understand early stage. Period. That’s not to say they haven’t made early stage investments – they have. For example, Clearleap. They invested along side Trinity. Trinity is a great Valley firm. We spent time with them. But here’s the rub. Noro probably wouldn’t have done the deal alone, nor would they have done the deal if it was 3 guys just out of GA tech with no experience (in fact, the founders are ex-N2Broadband guys who had a good exit).

Despite what Alan said in a comment on Lance’s blog, Noro had the opportunity to do the Appcelerator deal – 100% as the only lead investor – on a silver platter. Alan and Greg know that – even though they’ll try and say they didn’t, publicly. But the true story is that I gave Alan one week to put a term sheet on the table; he had a told me and several others many times he would. In fact, Alan told several people around town that they wouldn’t lose the Appcelerator deal even before we had decided to raise a round. I’ve known Alan for a long time and I’d like to think of him as a friend – so I know he’ll be pissed at me for putting this out there. However, it’s the truth and I’m sorry if the truth sometimes hurts. I think ultimately, Alan was probably paranoid that he’d lose the deal anyway and I was just using Noro to price the deal. A number of inside people know this: I had told everyone that I would give them the deal if they put a decent term sheet on the table we could live with (which I think was reasonable with expectations). I even told Alan I would give them dibs for a week before we talked to anyone — which I honored. In fact, we waited almost 2 weeks before deciding that they were playing games.

Alan insisted on 2 things that I think ultimately was a proxy for their true colors: he wanted detailed, 5 year financials and several days to “dig through the financials” and he wanted to spend time with our 2 key prominent advisors. In fact, that’s part of normal due diligence especially for a round size we were talking about. However, it’s also symptomatic to part of the local investor problem. I’ll contrast that with all the investors I met with on the west coast: we didn’t even talk about financials to late in the discussion.

Let me be straight here: we had very detailed financial models and we have great advisors which are very active. However, when you don’t know what’s important and you don’t understand how to evaluate a deal like Appcelerator, you gravitate towards what you’re comfortable with.

The problem with Noro isn’t that they’re not a good firm. They are not experienced early stage investors. They haven’t had a great track record and most of their partners haven’t had any amount of reasonable success. OK, I said it. I’m sorry, but it’s the truth. It doesn’t mean that their money isn’t greener than the next guys – it is. And they have a decent amount of money in their latest fund. They should be really leading the charge in Atlanta – but they are not. I hope that changes. I think for a region to have a vibrant startup community, it needs some anchor VC tenants that can lead the charge. We’re really missing that in Atlanta.

And here’s another hard-to-stomach fact. West coast money specifically told me they did not want local money involved. Even after I had decided that Noro wasn’t a good fit and moved on, I was still trying to angle how I could let them in to the deal in some capacity. Up to even after signing a term sheet, I talked 3 different times about a possible local partner and I continue to get the same line: “why? what value can they possibly provide”.

You see, you raise money for more than just the money. Don’t get me wrong, all money is green. However, $4M from a west coast VC is so much different than $4M from a local VC. That’s a hard pill to swallow I realize. But, everyone knows it. Get over it. Sig said in the Atlanta Business Chronicle article that he could (my paraphrasing) help find a VP of Sales but couldn’t help with contacts at Google or Microsoft. Hello…. VP of Sales is important, but to most early stage startups, Google … Microsoft … yeah, you need to have relationships there. It’s just too important for so many reasons.

Side note about a smaller local VC

I will say that I did have a good experience with Nelson Chu and the partners at Kinetic. While Nelson didn’t invest in Appcelerator, he was extremely aggressive and helpful. Kinetic is out of Maryland and invests all over but Nelson’s base has been in Atlanta for a long time. Nelson’s been a wall flower at events in Atlanta for a long time — Nelson now has some new money and I really hope he gets active in some smaller, local deals. He’s very smart and tries to work hard and really understand what you’re doing.

A new fund?

There’s rumors that Said Mohammadioun is rasing a small fund, around $80M or so I hear. OK, another good example of a persistent problem: Not enough money based on their profile as a VC. They’re going to only be able to make around 5-7 $5M deals to be able to keep enough dry powder ready for follow-on rounds. At least, I’ve been told that’s their target. Maybe they’ll do some $1-2M deals and get it to around 10. But that’s part of the problem. Not enough early stage money that’s ready and willing to invest much earlier than we’re comfortable with in Atlanta. Said is a great guy and was on our board at Vocalocity and I have much respect for him. However, I’m afraid they’ll fall into the same trap we’re already in.

Local Supply and Demand

Part of the local problem is 2 fold: not enough decent deals to invest larger dollars in and not enough smaller capital to invest in smaller deals.

We need a $80M fund that will invest in 80-100 deals with enough follow-on capital. But here’s the dichotomy: even if we had it, we don’t have enough (currently) smaller local deals that are fundable. So, Atlanta would need to be willing to churn through some deals over a period of time to cultivate a culture change, a set of lifestyle changes and major ecosystem changes – and that’s going to be tough and painful.

Here’s what I think are 5 key requirements to make this happen:

1. We need to build up a vibrant, less risk adverse investor / entrepreneur / employee base. Investors need to be funding as much as they can as early as possible, entrepreneurs need to be encouraged to try everything we can pre-revenue, pre-customer and pre-perfection. Employees need to be more excited about working for the next cool startup more than UPS and Turner. This is a symbiotic relationship where the balance needs to be near equilibrium. Right now, it’s all out of whack. Tech and Emory students should be dying to intern and then work for or start a startup as soon as they graduate. We should have a problem of students dropping out to start companies. In fact, the opposite is true. They leave as soon as they graduate and they intern outside of Atlanta during the summer.
2. Lots of deals for some period – say the next 3-4 years – will fail. Our goal should be to fund smaller amounts faster, build some teams up that can execute on different ideas without much concerns for revenue models and salespeople, and then FAIL FAST. Fail as fast as possible with as little capital invested as practical. Once they fail, they must be encouraged to START AGAIN as soon as possible! Refactor. Get back on the horse. What can we do different next time around? These failures should be not be shamed. Let’s go ahead and get rid of the startup scarlet letter. We need more starts. We need an economy that allows the whole thing to get going and fail and get going again – without having to mortgage houses and without having to present 5-year financials to get $50K. Go go go. Dream big and let’s find you some money to try it out.
3. We need to create an ecosystem around startups. TAG is wonderful for big corporate companies who have money, it’s irrelevant for startups (no offense to Tino). We need a heck of a lot more Startup Riots, Startup Lounges, Barcamps, Atlanta Web Entrepreneurs and SoCons. We need more Jelly’s and Open Coffees. In fact, local investors should feel compelled to help pay for as much of these events as possible. They should be sponsoring any person who wants to create one of these events carte blanche. To date, we (the entrepreneurs) have largely had to fund them along with some gracious sponsors – a lot who aren’t necessarily invested locally like Microsoft. Stop that. We need these events. Please show up to them — you’ll learn something. Actually, go to a barcamp and hang out with the locals. At last year’s Barcamp, we had all sorts of really cool ideas and great debates and discussions. At each event, there are very smart people who are tomorrow’s great startup entrepreneurs or startup employees. Get to know them. Get off the golf course and from behind those big conference room tables and get to know some common folk. (And, while we’re on it, can we please get a little less stiff about the dress code. In the valley, i wore jeans or shorts to meetings. I would get stared down at Startup Lounge if I came in looking like that…). How many local investors have a twitter account (that they use, not to lurk) and blog? How many now in the valley or boston?
4. We need to mandate – at least through peer pressure and possibly through some sort of social contract – that entrepreneurs must give back. It must be reciprocal for this to work. In the valley, if you make it, you’re socially compelled to re-invest and give back in some way. In Atlanta, forget it. The one’s that can and should, don’t. There are some that do, so don’t take that as everyone. But most, don’t. Not even close. And, I’m not talking about just money – I’m talking about giving back to other, younger one’s behind them in the form of guidance, assistance, mentoring, etc. Sit on boards, write checks, make connections — but please, HELP. In fact, only put in a little money — since plenty of other locals with help with the money — just help with the connections, help with all the stuff that you’re in the best position to help with: experience.
5. The last major hurdle, which is a major one – is the acquisition economy in Atlanta. Atlanta is a technology laggard. At least, for bigger companies. Even though we are corporate headquarters to some big brands like UPS, Chick-Fil-A, Georgia-Pacific and Delta (just to name a few) – none of those guys are technology leaders or startup acquirers. This makes it pretty difficult for Atlanta given that strong startup communities usually have strong economies around larger companies acquiring smaller ones to grow and innovate. You would think with UPS that Atlanta would have a very active community of shipment, tracking and transportation startups. They probably would if UPS invested and bought local companies doing innovative things in this area. They don’t. And how about CNN, Turner and Cox? Huge media companies with major presence in Atlanta — but all the cool video and new media startups are in San Francisco. Why don’t we have all of these cool local companies built up around new media? We do have a decent cluster built around Security – given ISS and it’s long history (started in 1994 by tech student, Chris Klaus). However, I do believe that’s a relative anomaly. Why? ISS itself hasn’t really been active acquiring security companies locally (or even outside of Atlanta). In fact, most of the local security companies are really the result of a local cluster of security having been created by a number of dissatisfied entrepreneurs leaving ISS to do something better. Either way, with CipherTrust and SPI Dynamics having decent exits – it’s been a good thing for Atlanta and the security cluster. So, as far as larger corporate acquirers, I’m not sure exactly how this can be solved. These local big companies neither make good acquirers or early stage customers.

Here’s the danger

Local money needs to understand a few things I’ve consistently heard:

1. Out of town VCs could care less about local money. In fact, in this day, they’d prefer to not even have them involved. I know that’s going to be contrary to what we hear locally. Locals would like us to believe that out-of-towners like to have a local person in the deal. That’s baloney. It’s just not true. That’s a ruse that locals create to (a) get into an out of town deal and/or (b) mitigate their risk with someone bigger/smarter. In fact, I have repeatably heard that they would prefer to not have smaller, local firms involved *at all*. Out-of-towners have been consistently burned but smaller locals.
2. Clean cap tables and simple terms are much more attractive to bigger firms. We have a problem locally where startups raise money (over and over) in smaller amounts from lots of angels or local firms — and our cap tables look like our 5-year financials: overly complex and exhaustive. We need to ensure that cap tables and terms are clean. I realize that can be tough when you get money from lots of individuals – but we need some solution that’s both practical and protective. And enough with all these silly, overly burdensome terms. For all the money and ill-will we’ve created in all these startups over the years — how’s our track record on all those onerous terms? Hmmm… how about 0%. Please name one company where investors have been able to take a failed company’s IP and make something with it? Name one startup where those 3-4x liquidation preferences have yielded a decent return. C’mon, we’re killing ourselves here and only making the local lawyers rich.

Unfortunately, I don’t believe that the Atlanta startup community is at a cross roads — it’s not that simple. It’s more like a labyrinth. This problem is a multi-variable equation. And, it’s one whereby all parts have to work together pretty consistently.

The local community has a lot of reservations all around. I do believe it can work. I do believe that a few leaders from each constituency can emerge and provide 80% of what’s needed to get us there. I also think it can happen. However, it will take some time. It will probably take 6-8 years for this to really work if we intend to see a major shift. That’s quite a long time in startup time – and here’s why: we need to get several rounds of failed startups (2-3 years) through the system and then get some decent base hits but a great set of teams. Then, we can go back through the normal cycle (4-5 years) to get some really decent hits. At that point, we’d have enough stuff in the pipeline that we could really change things. And, enough decent successes following the formula, that they’ll start their re-investment for the cycle to continue again and again.

The other alternative is status quo, or worse, an imbalanced ecosystem. One example of imbalanced ecosystem is what’s happened in the last year in Atlanta. The entrepreneurs have taken the mantle of driving the startup ecosystem. That’s not entirely bad, but it’s also not sustainable. All the local events (that are meaningful) are being driven almost exclusively by entrepreneurs (myself included). The burden is heavy. Everyone needs to participate. Everyone needs to be involved.

So, why move?

Well, frankly, I’m both tired and scared. I’m tired of pushing hard and need to focus on my own startup right now. And I’m scared that if I don’t get every possible advantage in my own court, I’ll fail again. I really want Appcelerator to succeed in a big way. I believe I can change the world – at least the small part of the world that is impacted by what we’re doing. And, I believe that if we can even be partially successful in what we’re attempting to do, we will. I need every advantage I can get to make that happen. The Silicon Valley area is part of that plan because it puts me (and Appcelerator) in the heart of where things are happening today with a set of partners that have done it over and over again. The ecosystem is in place here and it’s working consistently. It’s not without its own set of new challenges: the valley is ruthless, expensive, somewhat overrated and definitely a different pace of life. But, with all that, it’s still the place to be. Very few significant technology companies make it big outside of the Silicon Valley – and that’s just the facts.

One very prominent valley investor told me: “Jeff, if you want to be an actor you go to Hollywood. And, if you want to be a tech entrepreneur, you need to be in the valley.”

So, I’m going to have to put my own self-interest (and that of Appcelerator) ahead of my altruistic concerns for Atlanta. At least for a while. If I’m successful, I do believe it will help Atlanta in many ways.

So for now, I’m outta here. I’ll be living in Mountain View, California just off Castro Street and our new headquarters is in downtown Mountain View (just 3 blocks away from my house).

I wish Atlanta the best of luck and I’ll really miss all my local friends and colleagues. You have been so good to me for so long and I really appreciate everyone’s well-wishes and congratulations. You’re in my heart and on my mind. I really hope we can keep in touch.

One of my goals as part of this transition is to blog more – specifically about this experience and how it’s different (both good and bad). So, please stay tuned and subscribe to my blog (and my twitter stream if you want more rapid updates).