If you ran into Candice Blackwell in the past couple of weeks, you probably heard about GABA Inc., her startup that connects medical students with career mentors.
Never heard of GABA? Even better. Blackwell prefers practicing her pitch to people who don’t know the startup.
“I’ve pitched to basically anyone who will listen,” Blackwell said, laughing.
All that practice is leading up to Venture Atlanta, the biggest investor conference in the Southeast that will take place online and in-person Oct. 20-21.
The 14th-annual conference will include pitches from 93 startups in the region, chosen from more than 400 applications. Investors from around the country will listen to the presentations and meet with founders, hopefully forming partnerships to skyrocket the growth of these seed-to growth-stage startups.
Founders give their three-minute pitches on stage then spend the rest of the time in a whirlwind of investor meetings, which could take place in person or on the Venture Atlanta conference site. The two days are also filled with panels from some of the top names in the Atlanta technology ecosystem including Mailchimp CEO Ben Chestnut and Calendly CEO Tope Awotona.
Blackwell is planning a pre-seed round after earning $323,000 in grants and pitch competition awards. GABA has competed in 20 programs and won nine of them, Blackwell said. Those competitions have prepped her for Venture Atlanta — she rarely gets asked a question by an investor that she can’t answer.
That constant practice is similar for many founders presenting. They’re constantly talking with investors, recruiting employees or selling their products to customers. Every day is practice for Venture Atlanta, but the conference can still be intimidating. It compresses months of meetings into two days.
This year is Blackwell’s first time presenting at the conference, and it's already given her startup a boost. When the list of presenters came out, she knew because of the flood of LinkedIn notifications.
“It changes the way people look at us as a business, particularly people familiar with Venture Atlanta,” Blackwell said. “It helped us feel more mature."
Blackwell’s nerves come from the in-person aspect of the conference. She started GABA in May 2020 — “deep in the pandemic,” Blackwell said. That means many of her meetings or programs have taken place on video calls, where she’s come up with tricks to keep herself focused and calm. But in-person interactions are a bit more intimate.
For Mary-Cathryn Kolb, CEO and founder of cooling fabric tech startup brrr°, nerves are the one thing she’s not bringing back to Venture Atlanta during her second year at the conference. She presented in 2018 as an early-stage startup and is back in 2021 as a growth-stage company.
“Most people have been where you are,” Kolb said of her experience presenting. “It’s about sending and receiving the message of your raise."
One of the trickiest things for Kolb is whittling her pitch to the three-minute timeframe. She usually plans out her presentation without a time limit then works with her team to make the information as succinct as possible. She has the pitch written on note cards and goes over it in the mornings and at night to keep it memorized.
Jenn Graham, CEO and founder of Inclusivv, started working on her three-minute pitch about two months ago. Before starting the civic engagement startup, she was an organizer for TEDxAtlanta, so she already had experience in structuring a timed presentation.
“Your goal is to pique their interest,” Graham said.
Inclusivv, formerly Civic Dinners, is planning its Series A round after raising a $1.1 million seed round early this year. For Graham, it was all about researching and targeting specific investors and making sure she knew all the specifics of the business.
Graham wants to make sure she finds an investor that aligns with Inclusivv’s mission — to create meaningful conversations with diverse people through structured conversations.
