Last Thursday (November 17th) was a great day in Tampa Bay. It was Demo Day for the first class of startup companies at Gazelle Lab, a TechStars Network member located in St. Petersburg. I attended this event at the Mahaffey Theatre in St. Petersburg, along with some 500 other folks. A fantastic showing!
First, let me say hats off to the founders of Gazelle Lab, Marvin Scaff, Daniel James Scott, Brent Britton, John Morrow, and Bill Jackson. They (and a few other investors) put their own money up to get Gazelle Lab off the ground. And not only did they put their own money up, but they got to work to make it happen. Writing a $25K (or more) check for technology startups (much less technology business accelerators) is not in the usual investment game plan of most Florida accredited investors and even if it is, working to make the investment work takes time and commitment that is hard to find. I, for one, commend you guys! Now they are raising $3M to keep Gazelle going for the next five years. They have made a great start. Let’s all wish them good luck in their effort.
The startup presentations, given from the stage of the Mahaffey Theater, were part typical investor pitch and part (as befitting the setting) theater. While I personally would have preferred a little more investor meat and less theater (more on that below), the presentations conveyed the passion of the entrepreneurs and the excitement of the Gazelle startups. The audience reception and the #Gazellelab Twitter feed conversation was a confirmation of that excitement. It was certainly a refreshing morning for startups in Tampa Bay.
The 6 companies that presented included:
Auto.IQ (founded by Bret Tobey and Renz Kuipers) – a mobile app that intelligently manages automobile diagnostic sensor data, creates and maintains an automobile “health record”, and interfaces with automobile service providers.
Dropost.it (founded by Ty Mathen and Orrett Davis) – an app that moves the gift card buying and sending experience to the internet and allows the sender to “drop” a gift anytime/anywhere to the recipient.
Teburu (founded by Greg Ross-Monroe and Lean McIntosh) – an online ordering management system for small- and medium-size restaurants.
Red Hawk Interactive (founded by Sean Davis and Aubrey Goodman) – an e-commerce platform that distributes independently created video content to streaming media platforms.
Kngroo (founded by Jeffrey Baird and Nick Kypriotakis) – an interactive mobile app that uses gaming to encourage users to visit local businesses and monetize mobile check-ins.
Leads Direct (founded by Brantley Smith, Dustin Holbrook, and Jerry Lamb) – an online lead aggregator for service-based verticals.
You can find more commentary about these companies and the Demo Day in Sarah Perez’s article in TechCrunch here.
This event had more of a pep rally feel (more like a Fall Friday afternoon in my Texas high school where they let us out of class to go to the gym and cheer for our team before the big Friday night game) than a typical (albeit in many cases boring) investor pitch event. A video introduction to the company by their mentor and a live company product presentation by one of the founders was the presentation format. I think a dose of traditional investor pitch information would have been helpful. The company context was missing – answers to questions like what is the problem your product solves, what are the characteristics of the market your product serves, who are your competitors, what value proposition do you bring to the user, what are you going to do next with the funds you are seeking, and, most importantly, why are you going to win?
So, how do you do that in this setting? Following Jeff Clavier of SoftTechVC, and keeping in mind the TechStars event format and the theater ambiance, here’s what I would have liked to have heard from these founders:
“Here is a big-ass problem in a big-ass market. And here is our kick-ass solution. We have competitors and here they are and here is what they have. Here is the value we have which they don’t have and here is why we are going to win. And here is our kick-ass team that is going to bring this product to the market and crush the competition. We’ve come this far in 3 months with Gazelle and now we need $500K to launch and win. Come look at what we have, get on board with us, and help us make it happen”.
Robert Trigaux’s assessment in the St. Petersburg Times is absolutely correct. This is a grand start. TechStars has arrived in Florida! Now its time for investors to come to the table and provide the funds needed by these 6 companies to launch and scale. Judging from the success of the companies at the 4 primary TechStars locations (Boulder, Boston, Seattle, and New York), the future of the first class of Gazelle Lab should be bright.
