In the past year I’ve gotten somewhat involved in the Atlanta startup community – a GREAT community full of some very awesome people. The community is full of great people from enthusiastic young entrepreneurs to serial entrepreneurs to accessible angel investors. The great part about Atlanta is how accessible everyone is – it’s relatively easy to get in touch with people.
At Atlanta Startup Weekend I worked with Jason Ardell, Joshua Silver, and a couple other people on CloseBuy.me – what I wanted to develop as a location based service that would allow you to search local stores’ inventories in real time. After the weekend, when we had a stilted, semi-functional demo that basically provided me with some thoughts on what to do and what not to do moving forward.
At Barcamp, I sat in on a presentation by Michael Mealling on private space development. I talked to him afterwards and asked how to get involved in the industry. Sometime later, I sat down for a similar discussion with Stephen Fleming, a former venture capitalist who works at GT and has invested in a couple space companies. Why the interest in space? I’ve always been interested. I grew up with Dad – a big space nut – with Astronomy magazines laying around the living room, an 8 inch telescope that we’d pull out occasionally, and building “spaceships” out of big cardboard boxes in the garage.
For a while I wasn’t sure which direction I wanted to go – technology startup or join a space-related company? Both seemed fun. I decided probably sometime in November/December that I wanted to work for a space oriented startup when I graduate – thanks to Stephen, Michael, and of course Dad. Why? I can get really excited about it. I can get into a technology startup – but not like I can get excited about space. There’s something about working with a company that’s striving to do things that haven’t been done before – stuff that could lead eventually to colonization of the moon or potentially other planets. It’s exciting.
Where does that leave CloseBuy.me? Right where it’s at. I’m not putting effort into it because I want to be able to focus all my energy in the direction I want to go. If that direction doesn’t focus on CloseBuy.me, I don’t want to put time and energy into it. I’ll still kick in and do what I can to stay on the pulse of the Atlanta startup community – but my primary focus right now (besides school and my paying gig) is my internship with Masten Space Systems.
Sorry if that’s too much of a recap for some of you – but I haven’t really talked through my rationale anywhere. It comes down to what I can get excited about – and technology isn’t nearly as cool as space.
