Business Incubator Series: Stephen Fleming, Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech – Atlanta (Part 8)

By guest authors Irina Patterson and Candice Arnold

Irina: What about those entrepreneurs who don’t need or want to raise money?

Stephen: Right, the bootstrappers. We have an active community of bootstrapping companies now, that for whatever reason, don’t need to or choose not to raise money – or choose not to raise money right now. We help them. The core proposition is to build something that somebody wants to pay for, build it fast, and bring in revenue.

These are typically software companies, so they’re either selling licenses to their software or selling advertising on a website, or whatever it turns out to be. Those companies are figuring out ways to do a lot with very little.

In the Internet space, it’s a cliché now: You stuff all your processing and storage up into the cloud, be it Amazon, Google, what have you, and your capital costs are trivially low. If you’re not paying yourself a salary, all you have to do is eat. So, you can bootstrap a company for very little money, usually with pretty quick turnaround.

What we encourage these companies to do is to do something quickly. Start getting customer feedback quickly. You don’t want to be in the mode of spending a year or two to launch something and then realizing that nobody wants it for whatever reason. You want to get something out there fast.

Irina: Do you have any special initiatives for these companies?

Stephen: We have our circle, which meets on Wednesdays. That’s when they help each other with ideas and share war stories and advice. That meets once a week.

Irina: What are your personal challenges?

Stephen: The biggest challenge right now is that we’re funded by the state of Georgia, and the state of Georgia has a budget challenge, just as 48 of the 50 states have budget problems right now. We’ve gone through some cuts.

We’ve had to let a couple of people go. We haven’t laid off any people from the incubator, but we’ve had some attrition when people move on to new career goals. We’ve not been able to replace them.

That’s been frustrating. I’d like to have a little more money and a few more people. The community has been great in supporting us, coming to our events, sponsoring us, and volunteering and helping us out. All of that’s been going very, very well. I just wish I had a few more dollars to hire a couple of people and have a bigger payroll.

Irina: How many people do you employ?

Stephen: I employ almost 200, but ATDC, not counting administrative support and graduate students, is eight full-time employees. Then we have two admins and a mix of graduate students. There are usually four or five graduate students running around at any given time.

Irina: OK. Changing topics, would you give us a sketch of the rest of your job?

Stephen: It’s industrial partnerships and economic development for the state of Georgia. We work with, as I said, companies as big as Boeing and as small as a 20-person manufacturing company to help them implement advanced technology, help them to get certified for new technologies. We teach courses. We do policy work for the state of Georgia.

We run a medical device manufacturing facility, which is for private contracting. I print books in Braille, I run an operation that makes textbooks available to the visually impaired in Braille and in audiobook format. I have a very complex operation. The incubator is the fun part. It gets a lot of the attention.

Irina: You said you partner with other organizations?

Stephen: We’re open to partnering because we are a public entity. We try to provide access to any outside organization, if it’s a trade association or law firm that wants to work with us. We tend to be open, just based on the restrictions of human capital. We’ve got eight people, and they’re all busy. We don’t do a lot of exclusive relationships because we are taxpayer supported. We try not to play favorites too much.

Irina: Thank you, Stephen. Great insights.

This segment is part 8 in the series : Business Incubator Series: Stephen Fleming, Enterprise Innovation Institute, Georgia Tech – Atlanta
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