Flashpoint Demo Day a Glimpse of How Entrepreneurs’ Dreams Come True

A gathering of entrepreneurs in the Bay Area on Thursday offered a window into how ambitious techies' visions become reality. It started with a presentation from a go-getter named Adam Ghetti.

Dressed casually in a dark tee-shirt, Ghetti stepped to the front a conference room at the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz on Thursday afternoon. He launched into an intense, rapid-fire pitch and test drive of his cloud security startup Social Fortress.

After Ghetti finished, 14 more entrepreneurs repeated the process, describing the basics of their businesses. They hoped to spark interest — and investment.

Ghetti and his cohorts are members of Flashpoint, a startup accelerator located at Georgia Tech university. The three-month program provides mentorship, advice and learning. Director Merrick Furst told Mashable the program functions "to address uncertainties and risks in the startup phase." Thursday was the group's chance to convince Silicon Valley venture capitalists of the value of their respective visions.

This is how it works in The Valley, in the country-club atmosphere of the austere office parks located on Sand Hill Road. Owners of nascent businesses sling a concept, sell an idea and present a business plan, usually touting massive potential and market opportunity.

If they're lucky — or, more likely, smart and talented — they get the funding to potentially push their idea over the edge and toward the mainstream.

And it's how the tech world operates now in enclaves outside of Silicon Valley too; the Flashpointers were on the third and final stop in a series of public demo days that took place earlier this month in Atlanta and New York City.

The presenters on Thursday ranged from a Georgia Tech undergrad who started his first company at 14, to hip young entrepreneurs, to serious middle-aged men in slacks and dark blazers. They bragged about who had already invested in their products, gaps in the market and how much teammates had sold previous companies for. They also told how much more money they needed. Most asked for between $500,000 and $1 million. Some companies had recently shifted focus and had been organized for just seven weeks. Others had already generated real revenues.

In addition to Social Fortress, companies that caught Mashable's eye for various reasons included CollectorDash, which targets a multibillion market of collectors of trinkets such as action figures; CodeGuard, a self-described "time machine for websites;" Trimensional, which makes 3D scanning available to consumers via a smartphone app; and SportsCrunch, a social network for athletes to relive glory days and reconnect with former teammates.

But our opinions mattered little compared to those of the attending representatives of venture capital firms such as Split Rock Partners of Menlo Park. Split Rock's Leo de Luna was at the pitch session to begin scouting out early-stage businesses for potential future Series A investments by his firm.

"At this stage, where they're at in seed, it's about market potential because that's a good way to kind of filter things out," de Luna said in an interview following the presentations. "Then just to see the entrepreneurs themselves, see their maturity, their ability to communicate and sell the idea and maybe glean some things about how well they know their market and their product. The best ones were the ones that could show a live demo and could say, 'We've got a product, we've got customers.'"

For Adam Ghetti, the demonstration of Social Fortress apparently worked well. Between chatting and networking with investors and other attendees after the show, he was asked how he thought Thursday's event went.

"I left my Friday wide open," he told Mashable, "and it's now full. So I think today went great."