Last week, a few members of the Bonfire team and I made our first trip to Venture Atlanta, the largest venture capital and tech conference in the Southeast. Though our roots are strong and deep on the west coast, we’ve recently cemented our interest in the ecosystem with two promising Atlanta-based investments, FlowPath, who presented at the conference, and Tourial.
I have to admit that I’m no stranger to the city - I went to college at Emory over a decade ago and remember the energy around medicine and politics. However, the Atlanta of 2022 is different. It hosts massive offices for companies such as MailChimp, Calendly, Microsoft and more. The conference itself? It was active! The sold-out event hosted more than 1300 attendees including innovative founders and top-tier investors with the intention of putting the Southeast on the map. And they were successful. After attending 6 events, 4 pitch sessions, 2 dinners and countless coffee chats, it became clear that there’s something special about being built in the Southeast.
Included in the aforementioned events is one that we co-hosted with our friends at Knoll Ventures. We rented out the patio of Lure and had almost 100 guests in attendance. Though we often found ourselves packed shoulder to shoulder, it was wonderful to mix and mingle with impressive founders, investors, operators and accelerators. (Shout out to our wonderful sponsor SVB for their ongoing support in our ecosystem!)
Hope you all enjoy some of the photos from the week. In the meantime, I’m working on getting my voice back from unprecedented social activity!
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