Paparelli Podcast

Sig Mosley is a great friend to the Atlanta technology community. Working with John Imlay, the former CEO of MSA, he led a movement that resulted in an economically vibrant Atlanta technology community. There was little in Atlanta when he started his angel investing career in 1992. And now Sig is the Godfather of Angel Investing.

In this conversation, you’ll learn what it takes to be a successful angel investor. And, as an entrepreneur, what you should look for in an angel investor.

Rarely do you get to experience a candid conversation with some great insights from a renowned and well-connected angel investor.

Bill Nussey is CEO and Co-Founder of Solar Inventions. 

You know you want your life to count for helping millions, if not billions of people. This is Bill. He had a brilliant executive career, including as COO of a billion-dollar public company. But even that was not enough. It was a building block to ever-increasing higher impact companies. And now he has given it all up for clean and renewable energy. He knew nothing about it three years ago.  But he knew if he could build something big in this market, it would impact the world. 

How Bill got to Solar Inventions is a case study in becoming a high-impact social entrepreneur.

Adam Wexler's PrizePicks was growing revenue at 100% quarter on quarter, and generating lots of cash. Then, in April of 2020, sports world-wide went dark. 

His revenue hit zero. 

Thirty days later, corn hole championships started PrizePicks back to revenue, then the NBA, and MLB started back, and he was back in business.

Revenue began to skyrocket. 

It was time to pour money into marketing. That meant going negative and that meant raising money. 

Wexler was faced with a big decision. Who would be the highest value-added investors for his vertical market company? 

Tune in and listen to this great entrepreneur sort through his options.

PrizePicks raised the money and is projected to move to 400% growth year on year. 

It's a great story and it is just starting!

What’s the best market for your technology?

This is a tough question to answer. 

Dan Ciprari partnered with a brilliant Georgia Tech PhD researcher and formed Pointivo. They secured the tech IP from the university, raised venture capital, and were off and running. 

But wait. 

Since everyone could use the technology they had a dilemma. You can’t sell to everyone. You have to pick one or two and specialize. This is how you create a valuable company.

Dan shares his approach to addressing this market selection dilemma. And he also share his entrepreneurial life journey in this conversation. 

Dan is humble, insightful, and transparent. There are many lessons to learn from this great and soon to be very successful entrepreneur.

This new generation of entrepreneurs is steeped in industry experience. They are identifying real industry and social problems. They envision the solution but lack the skill to create the product.

I interview two founders at opposite ends of the process. David is currently looking for a tech co-founder. Michael found his tech co-founder. Listen to these two founders tell you what they learned in solving this problem.

The SmartPM Story

Michael Pink is the founder, and CEO of SmartPM. Michael was a Deloitte consultant to the construction industry. He provided property owners and contractors the information they needed to settle disputes. Michael became an expert at analyzing complex construction projects and summarizing the data needed by all to move the projects forward. He got so good at it, he decided to start SmartPM and automate what he did manually.

The problem was, he needed a technically focused partner to build the product long-term. He went on a long search and found the right person after spending $300k on outsourced versions of his product.

The M Cultivo Story

My son, David Paparelli worked in the coffee industry for the last eight years. He knows the industry from farm to retail. He created M Cultivo to help farmers internationally achieve a living wage through better pricing data. He’s identified the problem, created the MVP, and now he needs help building the product. He’s looking for the technical lead who will join him in achieving his vision.

Learn what a real angel investor looks like and what a real angel wants in this conversation with Bill Midgette. 

Today, Bill leads Fairburn Equity Partners, and is an active angel investor focused primarily in the southeastern United States. He is also an active mentor of early-stage technology companies through Georgia Research Alliance and Georgia Tech, with the Advanced Technology Development Center and Venture Lab.  

Bill serves on the Boards of Directors of Carbice Corporation, Quest Renewables, Inc., Oncolens, Atlanta Technology Angels and the GRA Venture Fund. Further, he sits on advisory boards of seven companies focused primarily on healthcare and material science markets.

Over his career, Bill led the development and commercialization of new product technologies in the medical device, bioscience, and advanced materials markets through R&D investment, strategic partnerships, joint ventures, and acquisitions. He also holds two patents on commercialized medical devices, with a third pending.

I found out I was wrong, again. I believed people knew​ ​​early in life that they were going to create something​ from scratch and do their own thing​. All of the entrepreneurs I talked to over the years confirmed this. Then I met Frank and he proved me wrong. After 25 years of working for others, he became an entrepreneur. Frank became an entrepreneur at the encouragement of his clients and suppliers.

This is a great story, filled with lessons, and insights that just might change your life.

Frank's Bio

Frank J. Tighe, Chairman and CEO of Atlanta based, TDH Partners, Inc., has over thirty years experience in executive management, fundraising, sales, marketing and corporate formation in the medical device industry. He has developed and commercialized over 150 medical devices in his career and negotiated license agreements with major universities, physicians, private equity firms and industry competitors that resulted in millions of dollars in funding, sales and royalty income.

Mr. Tighe is currently serving as the Lead Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Georgia Tech University’s (ATDC) Advanced Technology Design Center, a start-up incubator that helps entrepreneurs launch and grow technology companies in Georgia. ATDC has raised over $3 billion dollars since its inception and was named by Forbes Magazine as one of the "Top 12 Business Incubators Changing the World.” ATDC’s 150 graduates have collectively raised more than $2 billion in capital.

Wells Burke is a serial technology entrepreneur. His recent venture, Rocket Partners, is a cloud-focused enterprise software development services company. Over the last 3 years, Rocket has grown to nearly 50 developers in 3 countries focusing on retail and healthcare Azure and AWS custom critical projects. 

In 2010, Wells founded LIFT Retail, a point of sale (POS) connected digital shopper marketing platform. Lift became the fastest growing digital ad network in the US scaling from 0 to 10,000 outlets in 3 years. After selling to Verifone in 2012, Wells spent three years building out Verifone's digital marketing properties and product managing Verifone’s $100MM global advertising network. Prior to LIFT, Wells founded Synthesis, a pioneer in the content management and electronic contracting space. Wells got his start at IBM where he helped launch some of the earliest interactive eBusiness initiatives for companies including Macy’s, Borders Books, Hertz Rental Car, and Bank of America. 

Wells lives in Atlanta with his amazing wife Kate and three awesome kids Owen, Margaret, and Emily. He is an avid mountain biker, terrible golfer, and unapologetic cloud software development super-nerd. Wells is also a proud yellow jacket with a BS in computer science from Georgia Tech. 

In our conversation, Well's shares his entrepreneur journey. It started in a booming dot-com economy, then when through a bust, another boom, and a bust again. All while, starting businesses, bringing on co-founders, raising money, defining market problems, building solutions, exits, rebirths, and much more. This is a roadmap for starting and building the company that is your perfect fit.

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I’m very pleased to bring you this conversation with my son, Nick Paparelli. Nick is on the path to becoming a software sales rep. I've watched him learn how to target a prospect, cold-call, qualify, and move the prospect along. He is not yet an entrepreneur like my other guests. Instead, I thought it would be beneficial for entrepreneurs to hear lessons learned from the trenches.  No theory here, just practice. I hope you enjoy it half as much as we enjoyed recording it.

Nick is a business development rep, BDR, with New Relic (Symbol: NEWR) Nick started his sales career as a BDR with a professional services company, Cloudreach. After they sold to a private equity firm, Nick moved to the big leagues by joining New Relic. He is early in his sales career, aiming to become an account executive in the next twelve months. He is calling on F100 executives with the goal of finding qualified opportunities. In this interview, Nick shares his journey and what he learned. 

This conversation is all about recruiting, hiring, and managing business development reps. Entrepreneurs will be well-served in watching this. Nick and I also talk about starting a sales career, effective sales management, hitting sales targets and maximizing your plan, building relationships, software sales executives, life vision, and setting a path for life. 

If you are interested in contact Nick with questions or opportunities contact him on his LinkedIn page. https://www.linkedin.com/in/npaparelli/

Gregg Hinthorn is the President of Hinthorn Media. He helps people of influence, with a desire to write, tell their story. 

Gregg is also a TikTok star with over 400,000 followers. 

In this episode we talk about social media, building a channel, and loving your audience as your primary motivation.

If you are a person of influence interested in telling your story through writing you can reach Gregg on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/hinthorn/).