[celiadyer]

In Atlanta, startups wear "bootstrap-financed" like a badge of honor but I argue that unless you have a strong technologist co-founder and a really talented founding team generally, you simply must get funding to build a team to get serious traction. However, the angels and big VC firms here are looking for the huge deals of old and B2B plays. I know of no local angels here who invest in the consumer internet or real time data space other than a couple of really small investments made following Shotput Ventures.

Look how differently investing operates in the Valley (to which Atlanta has now lost at least 3 very promising entrepreneurs in the last 2 years). Look at super angels like Ron Conway of SV Angel LLC who has invested in 40-50 plays in the real time data space this year: http://www.crunchbase.com/person/ron-conway. These are relatively small deals, capital light -- but they do require some rounds of investment and are not bootstrapped.

It isn't just Atlanta. Boston and other cities outside of the Valley lose entrepreneurs for money, too. An example is WePay, whose founders are Boston College grads who didn't get into Tech Stars Boston but were accepted at Y Combinator last summer to test their beta product. After Demo Day, they recruited a couple more team members from the east coast and relocated to Palo Alto. They've recently raised a $1.65M round from August Capital, Ron Conway, Max Levchin (a founder of PayPal) and an A-list of other investors in their space.

Maybe a few startups survive bootstrapping and flourish, but most are just "strapped" and fold.