Investor Spotlight: Atlanta’s Ashish Mistry

EEHeadline

Ashish Mistry is a consummate behind the scenes, make-things-happen guy in the Atlanta technology community.

To describe Mistry as just an entrepreneur would be a gross understatement. Behind the youthful demeanor lies a shrewd operator and tough competitor.

Mistry’s career in the technology sector began in IT services. As a newly minted graduate of Emory University, he co-founded his first startup, Virtex Networks, a remote management network services company, in the late 1990s. The venture-funded company was acquired by Leapfrog Services in 2001…back when Eric Schmidt was still chairman and CEO of Novell.

He joined the AirDefense team thereafter learning from the best: serial entrepreneur and investor Jay Chaudhry. Chaudhry was the company’s CEO and chairman at the time and according to Mistry, he “sat outside the chairman’s door” and “did what it took” which meant building out the company’s inside sales team and sales channel in Asia over several years. AirDefense is now part of Motorola Solutions.

Mistry went on to two tours as Entrepreneur in Residence at ATDC.

Today, he is managing partner of BLH Venture Partners, a private fund that invests in early stage technology companies with a focus on startups in ecommerce, SaaS, digital media and managed services. Portfolio companies include Acumen Brands, Better Cloud, KontrolFreek, Ionic Security, TripLingo and Vocalocity.

The last 12 months have been particularly eventful for the firm. Portfolio companies Acumen BrandsBetterCloud and Ionic Security have all raised significant rounds of funding. The firm’s very first investment Vocalocity announced its acquisition by Vonage for $130 million in October.

Mistry’s characterization of BLH: “We’re not just entrepreneur-friendly, we’re entrepreneurs who happen to run a business that invests in other entrepreneurs.”

When not handling BLH matters, Mistry can be found fulfilling his other professional responsibility as CEO of KontrolFreek, a red-hot ecommerce company that manufactures and sell accessories in the console gaming industry. Despite his already full schedule, Mistry still spends 50 percent of his time with KontrolFreek. According to Mistry: “It keeps me close to the operations and many of the ecommerce investment opportunities come from my role as the CEO of KontrolFreek.”

This post originally appeared on Venture Atlanta.

EETNBannerAd1

Startup Founders, Devs & Designers (aka Geeks Like Us) Love DragonCon, We’ll Be There

dragon1

In our previous geekery, techie and mobile lives two of our favorite events to cover have been ComiCon and DragonCon. Let’s face it most startup founders, developers,designers, entrepreneurs and coders are really geeks at heart. If you haven’t been to DragonCon before it’s the ComiCon of the east coast and despite it’s size it still has that alluring feel of a convention that hasn’t sold out to big business.

If you’ve been to ComiCon in the last five years or so you’ll notice a huge amount of commercialism. The grass roots comic book and pop culture convention feel has drifted away. That’s not the case for the four day event held in Atlanta every year.

We’ve got an entire team that will be blogging, posting photos and broadcasting live on AOL and Slacker radio all weekend long to bring you all the delicious DragonCon action. We’re going to hit the best panels on the culture side and also some of the tracks that will undoubtedly provide great content and information for those of us building businesses.

DragonCon covers so many different parts of current culture it’s hard to believe they do it in just one weekend. Attendees will be able to mingle with celebrities from their favorite sci-fi programs, web programs, and even comic book heroes. There are tracks and panels on writing, art, comics, pop culture, gaming, sci fi, and even the Skeptics track which I personally love.

Heck last year there was a panel on WKRP in Cincinnati which Howard Hessman and Lonnie Anderson where there as the speakers.

This upcoming weekend will feature a decent break from our day to day startup coverage but we’re all going to go back to our roots as geeks, comic book readers, sci-fi lovers, Dr. Who fans, gamers and much much more. There’s a huge commonality between the DragonCon/ComiCon go-er and those of us in the startup world. Sure we were a little off as kids and teenagers but now we’re building products, software, and businesses.

So join us all weekend long for a great trip through DragonCon and if there’s something you want to see specifically email info@nibletz.com

For those of you familiar with our coverage of DragonCon and similar events on our other sites, this year we’ve got StoryMark an Atlanta startup on board as the the photo sponsor. That’s only fitting because DragonCon is in Atlana however we’re going to use their unique app to post a ton of photos in our social media channels and here at nibletz.com with audio clips. As the days get later and later though, please be aware that they serve alcohol by the bucket at this event.

StoryMark is a great photo app partner their app allows you to record a :30 second audio excerpt that gets embedded in the finished photo product. So now you don’t have to write out a long azz caption when you’re not sure what’s in the photo. It’s also perfect for families and loved ones to send great photos back and forth.

We like to kid with the founders of StoryMark and just point out that every photo sponsor we’ve had at DragonCon,ComiCon, NYCon and CES has gone on to get acquired (Instagram), AcquiHired (LightBox) or a huge investment (CoolIris).

So enjoy your weekend and make sure you bookmark nibletz.com for DragonCon coverage. Don’t worry we’ve also got some amazing startup stories this weekend. And, finally if you’re an Atlanta startup we are doing office hours in limited brunch time sessions if you want to meet up for that just email info@nibletz.com