John Yates With Morris, Manning & Martin LLP

Intro: [00:00:04] We’ll come back to the Startup Showdown podcast, where we discuss pitching, funding and scaling startups. Join us as we interview winners, mentors and judges of the monthly $120,000 pitch competition powered by Panoramic Ventures. We also discuss the latest updates in software web3, health care, tech, fintech and more. Now sit tight as we interview this week’s guest and their journey through entrepreneurship.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:38] Lee Kantor here another episode of Startup Showdown, and this is going to be a fun one. But before we get started, it’s important to recognize our sponsor, Panoramic Ventures. Without them, we could not be sharing these important stories. Today on Startup Showdown, we have John Yates and he is with Morris, Manning and Martin. Welcome, John.

John Yates: [00:00:57] Thank you. Thanks for inviting me.

Lee Kantor: [00:00:59] Well, I’m excited. First off, to share with our listeners what you got going on at Maurice Manning and Martin. Talk a little bit about your practice since you are one of the kind of linchpin people in this arena in technology, especially in the metro Atlanta area.

John Yates: [00:01:15] Well, thank you. It’s a pleasure to be involved here today and to be a part of this podcast, so I appreciate it. So I am a senior partner and head the technology practice at Morris Manny Martin here in Atlanta. I started in the practice actually in 1981. That was the year the IBM PC was announced. So sort of the beginning of time. And the technology community came to Atlanta at that time, didn’t know anybody, but my sister had encouraged me to get involved in the tech space. And I’ll tell you more about that. But I guess roll the clock forward to the present. From when I joined Morris, Manning and Martin, we were about 20 lawyers. Today we’re over 200. We represent over 600 technology companies throughout the United States and internationally. We did over 300 tech financings last year. Venture M&A, private equity deals. And we’re one of the top ten law firms in the country and doing tech deals and the number one firm in the Southeast and in Atlanta, we’re doing deals in the private equity venture area. So it’s been a been a great ride and we’ve been excited to be in Atlanta for that, although again, the practice is very much global. So it’s been a great environment and a wonderful city to be in.

Lee Kantor: [00:02:22] Now take us back in time a little, because it’s probably difficult for our listeners to even imagine at that time in the early eighties, what was the tech scene like? Was there an official tech scene or was this just kind of sprouts, just, you know, a few individuals out there doing interesting work?

John Yates: [00:02:40] Well, it’s interesting and it is interesting as well that there aren’t a lot of us that are still around that remember that time, most of the people, your listeners that may not even been born in 1981. So I’m really dating myself here. Fortunately, my memory is still pretty good about that time. So before 1981, the second half of the year, when the IBM PC was announced, the market was very cluttered and it was mainly mainframes and midrange computers. So companies like Digital Equipment Corporation companies, companies products like PDP elevens and faxes and the like, and IBM were the dominant players, UNIVAC, Honeywell. I was very different crowd. The latter part of 1981 resulted in the IBM PC being announced as open architecture. Now Apple did have a product at that time, but it was very closed in its architecture and it made it very challenging with respect to the ability for people to write software to the Apple system. So when IBM opened up the architecture, meaning they allowed basically software companies to write into their computer, it basically spawned the software industry. And Atlanta was very fortunate to pick up on that.

John Yates: [00:03:46] Now, at that time, MSA Management Science America was one of the largest midrange software companies in the country. And I’m sitting here in my office in Buckhead. I can see the old MSA building across the Lenox Mall Peach Tree area, and they and American Software were two of the largest players. So what happened was Atlanta spawned a lot of software companies that were nurtured as a result of IBM opening up that architecture. So we became a software capital. And also we ended up at that time having Peachtree Software, which was one of the first, if not the first accounting software products for microcomputer technology users. And we also spawned a little after that a company called Samba that was one of the first word processors in that area. So we became very software driven at that point. A lot of folks coming out of Georgia Tech and a lot of companies that were offshoots of what were midrange and mainframe computer companies that all of a sudden were focused on the microcomputer. So that was really the genesis and what initially launched the tech community in our city.

Lee Kantor: [00:04:56] Now, where there are a lot of lawyers clamoring to get into tech at that point.

John Yates: [00:05:01] Not really. There weren’t that many companies, so there weren’t as many in this area, so there weren’t as many lawyers clamoring. The reason I was clamoring was because my sister had started a tech company in 1980 in Palo Alto, California. So I saw a reason to clamor when I went out and visited her after getting out of law school, got the bug by traveling around Silicon Valley with her, and at the time there were some major trade show called Comdex. Comdex, and it was one of the largest trade shows in the world and every computer company. And there were a lot of them at the time who had all sorts of different microcomputers would go to those shows, as would all the software companies. Now, for about a decade, Comdex was the show you had to attend, and all the major software companies in Atlanta and all of the world went to Comdex and all the hardware vendors went to Comdex. And what happened was obviously hardware became more commoditized and the software companies really stopped going to Comdex because it became so large. Just a huge, huge, huge conference. But what happened was I got the bug because if having gone out to Silicon Valley and my sister’s tech company was one where I represented her and then several other tech companies out there and just saw that it was just a matter of time before it spread to Atlanta. Fortunately for me, it spread pretty quickly.

Lee Kantor: [00:06:19] Now, was having seen Silicon Valley in the community there, was that what kind of inspired you to be kind of a leader when it comes to organizing a Atlanta tech community and tech community events? It seems like you’re you’re touching a lot of them throughout the years.

John Yates: [00:06:38] What’s interesting, because at the time in 1981, 82, 83, there was there were some groups in Atlanta that were doing some things in technology, but they were it was largely sort of scattered. And what we found out in the Valley was that the software was driving a lot of the activity. So I went to my sister in Palo Alto and I said, Gene, what should I do? Where should I focus my time and attention? And she said, You need to start a software society. You need to start something in Atlanta and bring together the software leaders because there’s a lot of small growing companies there. And so I came back to Atlanta and came back to my home and contacted a few folks who were who had a similar interest. They weren’t lawyers. The computer law area or software law area was very nascent at the time. Very few decisions, very little precedent that was being created. And so I said, this is going to be a hot area. Initially I came up with the idea that we would create the Atlanta Software Society, but then I thought of the acronym for Atlanta Software Society realized that wasn’t going to work. So we said, Well, let’s make it. The Southeastern Software Association CSA, which is today one of the divisions of the Technology Association of Georgia, which we’re also co-founders of. And so started the Southeastern Software Association, which turned into the initial pivotal group, later grew into become part of Tag. But that was really the genesis, bringing together people that had an interest and then finding out a lot of these were small companies that were going to grow rapidly. They just wanted to find common a common allegiance with other entrepreneurs. And the CSA created that.

Lee Kantor: [00:08:22] So now I guess there was a lot of foresight to to call it southeast, because the Southeast is kind of really becoming a major, major player in the country when it comes to technology. Could you imagine then what it is now, where there are so many cities around the southeast that are kind of making their mark when it comes to technology?

John Yates: [00:08:44] Yeah. This is obviously a hot space to be in right now and it’s easy to start a tech company. You can pretty much do it anywhere right now from any apartment in any city, anywhere in the world. And so a lot of cities are trying to attract technology businesses. For a long time, the medical device area was in Minnesota and San Diego and biotech was in portions of Boston. And you could think about certain areas where there was really usually a center, university center that served as a hub. That’s still a huge advantage for Atlanta to have Georgia Tech in that regard. You do see places like Miami that are focused now on cryptocurrency, which is fine. That’s an area that’s a little more problematic, let’s say. But it’s certainly an area that’s been hot and we have our fair share of crypto related businesses in the Atlanta area. Austin is also gotten gotten into the fray. One of the disadvantages there is, again, infrastructure and also the absence of what Atlanta has, which is being one of the top three cities in the country for Fortune 100 headquarters. And frankly, being in an environment where we’ve gone through a lot of the sprawl that Austin is going through now, so we’re going to see competition. There’s no question about it. We do need to be more innovative and creative in Atlanta. And one of the great things about our city is we brought together the business community, the traditional business community, again, being top three in the country for Fortune 100 headquarters with the tech business community. And we’re bringing those together in a very unique way that very few cities can do. And it’s it’s been a big differentiator for us.

Lee Kantor: [00:10:23] So now as your career has progressed and you’re now kind of in start of shutdown, at least you were a judge. What how how does that kind of has that changed? Are you seeing entrepreneurs today? Are they kind of similar people as they were in the eighties, nineties and early 2000s?

John Yates: [00:10:43] There are a lot of similarities. It’s interesting. Back in the eighties and nineties, the challenge of go to market strategy was was much different. The Internet was not being used for commercial purposes. And so the way you communicated was very different. And it was primarily through magazines, which is not a very efficient way to do it, but literally for, let’s say 20 years, the first 20 years of the computer industry, a lot of it was you ran ads and articles and wrote columns and magazines. That was where I start. I wrote a column on computer law in a publication called Computer Retail News that, believe it or not, was published right here in Atlanta, but it was distributed nationally, not a very efficient way to actually get the word out. And I actually did prospecting for software and technology companies by reading, subscribing to all these computer magazines. And literally there were hundreds of them I could have. I’m sure I’ve supported many a paper drive for over a decade, and I would go through those magazines looking at articles, tearing out ads, looking at area codes and zip codes, trying to figure out where these companies were just a highly inefficient system.

John Yates: [00:11:54] And then when the Internet came on, obviously it made it much more efficient, created a much greater likelihood to accelerate companies and go to market quickly. And then social media, of course, helped to catapult that even further. So one of the big differences now is that because of with with the Internet and social media, you can be anywhere. You can plant a flag anywhere you want to be, and you can really create the business in a quite a unique way, which was not the case in the olden days, where we were much more tethered to a particular location and made it much more difficult to get get the word out and required, frankly, a lot more money to do it, too, because advertising campaigns and magazines and going to tradeshows and the like was highly expensive. So the system now much more efficient, much easier. But frankly, that also makes it more crowded, too. So you’ve got to find ways to differentiate yourself.

Lee Kantor: [00:12:49] Now, are you finding that the startup founders are looking the same? Are we is is our startup community as inclusive as you’d like it to be, where it represents America? Maybe truer than it did maybe in the early stages of this.

John Yates: [00:13:06] Well, there’s yes, I think it is much more inclusive now. And Atlanta has a big advantage of being probably one of the most diverse cities as far as population in the United States, which does make us quite different from many other cities as well, because the barriers to entry are lower. It means that more people of any kind of color, persuasion, religion, geography can enter the market. And and so it creates a great opportunity, especially for a community like Atlanta, where we have such a diverse population and we have great mentors. I know Panoramic is one of the supporters here of this podcast. They do a wonderful job focusing on on entrepreneurs, focusing on issues, diversity, as do many other companies and businesses here. So it creates a unique environment for us and a way to attract, I think, companies and entrepreneurs that can feel comfortable that there are people like them that are in our community getting the support and a community that really is desirous of doing that. I know our mayor is focused on that mayor. Mayor Andre Dickens is a Georgia Tech graduate. I know invest Atlanta is focused. I know the metro a lot of chamber. So we’ve got a lot of organizations that are trying to knock down any barriers that were out there for young entrepreneurs, diverse entrepreneurs. We now have a number of venture funds. In addition to panoramic, we have Zane Ventures, Valar Ventures that are focused on dealing with and supporting entrepreneurs that are diverse women entrepreneurs and the like. So it’s great to see that in our community and it’s a good thing for what’s happening here in Atlanta is a differentiator.

Lee Kantor: [00:14:55] Now, any advice for the entrepreneur out there that’s listening that might be from an underserved community? What would you recommend they do to kind of plug in and to get involved and to give themselves the best chance for success?

John Yates: [00:15:08] I think there are three areas of really focus here. One are these venture funds that I’ve just mentioned, the early stage funds, the Atlanta Technology Angel’s Panoramic Valar Ventures, Zane Ventures, these are all groups that that are helpful and directing folks to the right area. And also some of them have cohorts. I know Zane, for example, has a cohort of entrepreneurs. They bring on on as do several of these other funds. So if you’re an entrepreneur, you may be able to get plugged into that. There’s a launch pad to X, which is primarily for women entrepreneurs who are starting businesses as a way to get plugged in, to learn about how to grow a business. And then the Technology Association of Georgia, which is, I think probably the largest tech organization in the United States, I believe that Larry Williams is CEO mentioned. I think we’re over 30,000 members there, which is phenomenal. But lots and lots of groups within the Technology Association at Georgia, where these entrepreneurs can plug in the metro Atlanta Chamber, is also quite helpful in that regard. And importantly, Venture Atlanta, which has now become one of the largest venture conferences in the country, is a must attend this year. It’ll be October 19th through 20th. It’ll be held at the Woodruff Arts Center, which is going to be fantastic, a great way for us to tie technology and the arts together. And I know being involved with the Woodruff Arts Center on the board, we’re extremely excited about bringing the technology entrepreneurs together with folks in the arts community, but also many of the tech leaders. So if you’re a young entrepreneur, there are a lot of resources there and you want to make sure you get your your registration to attend venture. Atlanta, October will be here before you know it.

Lee Kantor: [00:16:52] Well, John, thank you so much for sharing your story today. If somebody wants to connect with Morris, Manning and Martin or learn more or maybe connect with you, what’s a website website is.

John Yates: [00:17:03] Mhm. Law.com. And I’m also on LinkedIn. That’s a good way to connect with me. I do have quite a few LinkedIn connections and I’m always happy to help people if they’re looking to connect into the network. And so I would say you can reach me at my law.com the website provides all the information, but the email address is Jay Yates at law.com and I appreciate everything that you’re doing and this podcast is very informative and we appreciate the support panoramic as well.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:32] Well, thank you again for sharing your story. You’re doing important work and we appreciate you.

John Yates: [00:17:36] Actually.

Lee Kantor: [00:17:37] All right. This is Lee Kantor SEO next time on Startup Showdown.

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