Tech gurus with Atlanta ties hit it big. What they wish they’d learned sooner.

Atlanta entrepreneur and venture capitalist Jewel Burks Solomon was just 23 when she got the idea for her first startup, Partpic, an industrial parts search company using computer vision.

Snap a photo and Partpic’s technology could identify the part.

At the time, more than a decade ago, Partpic was one of the promising young companies at the Advanced Technology Development Center at Georgia Tech, a hive of entrepreneurs in a Southern tech capital still in its formative stages.

“So I really leaned into the community that I could find,” Burks Solomon said. “Being a part of that incubator was important.”

“It allowed me to connect with mentors and entrepreneurs who had done it before,” she said.

The idea caught the attention of Amazon, and the world’s biggest online seller bought Burks Solomon’s company in 2016.

Burks Solomon said she has made it her mission to fill in the “gaps and holes” that she experienced when she first founded a company.

Now a venture capitalist, Burks Solomon spoke in October at the Women’s Global Leadership Conference at Agnes Scott College on a panel with the theme “From Scale to Sale” with fellow entrepreneurs Jessica Owens and Sanjay Parekh.

Here are some of the hard-earned lessons these startup veterans shared.

When times get tough …

Parekh, an Atlanta entrepreneur who co-founded Digital Envoy, Solidfire and Mirage Data, said it’s important to build out a network of people that will be there even when things go badly.

Even as he works on a startup today, he said he’s “going back to the people that I’ve now known for 20 years,” such as one of the co-founders of PayPal, an early customer of his.

“Keeping in touch with some of those people and making sure that you keep those relationships alive really becomes helpful,” said Parekh, who co-hosts the tech news podcast “Tech Talk Y’all."

“People don’t give money to people they don’t know. People also don’t help people that they don’t know. And so nurturing those relationships is super, super important,” Parekh said.

Metro Atlanta Chamber CEO Katie Kirkpatrick moderated a panel at Agnes Scott College's Women's Global Leadership Conference, with speakers Jessica Owens, Jewel Burks Solomon and Sanjay Parekh. (Kelly Yamanouchi / AJC)

He added that it’s important “to find those people that will help you when things are not going well.”

“It’s really easy when you’re successful to find people to party with,” Parekh said. “Nobody wants to hang out when things are not going well.”

And Burks Solomon said: “It goes back to making sure that you are not working in a silo and retreating, especially when times get hard, making sure that you’re open and talking to people.”

At the venture firm Burks Solomon co-founded, Collab Capital, “we subsidize therapy — free coaching and therapy for our entrepreneurs,” she said.

“Entrepreneurship is super lonely,” Burks Solomon said. “Managing your business and your team is one thing, but also maintaining relationships with your family and figuring out how to manage your kids — all those things can be really difficult for entrepreneurs.”

She said sacrifice is a big part of entrepreneurship. And it’s important to understand what you’re willing to sacrifice.

“For me, I was willing to sacrifice the better part of my 20s to build something that I really cared about. I had to go on an apology tour to my family and friends after I sold the business because I was not present in many ways during the time that I was working on it,” Burks Solomon said. “That was a sacrifice that I was willing to make, and it paid off.”

Capital is key

Burks Solomon said the biggest gap she encountered as a founder in Atlanta was access to capital. “I wasn’t able to raise the amount of money that my peers in Silicon Valley were able to raise,” she said.

With the sale of her company Partpic, “We were able to have a great outcome with Amazon, but I think we could have gone a lot further had we had more access to capital,” Burks Solomon said. “So I’ve made it my mission to work on that access to capital problem for entrepreneurs.”

It’s a problem that’s especially acute for women of color. Black women founders and other minority entrepreneurs face a particularly difficult funding landscape, experts say. Only 2.1% of venture capital funding went to women-only founding teams last year, according to a report from the Female Founders Fund.

Parekh noted that it’s important to be aware that raising funds could narrow your potential outcomes.

While an entrepreneur gets to decide everything and be “the holder of your own destiny,” he said: “The minute you raise money, you’ve got three paths in front of you: You get acquired, you go public, or you go out of business. That’s it.”

“Sometimes those factors are outside of your control,” he added.

The way venture capital firms work, Owens said, is they give money to small startups “to have those startups grow and then to sell or go public, and that money is then returned to their shareholders.”

So, “as soon as you take someone else’s money, to a large extent, over time, you lose control of your business. What that means is that people join your board, they give you money, and they start to take voting share of your company,” said Owens, an Agnes Scott graduate who founded the digital health platform Spark Diagnostics and co-founded health care company Grail in Menlo Park, California. Usually, founders lose voting control of their company by the second round of funding, she said.

Don’t trust everything you see on LinkedIn

The startup veterans acknowledged that entrepreneurs also go through challenging times that aren’t always visible to those on the outside.

“It’s important to remember that everyone goes through life looking at LinkedIn being like, ‘Oh, they’re so amazing.’ It’s because they don’t put the ones that didn’t work on LinkedIn,” Owens said.

“So just remember that part. I built plenty that didn’t work,” Owens said.

And when building a startup, Owens said, “You’re gonna hear ‘no’ most of the time.”

“You’ve gotta be super thick-skinned,” she said.

Burks Solomon added that it’s important to “be mindful that things come full circle. … Just be gracious if you get a no.”

When it’s time to sell …

Owens said there’s one thing that she would have done differently in her path to selling her startup.

She had a baby the weekend that a lot of important decisions got made for the sale of her company, and she realizes now she should have negotiated her equity in the deal sooner.

“It’s hard to think that that really did go down all at once,” Owens said. “I was really naive. … I was like, ‘Oh no, I can just do that next week.’” But that ended up having long-term implications.

Burks Solomon said she was also unprepared when it came time to sell, for a different reason.

“The one thing that I didn’t understand going into an exit was the tax implications, and what I needed to do beforehand to make sure that I was safeguarded,” Burks Solomon said.

“I was just happy that someone was interested in buying my company,” she said, and “excited to get it done, but really didn’t understand all the personal implications.”

Now she knows the importance of having a financial team, including a financial adviser, lawyer and tax expert ahead of time.

“I was so green,” Burks Solomon said. That’s why “it’s so important to have mentors, have people who have been where you’re trying to go, because there’s so many things that you just don’t know until you face it, and at that point it’s maybe too late.”

Life afterward

Burks Solomon said after pouring so much of herself into her startup and then selling it, it was difficult for her to establish her own identity.

“My identity was very wrapped up in Partpic,” she said. “It was hard for me to break away from.”

When she pitched the company to others, she always wore an orange dress. “I wanted people to know Partpic colors, and me associated with it. So I had that as my uniform for four years.”

“And when I sold the business, I had a really difficult time because I didn’t even know how to introduce myself. I was still used to saying, ‘Hello. My name is Jewel Burks, I’m CEO of Partpic,’” she said. “So it was hard for me to kind of take away my business identity and my personal identity and build who I actually want to be as a person.”