How Your Venture Can Avoid Failing When You Start Winning

By dennis.hayes on

SpartansFirst and American Technology Venture Lab

Sponsor (Event 1 of 2):

How Your Venture Can Avoid Failing When You Start Winning

5:30-7:30, Thursday April 23, 2026

 

Presented in cooperation with Tech North Atlanta

 

Hosted by Tech North Atlanta at 925 North Point Pkwy Suite 130, Alpharetta, GA 30005

Register Here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/1986217063705?aff=oddtdtcreator

 

SpartansFirst and ATVL

Sponsor (Event 2 of 2):

How Your Venture Can Avoid Failing When You Start Winning

8:30-10:30 am, Thursday, April 24, 2026

 

Presented in cooperation with the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech

 

Hosted by the ATDC at: the Community Room, 75 5th Street NW, Suite 2000, Atlanta, GA 30308

Register Here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/how-your-venture-can-avoid-failing-when-you-start-winning-tickets-1985940521560?aff=oddtdtcreator


 

 

How Your Venture Can Avoid Failing When You Start Winning
The AI Productivity, Regulation, Performance, and Key-Man Risks No One Warns You About

NOW, at the very moment when early traction turns into visibility, attention, and growth pressure, most technology ventures become more fragile—not more secure. This seminar hosted by the ATDC at Georgia Tech is designed for founders who are approaching that inflection point, along with the mentors and advisors responsible for guiding them through it. The program brings together four deeply experienced leaders to examine why success exposes hidden risks in AI adoption, regulation, system performance, and leadership continuity—and how founders can address those risks before they become public, expensive, or irreversible.

The session opens with Dennis Hayes, chairman and CEO of SpartansFirst (https://spartansfirst.org) and the American Technology Venture Lab (ATVL) (https://americantechnologyventurelab.org) and owner of Genesis Technology Advisors and Investors (GTAI), who frames the modern startup reality: AI is no longer optional, but unmanaged AI is dangerous. Hayes will demonstrate how secure, purpose-built AI platforms—such as the SpartansFirst Secure AI Launchpad powered by hatz.ai—can serve as an AI laboratory for startups, enabling disciplined experimentation, planning, development, and operational support from the earliest stages. His focus is on using AI as infrastructure, not hype, to prepare ventures for real customers and real scrutiny, including how productivity is influenced by an “AI-first” philosophy.

Next, Steve Britt, general counsel of National AI Association (www.thenaia.org) and founder and managing partner of Britt Law (www.brittlawllc.com), addresses the external forces that often blindside successful startups. Britt examines the rapidly evolving legal and regulatory environment surrounding AI, data, and personal information, explaining why fragmented state-based approaches create hidden exposure for growing ventures. His presentation connects regulatory strategy directly to product design, scalability, and long-term viability.

The third presentation features James Pulley, co-founder and chief research scientist for Perfacuity (https://perfacuity.com) and Neoload Professional Services product manager for Tricentis (https://www.tricentis.com), who introduces the emerging discipline of software performance risk management. Pulley explains why performance failures rarely occur in isolation and why they surface precisely when attention spikes—during launches, media exposure, or sudden growth. He elevates performance from a technical concern to an executive-level business risk that directly affects revenue, operations, and reputation.

The program concludes with Cody Reynolds PhD, founder of Riffle Strategies, who focuses on what happens when ventures outgrow their original assumptions. Reynolds addresses key-man risk, leadership transitions, ownership structures, and exit readiness—helping founders and investors protect value, reduce disruption, and avoid the costly mistakes that often appear only after success is underway.

Together, these perspectives give founders, mentors, and advisors a clear, integrated view of how to survive their initial success—by anticipating risk, building resilience into systems and governance, and preparing early for the realities that follow winning.

 

Key Points Demonstrating the Value of This Seminar

  • Survive and Scale Initial Success: Attend to learn how to identify and mitigate the hidden vulnerabilities that emerge precisely when a venture gains traction. The program focuses on preventing the costly, irreversible mistakes that often happen when early growth pressure makes startups more fragile rather than more secure.
  • Build Resilient Technology and Operations: Gain actionable strategies for implementing secure, disciplined AI (rather than relying on unmanaged hype) and learn how to proactively manage software performance risks so your systems do not crash during critical moments of high visibility, such as product launches or media exposure.
  • Protect Long-Term Enterprise Value: Understand how to safeguard the company's future by navigating complex, fragmented legal and regulatory environments (especially concerning data and AI), while effectively managing "key-man" risks, leadership transitions, and exit readiness before they derail the business.

 

Dennis Hayes is a Georgia Tech alumnus and pioneering technology entrepreneur best known as the founder of Hayes Microcomputer Products and the creator of the Hayes Smart modem and the Hayes Standard AT command set—innovations that provided the practical on-ramp to the information superhighway during the formative years of the personal computer industry in the 1980s and 1990s. By standardizing how computers controlled modems, Hayes helped transform data communications from a specialist activity into a mass-market capability, enabling the rapid growth of online services, bulletin board systems, and ultimately the modern internet economy.

After building and leading one of the most influential companies of the PC era, Hayes has focused his later career on strengthening entrepreneurial ecosystems and expanding access to emerging technologies. He is the founder of SpartansFirst, a community-oriented nonprofit dedicated to closing gaps in education, accessibility, and technology awareness, with a strong emphasis on practical innovation that directly benefits local communities.

Hayes also founded the American Technology Venture Lab, a second nonprofit organization that delivers objective-based mentoring and educational programs for early-stage science and technology ventures. Modeled on disciplined, outcome-driven approaches to venture development, ATVL helps founders prepare for scale by focusing on product–market fit, value proposition, proof of concept, distribution strategy, branding, and long-term organizational sustainability.

Among the initiatives Hayes actively promotes and supports is the SpartansFirst Secure AI Launchpad (SAIL), powered by the hatz.ai platform. Through SAIL, founders gain access to a secure, fixed-cost AI environment that functions as an AI laboratory—allowing ventures to safely experiment, develop, and deploy AI solutions for product development, operations, planning, research, and analysis. The goal is not experimentation for its own sake, but disciplined adoption of AI that improves productivity, decision-making, and readiness for real customers.

Across every phase of his career, Dennis Hayes has remained focused on practical innovation—building tools, systems, and institutions that help technology move from possibility to real-world impact.

 

Steve Britt is a seasoned attorney with deep expertise in technology law, data privacy, and artificial intelligence. He serves as Chief Counsel for the National Artificial Intelligence Association (NAIA), where he leads the association’s legal strategy and policy work—helping shape clear, practical frameworks that support responsible AI innovation while enabling businesses and policymakers to navigate a rapidly evolving regulatory landscape.

At NAIA, Britt plays a central role in advancing a coherent national approach to AI policy. He works to promote rules that are understandable, implementable, and grounded in how AI systems are actually designed, trained, deployed, and monitored. A key theme of his work is reducing the compliance and operational friction created by a patchwork of state-by-state AI requirements. Britt advocates for nationally consistent standards that preserve room for innovation while still delivering real accountability—so organizations are not forced to navigate fifty different regulatory regimes for the same technology stack.

Britt’s policy work addresses the core legal questions shaping AI adoption across sectors, including: governance and accountability structures within organizations; transparency and documentation expectations that are realistic for fast-moving models and vendors; risk-based compliance approaches that scale obligations to use-case impact; procurement and deployment standards for AI used in government and regulated industries; and liability considerations for automated and algorithmic decision-making. He engages with stakeholders to encourage policy that promotes competition and national competitiveness, while also protecting civil liberties and maintaining clear lines of responsibility when AI is used in consequential contexts.

In addition to AI governance, Britt emphasizes privacy policy as foundational to sustainable AI development. He supports privacy frameworks that are comprehensible to consumers and workable for businesses—favoring clear definitions, consistent obligations, and practical compliance pathways over fragmented, conflicting rules. His work focuses on aligning privacy expectations with modern data realities, including data minimization and purpose limitation where appropriate, meaningful notice and consent, vendor and third-party risk management, and strong data security practices. In the AI context, he also addresses issues such as responsible data sourcing, data governance controls, and the handling of sensitive information in training and deployment—helping organizations reduce risk while still enabling legitimate innovation.

Britt is known for translating highly technical concepts into actionable legal guidance. He advises business leaders, product teams, and policymakers on AI governance, regulatory compliance, risk management, data governance, privacy, and related technology transactions. His approach is pragmatic and business-oriented: promote innovation, reduce legal uncertainty, and build compliance strategies that teams can actually execute—without overpromising or relying on purely theoretical models of how technology works.

Prior to his current work, Britt served as Counsel for Cyber, Data Privacy and Artificial Intelligence at Parker Poe Adams & Bernstein LLP, where he advised clients on complex regulatory and compliance challenges involving data and emerging technologies. He earned his Juris Doctor (J.D.) from West Virginia University College of Law. He is also the founder and managing partner of Britt Law.
 

James Pulley is widely regarded as one of the pioneering figures in modern software performance engineering, often referred to by peers as the “godfather of performance engineering.” He brings decades of hands-on experience diagnosing why complex systems slow down, fail, or collapse under pressure—whether during Black Friday traffic surges, a high-visibility Shark Tank appearance, or the first national media exposure following a major product launch.

Pulley graduated from Furman University with a computing and business–oriented degree that shaped his lifelong focus on the intersection of technical behavior and business outcomes. Early in his career, he worked with enterprise software and infrastructure leaders including Mercury Interactive and Microsoft, gaining deep exposure to operating systems, enterprise tooling, distributed architectures, and large-scale production environments.

Over time, Pulley became known for his ability to see performance as a system-level problem rather than a tooling or testing exercise. His work spans application architecture, infrastructure, networks, databases, user behavior, and organizational decision-making—focusing on how interactions between these elements create emergent performance failures. He later served as Chief Performance Officer at a global engineering consultancy, where he led enterprise performance engineering practices, advised Fortune-class organizations, and helped mature performance engineering from reactive testing into a disciplined engineering function.

Today, Pulley is the founder of PERFACUITY, a company defining a new category: software performance risk management. This approach treats performance as a measurable business risk—identifying where architectural, operational, or organizational choices create exposure to outages, slowdowns, revenue loss, or reputational damage. PERFACURTY enables organizations to assess, prioritize, and manage performance risk across the full lifecycle of complex systems, long before failures become public incidents.

At technical conferences, Pulley is known for combining deep engineering insight with real-world war stories, offering audiences a practical, systems-thinking perspective on how performance truly works—and why it so often fails when it matters most.

 

Dr. Cody Reynolds is a seasoned advisor, strategist, and operator specializing in succession planning, ownership transitions, and exit readiness for science- and technology-driven organizations as well as family-owned and multigenerational businesses. He brings a rare combination of academic rigor, hands-on startup experience, and real-world transaction insight to organizations facing complex ownership and continuity decisions.

Dr. Reynolds earned his PhD from Clemson University, where his work focused on innovation, commercialization, and the mechanisms by which new technologies move from research environments into viable, 

 

Metro Atlanta Seminar Contacts

Tech North Atlanta

 

Georgia Tech ATDC

 

 

Seminar Speakers

  • Dennis Hayes: Dennis.Hayes@SpartanFirst.org
  • Steve Britt: steve@brittlawllc.com
  • James Pulley: jpulley@journeymanpublishing.com
  • Cody Reynolds: cody@rifflestrategies.com

 

Other Contacts

 

Catering (TBD)