Fixing everything with PartPic in Atlanta - Small Empires S. 2 Ep. 1

Somewhere in Atlanta, a woman picked up a phone, listened to a stranger describe a piece of metal as "silver and kind of round," and decided she was done surviving a broken system. That woman built a company to fix it.

Jewel Burks wasn't supposed to be a founder.

She was supposed to field angry phone calls at McMaster-Carr, one of the largest industrial distributors on the planet. Customers called in furious because they got the wrong part. And why wouldn't they? The identification process was basically a game of telephone... played with a phone book.

A literal phone book. In 2014.

Customer says, "It's silver, kind of round." Sales rep flips through a dead tree catalog the size of a toddler. Everybody crosses their fingers. BAM, wrong part ships. Customer calls back angrier. Cycle repeats.

Partpic was born from that frustration. Computer vision meets industrial distribution. Snap a photo of the mystery widget, and the software identifies it in seconds... model number, purchasing link, done. No guessing. No catalog. No prayers.

Simple idea. Brutally hard to build.

The Part Nobody Romanticizes

Here's where the startup story usually gets the Hollywood treatment. Founder has idea. Founder raises money. Founder changes the world.

Nobody talks about the middle part... the year Jewel ran Partpic on fumes. A $100K friends-and-family round. Competition prize money. Side jobs to feed the company. No consistent salaries for anyone on the team.

Let that land.

She wasn't choosing between cappuccinos and drip coffee. She was choosing between paying herself and keeping the lights on for a technology that required significant capital investment in machine learning and computer vision research. Her technical team... people she recruited by literally hanging out at Georgia Tech, sneaking into the library, attending random club meetings... they were building something genuinely difficult. Visual recognition for unbranded industrial parts isn't a weekend hackathon project.

Three months without food. Three days without water. Three minutes without hope. Jewel was operating in that hope margin... the place where you haven't eaten in a while but you keep showing up because you believe the thing you're building matters.

The Herd That Won't Move First

Then comes venture capital fundraising. The necessary evil.

Alexis Ohanian nailed it in the episode: fundraising is Groundhog Day. Same pitch. Same questions. Same energy required every single time. What he described next is the part that makes founders want to scream into a pillow.

"We've had a few commitments from folks who want to join but just don't want to lead the round."

Read that again.

Investors saying, "I believe in you... but not enough to go first." Ohanian called it what it is: lack of conviction. The same investors who will tell you they're independent thinkers, not herd followers... and then wait for someone else to lead.

This is the seed-stage funding gap that crushes good companies. Not bad ideas. Not weak teams. Just the paralysis of nobody wanting to be the first signature on the check.

Geography as Glass Ceiling

And then there's the Atlanta question.

"Are you going to be headquartered in Atlanta? Will you move out to Silicon Valley?"

Jewel heard this over and over. The quiet implication: Your city isn't serious enough for serious investment.

Let's look at what Atlanta actually offered Partpic:

- Georgia Tech... world-class computer science and engineering talent, literally across the street - Proximity to major industrial distribution customers and headquarters - A growing Atlanta tech ecosystem with real infrastructure - Lower operating costs than the Bay Area

Ohanian put it bluntly: a startup needs to be wherever it will be most successful. Not wherever investors can schedule weekly lunches. The geographic bias in venture capital isn't just annoying... it's economically wasteful. It starves companies that have strategic reasons for being where they are.

The Piece That Doesn't Fit the Pitch Deck

Here's what hit hardest.

Jewel walked into TechCrunch Disrupt knowing her team "looks quite different than most of the teams people attending TechCrunch have probably seen before." She was pitching a solution for an industry nobody at tech conferences thinks about. She wasn't building the next photo-sharing app. She was fixing actual infrastructure.

And she was terrified of how they'd receive her.

They gave her a standing ovation. Won the Enterprise Disrupter category.

But here's the thing... she shouldn't have had to wonder. The quality of the solution should have been the only variable. The fact that she carried the additional weight of representation, of wondering whether the room would see her before they saw her work... that's a tax that doesn't show up on any balance sheet.

She carried it anyway. Showed up anyway. Built the thing anyway.

Light doesn't fight darkness. It just shows up.

What the Copper Macaroni Teaches Us

There's a beautiful moment in the episode where someone holds up a copper 90-degree elbow fitting and calls it a "copper macaroni." And the National Builder Supply founder says his mom would call it the same thing.

That's the entire problem Partpic was solving, distilled into one moment. The gap between what something is and what regular humans call it. The translation layer between expertise and experience.

Every industry has its copper macaronis. Every field has knowledge locked behind jargon, catalogs, and gatekeepers. The founders who matter aren't always building the flashiest thing. Sometimes they're building the bridge between confusion and clarity.

Jewel built that bridge while paying for the lumber out of her own pocket.

If you're building something real... something that solves a problem people haven't even figured out how to describe yet... and the investors want you to move, and the round won't close, and the salary isn't coming... hear this. You're not behind. You're in the part of the story nobody films. The part between the idea and the ovation. Keep showing up. The room will catch up to you. 💪

--- Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYOVGVmWc5U