The Atlanta startup culture is a bit different from the Bay Area. Less consumer internet, more B2B. The investors tend to come from a real-estate, or similar background, and do not always understand technology. That's partly why the bootstrapping/lean startup approach is so critical around here. It's just not worth wasting time trying to get a permission slip from an old rich guy in most cases.
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"investors tend to come from real estate" Yowza, you're about 20 years behind the times. Local angel group has 100+ investors, is 15 years old and has invested in probably 60+ companies in tech space by now. 4 GA VC firms are raising new funds, ATV has just created a new accelerator, state of GA has just created a state based $100M fund, Flashpoint has helped raise roughly $30M in 18 months and so on and so on.
Flashpoint is pretty great!
I am going based upon what I have heard in various startup circle discussions. I am usually the "hacker" in the group of others. I have myself stayed as far away from raising funds as possible. I know I have watched friends in the startup community spend months or years courting the angel investment community, going to dinner theatre (pitch events) and come away empty handed and dejected. Most would be better off just building their MVP and marketing it with every ounce of passion that they put into attempting to raise an Angel round.
A few years ago, I had a SaaS startup in the ATDC but at just about every meeting I was one of the few people in the group capable of coding.
One thing lead to another and I ended up bowing out of the full on startup myself and ended up creating a Ruby on Rails development consultancy instead. It has been growing steadily for the last two years and I am pretty happy with this direction given the massive opportunity to work with a variety of startups build their products to test their product/market fit.