121G Amplifying the Entrepreneurial Impact of the Auburn Family

Alumni-founded company is actively recruiting the very best software developers at Auburn University to help support the company’s extraordinary growth opportunities 

The Auburn Family shows up.  

The founder and three key executives of 121G, a start-up investment, consulting and marketing services firm headquartered in Carrolton, Georgia, recently visited Auburn’s New Venture Accelerator (NVA) to reconnect and explore opportunities to strengthen new employee recruitment initiatives for 121G’s growing business needs as well as assist the NVA in progressing student- and faculty-founded start-ups at Auburn. 

Top executives Tee Green, Greg Shilling and Alex Hoskins – all Auburn Harbert College of Business alumni – and fellow 121G executive Jonathan Samples met with Lou Bifano, Ward Swift and other Entrepreneurs-in-Residence at the NVA to discuss ways 121G and the NVA can redouble their efforts on both sides of what promises to be a mutually beneficial relationship. Green, Shilling and Samples were key executives of Greenway Medical, an electronic health records (EHR) company they founded, took public and eventually sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2013 and now operating as Greenway Health. All four serve as partners in 121G’s rapidly expanding investment, consulting and marketing services business enterprise.

The NVA sat down with Hoskins, co-founder and General Manager of 121GM, 121G’s digital marketing division, to find out how the firm’s budding relationship with the NVA could deliver tremendous value in identifying potential new hires from Auburn in support of 121G’s ambitious growth plans as well as in helping drive the success of NVA-resident companies. 

NVA: A key component of your plans to form an expanded, mutually beneficial relationship with Auburn’s NVA is your desire to recruit the very best college graduates you can from Auburn. Can you tell us what’s driving that need and what you are looking for? 

Hoskins: First off, we are in an accelerated growth mode thanks to the strategic discovery and implementation process we’ve perfected and continue to develop. As a result, we’re currently looking to find new developers, and we like to recruit students while they’re still in college. In fact, we even have some high school students currently working with us. 

The reason for that approach is we don’t want to hire someone who has, let’s say, five years in some corporate setting and then you have to either try to break specific habits or you have to reteach them a whole new way of doing things. 

Ours is a learning environment, it’s fun, it’s a family. When you capture these young kids at a high school and college level, you can offer them an environment of intellectual expansion that will serve them well in their careers. They will be able to expand their knowledge base. They will have the culture, the ability to grow, and – one of the most important things – they’ll have the opportunity to step outside their comfort zone. 

NVA: Why would a top software development or business student at Auburn want to consider 121G?  

Hoskins: 121G is a multifaceted business that offers a comprehensive portfolio of several different types of integrated services, resources, knowledge sets and experience that we bring to bear on every investment, partnership and service engagement. 

On the capital investment side of the business, 121G invests in innovative and passion-driven companies across diverse industries – including healthcare, technology, construction, human resources and outdoor sports – to help fuel intelligent business growth.  

Our advisory services arm provides business consulting services that include leadership development, technology innovation, sales and marketing strategy and digital marketing support for invested companies, related partners and marketing services clients.  

On the intellectual property front, 121G designs, develops and markets patented and copyrighted intellectual property assets in conjunction with leading software development clients, partners and their customers. 

What we strive for is to be the best-of-breed in all we do. We have 90 team members with more than 700 total years of combined hands-on and executive leadership experience, whether that’s in software technology development, team building, staffing, EHR management, application implementation – things like that. There’s just a wealth of experience and knowledge at 121 G.  

NVA: 90 employees are certainly a lot – what do most of these folks do? Their backgrounds, experience sets? 

Hoskins: I would say that between 60 and 70 percent of our team are primarily developers – software developers, to be exact. That skill set plays into virtually everything we do, from assessing potential investments to assisting client companies with their own product and service development efforts as well as providing marketing services to a more established clientele.  

But at 121G, the lines of responsibility, cross-functional engagement and ultimately – contribution – of our team members are purposely blurred. That’s an intentional part of how we position and deliver our services as well as how we utilize our collective, intertwined expertise on behalf of our clients, their partners and even their own customers. 

We aren’t pure “money guys” – we take an active, hands-on approach to the investments we make by leveraging resident firm experience and expertise to help drive the success of the companies we invest in. We target those promising start-ups for whom our extensive marketing capabilities can provide the leg up they need to succeed in highly competitive markets. 

NVA: There seems to be a “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” kind of thing going on here. Can you expand a bit on how that works? 

Hoskins: Absolutely there is. You not only have decades of experience from a technology perspective – from an industry-leading software development side – but you also have the leadership qualities that come along with that. The team building aspect, for example – the ability to help build a culture at a company that can drive growth – is one of the keys to being able to scale. Because the team at 121G has done it so many times, and the formula we’ve created to do so has been implemented with such great success, we are confident in our business value proposition. 

Implementing that model in a given new venture opportunity may come in the form of an ongoing management consultancy and services engagement, a temporary C-suite leadership appointment or a hybrid of the two. It all depends on the specific capabilities and needs of the particular start-up. 

One critical advantage to this strategy is that it aligns perfectly with the needs of the companies we choose to work with. More often than not, they have leadership and operational demands that extend beyond the capabilities of their initial start-up team. That is to be expected, especially when we’re talking about taking an initial idea and a working prototype and turning it into a promising new business enterprise poised to go to the next level. 

NVA: We understand that this comprehensive, integrated portfolio of services offerings is delivering returns beyond your direct clients and invested companies, right? 

Hoskins: Yes, that’s true. Our comprehensive and integrated service offerings extend far beyond our direct clients and invested companies, creating value across the entire industry. For example, we began working with a healthcare start-up that quickly expanded through acquisitions, eventually becoming part of a publicly traded industry leader. Through this evolution, our expertise continued to drive impact, supporting not just one company but an entire network of organizations as they scaled.

Now, we’re collaborating with one of the largest companies in the space to enhance healthcare services for a vast customer base, demonstrating how our work contributes to broader industry advancements. Our ability to support companies at every stage—from emerging start-ups to major public enterprises—ensures that our influence extends well beyond individual partnerships, creating ripple effects that drive innovation and growth throughout the market.

NVA: One of those core competencies you have pertains to intellectual property (IP) development – patent and copyright identification and registration initiatives. What role do you play here? 

Hoskins: We have a lot of capital invested in the IP our client companies are developing and bringing to market. That effort pays off in a big way, not only for us and the client companies that create and develop that IP, but also for the greater market impacted by those groundbreaking innovations. The licensing value of those assets plays a big role in terms of return on investment – not only for us, but for the major customers those assets impact. 

NVA: Our plan is to have office space in the same building as the NVA to serve our two-fold strategy, where we will be bringing in interns for marketing and computer science or development, with the potential to come back and work for 121G in Auburn after they graduate.  

That’s the plan right now, and we are excited at the extraordinary possibilities that will bring for us, for the NVA and for the entire Auburn Entrepreneurship Ecosystem at Auburn University. 

If you are a soon-to-be Auburn grad with what it takes to thrive in a fast-paced, supportive environment where the sky’s the limit, contact Alex at ahoskins@121g.io.