Editor’s note: Jim Roberts is Executive Director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of North Carolina Wilmington. He is writing about the Southeast Venture Conference for WRAL TechWire. More than 50 companies from across the southeast, including numerous ones from North Carolina, are being showcased to investors. What are the VCs looking for? Roberts also reports on the VC money panel discussion.

ATLANTA – At the opening day of this annual entrepreneur and venture capital conference on Tuesday, the crowd heard some new terms and listened to startup company pitches from South Carolina to Texas.

They also heard familiar wisdom from people who recovered or even resurrected from the Dot Com bust, post 9-11 and even the Great Recession after the 2008 financial collapse.

Speakers and investors talked about new terms such as “Unicorns”, “New World Problems such as what more is possible with Google Glass and wearable technologies” and “the Collaborative Economy”.

One of the original southeastern based Dot Com CEOs returned to the stage at this annual event to share the wisdom of the last 15 years to kickoff the conference. Doug Lebda who started LendingTree (Now Tree.com) in Charlotte during the Dot Com Boom shared his speech about the 15 lessons learned.

While he admitted that Charlotte was a tough place to be the “Entrepreneurial Firebrand”, he seemed to be very happy to have a second chance to do it right after buying back the Tree from IAC and Barry Diller.

Lebda shared many pieces of advice and the audience reacted most to wisdom such as “teams win”, “customers are people, not pie charts” then finished with “You can’t win if you don’t play”. He told the story about he almost chose not to start LendingTree and had accepted a job with one of the North Carolina banks before changing his mind.

Familiar Lesson about Aspirin Solutions to Solve Pains

The second opening keynote told a different story but had similar scars. Reggie Aggarwal is the founder of CVent, the event logistics firm. Cvent was started in northern Virginia. The firm was founded out of the Indian CEO Tech Council (now “TiE-DC”) which Aggarwal founded.

Aggarwal told many stories about the sacrifices about not taking a large salary as founding CEO and living with his parents beyond his twenties. He truly got the audiences’ attention when he asked several audience members (including me when I raised my hand) if we would rather start a company with an aspirin solution or a vitamin solution. Aggarwal made it clear it is better to have an aspirin solution to solve the pains of paying clients.

Aggarwal’s company grew quickly when he moved to the DC area from 6 employees to 125 people in less than a year. But after the “perfect storm” of the dot com crash and September 11th, he reduced the employee number from 125 to 26 employees and faced a potential bankruptcy.

He also talked about the term “Unicorn” for the 40 companies born in the last ten years that became companies with billion dollar revenue numbers. The unicorn meaning that only 4 companies per year achieved the billion dollar success vs the thousands of companies started every year.

He continued to share advice about persistency and consistency, being smart about sharing equity with cofounders and the value of your talented employees. But of course, the audience of entrepreneurs and investors perked up when he discussed the experience of the public offering on Wall St. and the importance of creating a culture of innovation within your company to help you achieve that success.

Editor’s note: Jim Roberts is Executive Director of the Center for Innovation and Entrepreneurship at University of North Carolina Wilmington. CIE is a new accelerator facility to nurture the startup ecosystem of Wilmington and coastal North Carolina. CIE will host the Coastal Entrepreneur Awards on May 22 in Wilmington. You can follow Jim on Twitter @UNCW_Startups or visit www.uncw.edu/cie