Over the past month I’ve had the opportunity to talk with a number of people in the Atlanta tech startup community about what’s working and what they’d like to see improved. There’s no shortage of ideas across all categories on how to make the community stronger, more vibrant, and more successful. One thing I like to do is to set goals, with metrics, to work towards as well as work backwards from, in order to align and focus the community.
With the year 2020 slightly over seven years away, there’s plenty of time to do great things. Here are a few goals for the Atlanta tech startup community for 2020:
- Create 10,000 new tech company jobs
- Have a new billion dollar, acquisitive, publicly traded anchor tech company in town (AutoTrader? AirWatch?)
- Deliver over 100,000 square feet of startup-focused office space with 500+ people in them (ATDC currently has 40,000 square feet)
- Participate in $1 billion in exits annually
- Facilitate $300 million in institutional investments annually
- Increase the number of GA Tech engineer co-ops that work at tech companies by 50%
- Win three Inc. 500 awards annually
Many of these are big, round numbers that are readily trackable. Data is available for Georgia for most of these categories and it will take some effort to distill the Atlanta portion of the data. We’ve made major strides in the community over the last seven years and I’m excited about the next seven.
What else? What are some other Atlanta tech community goals for 2020?
David Cummings on Startups 
Great post. However, 50% is a low goal on the co-ops front. We can get a lot more working for earlier stage companies if executed right.
Admirable goals. Would be interested to see each goal compared relative to today’s numbers like you did for the ATDC square footage.
As a stretch goal I’d like to see three defined tech competencies nurtured by companies that are diversified enough to ensure Atlanta survives a business cycle in one of the three.
1,000 angel or venture investments made by 2020.
Not necessarily startup-related, but Atlanta businesses would be well served by inexpensive access to fast, reliable, high quality internet bandwidth, a la Chattanooga.
David, I would love to hear your thoughts on how we can make Tallahassee a more entrepreneurial city and what types of goals we should be setting. Thanks, Eunice!