A number of people have asked me why I’m working on the Atlanta Tech Village when I could be taking time off and relaxing on the beach. Beyond the amazing opportunity to build something that will have an unbelievable impact on Atlanta and the Southeast, there’s another strong reason: I simply had to do it. Literally, for 12 years straight, I’ve battled the traditional commercial real estate world (#1 startup tip for commercial real estate) playing all sorts of games to make it work for a series of software companies with little visibility into just how fast we’d grow and how much space we needed to take (at one point we had 40 people and needed 14,000 square feet of space but went ahead and took 20,000 square feet because it was a good deal and we had an outside chance of needing it all, which proved to be correct).
Historically, it didn’t make sense for me to invest in real estate as my company was growing and eating tons of cash. Real estate is capital intensive, and my taste (a desire for Class A- space), makes it an expensive proposition to build something that really excites me. I knew that I wanted to solve the office space challenge for tech companies and startups for years but I never did anything about it because the timing wasn’t right. It’s a problem that I couldn’t get out of my mind — it never went away. Now, I can help build a solution that is perfect for companies between 1 and 25 people that don’t have good visibility into their staffing levels as well as have a desire to be part of a community full of cool people doing cool things. My itching needed scratching and I’m all in.
The best startups come from solving problems you can’t get out of your mind.
What’s on your mind?
David Cummings on Startups 
David – love your idea for the Tech Village. Congrats on the B2B camp. I was the one from SAS who asked about big company culture. I’d like to talk w/ you about how we could help with the Tech Village.
so basically ATV is a coworking space??
J