Atlanta Tech Community Goals for 2020

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?