A few months ago I heard that somewhere in the neighborhood of 55% GA Tech graduates stay and work in Atlanta within five years of graduation. Now, that might sound like a solid number, but that leaves a tremendous amount of talent that moves out of Atlanta and adds to the talent pool of other cities. Combine the talent from GA Tech with the desire to get more GA Tech students involved in startups, and there’s a big opportunity for Atlanta.
Here’s a modest proposal: provide $100,000 salary job offers to the top 100 engineering and computer science majors each year to work for a startup in Atlanta. Call it the Tech100.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that. Let’s look at a few of the potential details:
- The top 100 undergraduate students would be defined by GPA (e.g. if there are 20 different majors, it would be for the top five students in each major). Yes, there are other things to look at besides GPA, but that’s an easy place to start.
- Many of the top students will go on to grad school or professional school, and aren’t interested in working, significantly reducing the number of students to which this applies
- Current entry-level technical people make $55,000 – $70,000 in Atlanta as software engineers, sales engineers, technical project managers, etc, so there’s a $35k gap between $65k and $100k
- Something like the excellent Orr Entrepreneurial Fellowship found in Indiana would have to be created to subsidize the salary difference for startups between market-rate salaries and the $100k salary along with a management training-like program where the Tech100 meet regularly, listen to guest speakers, and gain exposure to everything Atlanta has to offer.
- Timing wise, it would be a two year program with a celebration at the end and the goal that these talented engineers would stay in the entrepreneurial community and make a lasting impact on Atlanta
- As for costs, assume there’s room for 20 people per year, so $700,000 in direct salary cost plus a few hundred grand to run the program, for a total of $1 million per year. Add it a second cohort since there would be two running at any given time and you’d need an annual budget of $1.7 million
The Tech100 would add 20 new talented people to the Atlanta startup community each year, who would then become many of Atlanta’s future technical and entrepreneurial leaders.
What else? What are your thoughts on the Tech100?
David Cummings on Startups 
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