After yesterday’s post on the Number of Startups for Atlanta to be a Top 10 Startup City, I received the ideal response back from the community: let’s track them. Startup Atlanta is working on putting a program together to do just that. Startups, unlike something more common (e.g. restaurants), are more difficult to track. So, how do we measure the number of active startups in Atlanta?
Here are a few ideas to measure active startups in Atlanta:
- Provide a public, community-editable Wiki powered by Google Sites or SquareSpace
- Track specific metrics like founders, number of employees in LinkedIn, amount of money raised (if applicable), names of investors, names of advisors, etc (or link back to CrunchBase and make sure CrunchBase is kept current)
- Decide on a common definition of a startup e.g. a business with a proprietary product focused on growth
- Create standards for what’s an active vs inactive startup e.g. at least one, full-time person is dedicated to the business
- Coordinate with local events in town like meetups, networking groups, etc to get the names of startups that attended to cross reference
- Use the list of companies from startup community centers like ATDC and the Atlanta Tech Village
Measuring both the number of active startups and their progress helps us understand how we’re doing as a city as well as how we’re tracking against our goals.
What else? What are your thoughts on measuring the number of active startups in Atlanta?
David Cummings on Startups 
Bullet point #3 “Decide on a common definition of a startup” can be quite challenging. I few years back I was pondering that question myself and noticed that there was no Google answer to the query “what is a technology startup.” So I decided to make one. You can find it here. http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/07/what-is-a-technology-startup.html. It’s not a perfect answer but a good start. The comments are worth a read.
Bullet point #3 “Decide on a common definition of a startup” can be quite challenging. A few years back I was pondering that question myself and noticed that there was no Google answer to the query “what is a technology startup.” So I decided to make one. You can find it here. http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/07/what-is-a-technology-startup.html. It’s not a perfect answer but a good start. The comments are worth a read.
We’re using AngelList to start, and we encourage ATL startups to sign up there if they haven’t already. CrunchBase is also a good idea.
Those are great ideas. We should also have a monthly newsletter that lists these startups and mentions the significant milestones they reach.