Last week, I was catching up with an entrepreneur, and he was taking me through all of their progress and new direction. When I first met with him several years prior, he outlined a vision of where the market was going, why it was an important trend, and how they were going to capitalize on it. While all of that made sense and felt intuitively correct, it’s still hard to know whether things will play out the way a visionary suggests.
What I’ve come to appreciate is that an initial vision is just that—a place to start. With that starting point, time in the market, talking to potential customers, talking to potential partners, and learning as much as possible as quickly as possible are always the most important places to begin. Over time, the vision will evolve, and the direction will evolve based on market feedback and trends in the space.
The key is to stand for something: provide a vision and tell the world where things are headed. With that, it’s incredible to see how people will buy into the vision. People will volunteer to help. People will make introductions. This idea that if you’re on a path to make an impact, to build a company, or to do something important, the world does want to help.
My recommendation is to articulate a clear vision, sell the future, and then continuously adapt, solicit feedback, and iterate. The vision is seen, but the journey to achieve it is unknown.
Last week, I attended a conference to share the story of South Downtown Atlanta. This wasn’t the typical startup or tech conference I’ve been to hundreds of times over the years, so it was particularly interesting to meet new people and hear new stories in the retail and placemaking world of real estate.
Upon arriving in the hotel lobby, I was given the traditional conference badge. However, there was something unusual about this one. On the back of the name badge was a handwritten Post-it note listing six or seven people I should seek out and meet at the conference. I hadn’t seen this before and immediately thought, “What a great idea.” The main goal of conferences is to learn, grow, and meet new people. Often, it’s a hit-or-miss process, trying to find people with relevant experiences, complementary offerings, or interesting projects.
Conference curator Eric Weatherholtz used his extensive relationships and knowledge of who’s doing what, why, when, and where to play matchmaker by providing a personalized list of people for me to meet. Considering there were 200 to 300 attendees, a significant amount of time and effort went into this process. Eric and his team’s efforts paid off, and the conference was a huge success.
Entrepreneurs would do well to organize their own conferences, industry events, or customer meet-ups. As part of hosting these events, take the time to formally play matchmaker ahead of the event. Think through the potential relationships and connections attendees should make, and use the event to ensure they maximize their time. Make personalized badge named intro Post-it notes part of the conference experience.
Last week, I was talking to an entrepreneur, and the topic of corporate culture and core values came up. We spent some time diving deep into lessons learned, and I shared one of my favorite best practices around the interview component of the hiring process. Of course, there are numerous great books and blog posts on hiring well, including Geoff Smart’s book Who (more notes on Topgrading) and First Round Review’s post titled 6 Must Reads for Hiring Tactics that Break the Mold.
In a startup, it’s assumed you’ve already defined your core values, as outlined in books like Good to Great. Once you’ve defined these values, an important element is aligning interview questions with them. Naturally, if a core value is something general, you can’t simply ask, “Do you have integrity?” during an interview. Yes or no questions don’t work. The key is to create stories and scenarios that allow candidates to share their experiences, and then listen for how well those experiences align with your core values.
For example, one core value I highly appreciate is positivity. Some call it being “glass half full,” others call it an optimistic outlook. Regardless, does the person have a positive attitude? Again, during the interview process, you can’t simply ask, “Are you a positive person?” Instead, take this core value and design a series of interview questions around it. Here’s how we do it:
Question 1: For your current employer, what are two or three things they do well? What are two or three things they don’t do well and could improve upon?
Question 2: For your current manager, what are two or three things they do well? What are two or three things you don’t like?
In this example, we’re looking for thoughtful answers about the current employer and manager. The first question—”What do you like?”—is meant to warm up the conversation and gauge how the candidate presents positive qualities. The real test, however, comes from the second question. Everyone has issues or things they don’t like about their employer, especially with their manager. What we’re listening for here is how they present those issues.
Do they make statements like, “This is terrible, they’re not good at their job, and I really don’t like working for them”? Or do they say, “Here are some areas where we don’t see eye to eye” or “Here are some areas where I would appreciate more give-and-take”? The big idea is to assess how they present negative aspects—do they do it in a way that feels constructive or destructive?
In this example of aligning interview questions with core values, we took one value I care about and organized a series of common questions around it to assess how the candidate responds and presents their answers. Entrepreneurs would do well to enumerate their core values and ensure that, during the interview process, they have a series of questions for each core value and a rubric to score responses accordingly.
One of the early entrepreneurial challenges is the need to think big and envision huge success, while also narrowing in on a small but critical wedge to enter the market. Investors want to believe it’ll be a home run, and customers want an immediate solution to an acute problem. Entrepreneurs need to thread that needle.
Fynn Glover at Schematic just launched his new startup, focusing on managing pricing and packaging for B2B software companies. He discusses the development of the idea in his blog post, How to Operate Pricing & Packaging in B2B Software. Here’s how Schematic positions the new product:
With just a few lines of code, businesses can implement pricing and packaging into any application, end-to-end—from feature delivery through billing and customer experience.
– Quickly roll out new features and tie them to your pricing plans.
– Target specific plans to customers and adjust them without engineering support.
– Experiment, scale, and manage pricing & packaging operations: trials, plans, limits, entitlements, metering usage, handling exceptions, provisioning customers, and embedding front-end purchasing components—all without code changes.
I’ve really enjoyed watching the thinking evolve.
The initial thesis centered around pricing and packaging as a standalone module that needed to be managed separately from the codebase. After conducting customer discovery to refine and narrow the focus, and following a few iterations, the launch is now focused on B2B software companies that use Stripe for payments. These companies have made enough progress to value flexibility and extensibility in pricing and packaging but aren’t yet locked into massive amounts of custom code to manage it.
The combination of extensive customer discovery and thoughtful iteration is key to the startup-building process. Start with the big idea, then narrow it down to a small but important wedge to enter the market. Go small before going big.
Also, support a fellow entrepreneur and check out Schematic to manage pricing and packaging.
Last week, an entrepreneur reminded me that one of the greatest gifts you can give someone is to believe in them. I’ve been working with this entrepreneur for a long time, and they recently launched their new business. As part of the launch, he sent me a note expressing his gratitude that I believed in him. This reminded me of one of my earliest entrepreneurial endeavors.
I was a junior in college, eager to become a full-time entrepreneur but needing help to start. I approached one of my professors, Frank Borchardt, whom I had met during my freshman year. We had hit it off and built a great relationship. He knew how passionate I was about starting my own venture, and at one point, he told me, “Whenever you’re ready to go out on your own, come see me, and I’ll be your angel investor.” At the time, I didn’t think much of it, but I tucked the idea away and continued with my studies.
Now, I was ready to make the leap. Professor Borchardt was a full professor in the German department, and I had no connection to or studies in German languages. The intersection was that Professor Borchardt was world-renowned for using technology in foreign language learning, and he loved studying the history of technology. The class I had taken with him was all about technology through the centuries and how it impacted society and culture.
When I walked into Professor Borchardt’s office, he greeted me with his big smile and boisterous laugh. He was the stereotypical eccentric college professor. In all the years I had known him, he had exclusively worn black and only shorts, never cut his hair or beard, and always filled the room with his big personality. I pitched him my idea: a product to make it easy to update and maintain websites. As a blissfully ignorant 20-year-old, I called this new product “SuperUpdate.”
Without hesitation, Professor Borchardt said yes. He told me he would love to write a check for $20,000 and that it would be much more interesting to invest in me than to see his shares in Duke Power grow. His investment paid off in many ways, but the most important was the belief he had in me. Believing in someone is one of the most powerful gifts you can give. On that day, more than 20 years ago, Professor Borchardt believed in me and helped me get my first startup off the ground. Today, my goal is to continue paying it forward by sharing that gift of belief with others.
Over the years, I’ve debated the pros and cons of venture debt with a number of people. Some entrepreneurs see venture debt as a safety net, with a big “Do Not Break Unless Emergency” sign in front of it. Other entrepreneurs view venture debt as a way to grow the business faster with minimal or no dilution.
During the Pardot days, we had a scalable business model and used venture debt to grow faster as part of our capital-light strategy. Our first line of venture debt was $1.5 million, and as the business grew, we secured a new line of credit for $3 million. By the time of our sale, we had used almost all of our debt capital in an effort to keep up with the market. It was the right thing to do for the business.
For Salesloft, the company raised several rounds of equity financing and increasingly larger venture debt lines of credit due to continual access to equity from institutional investors. Venture debt was primarily viewed as a safety net. When COVID hit in March 2021, we pulled down the line of credit, not knowing if it would be needed. In the end, it wasn’t, but it provided a cash cushion in case the COVID shock persisted.
This backdrop provides context for the announcement of our new private credit fund for growth-stage startups called Conductor Capital. The founders, Zack Mansfield and Dhruv Patel, have been in the venture debt world for many years, working for bank departments that specialize in startups. Many years ago, one of Zack’s clients was, in fact, Salesloft. Personally, I’ve written about venture debt many times and have used it in several startups (here, here, here). With Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and others going under last year, it was clear a gap had emerged in the market to help startups through venture debt.
Last year, after personally talking to several entrepreneurs about doing something on our own in the private credit space for startups, Zack reached out, saying he was working on a new firm. We began discussing the idea and decided to launch a new private credit fund focused on tech startups, called Conductor Capital. To support Zack and Dhruv, we recruited Kyle Porter from Salesloft, Tope Awotona from Calendly, and Nat Turner from Flatiron Health/Collectors. The big idea is: capital from entrepreneurs to support other entrepreneurs.
Today, we’re investing out of our first fund and have already closed our first loan.
Congrats to Zack and Dhruv on the launch, and please consider Conductor Capital when evaluating venture debt options. Conductor Capital is open for business.
Last week, I was catching up with an entrepreneur who shared a concept with me that I hadn’t heard before: negative roadmaps. In the startup world, a product roadmap outlines the features and functionality expected over the next few quarters or years. The idea with a traditional roadmap is to set a vision and direction for the product. By doing so, it helps sell to potential prospects what’s coming down the pipeline, share with existing customers where you’re going from a technology point of view, and align the internal team around priorities for engineering and product development.
Of course, entrepreneurs are an optimistic bunch and often want to be helpful to as many people as possible, which can lead to broad roadmaps or products that are overly expansive. One of my early lessons, learned many years ago, was specifically around this issue. We had a successful product, and we were growing nicely, but I fell into the trap of trying to be all things to all customers, both current and future. After building out a bunch of features and seeing that they weren’t being used much, I still tried to continually enhance the product. However, this only slowed down development because more code, technical debt, documentation, and training were required.
I realized that from a roadmap perspective and in feature development, it’s incredibly important to have an opinionated vision of where you’re headed. That opinionated vision from a product point of view doesn’t necessarily include all the existing customers you have today. The customers you want to have tomorrow may vary slightly or could be at the high or low end of the market. The idea is that the roadmap and the opinionated vision of the future should reflect what you want to have, not necessarily what you have today—although they could be one and the same.
The idea I learned about last week is that a negative roadmap. A negative roadmap tells you what you’re not going to do in the future. For example, it might outline feature requests we’ve received over the years that we’re not going to implement, modules customers have asked for that we are not going to build, or types of functionality that competitors offer but don’t align with our ideal customer profile, so we won’t implement them.
This idea of a negative roadmap is complementary to the normal roadmap. It’s a way to document things that are not going to happen in the product or things that are going to be removed from the product. Roadmaps are critically important, and as organizations grow, getting everyone on the same page becomes harder. Adding a negative roadmap to the mix is another exercise in aligning the team around what is not going to happen. Entrepreneurs should consider adding a negative roadmap to their collection of documents and best practices that they use to run their startup.
Last week’s post on the Atlanta companies in the Inc. 5000 awards highlighted one of our very own, Intown Golf Club, at Number 204. After reading about this award, several friends reached out with comments and congratulations. After all the feedback, I decided it would be a good time to share our origin story and progress on the business.
Back in 2018, I installed a new golf simulator in my basement garage. It was simple and not too fancy—a net return with a hitting mat, combined with a Foresight launch monitor attached to a laptop. I was convinced that with a simulator, I could become a scratch golfer. I quickly learned otherwise, but that’s a different story.
After using the simulator regularly for a few months and having friends and family try it out, the proverbial lightbulb went off. This is an amazing piece of technology that requires a large room, tall ceilings, and cumbersome equipment, making it difficult for most people to install in their homes. Why isn’t there a chain or franchise of great indoor golf clubs around the country? In places like South Korea, there are thousands of indoor golf facilities, yet in the United States, they are almost nonexistent, except for simple setups by golf teaching pros to sell lessons. It’s tons of fun to hit on the simulators, playing different games for kids, running various combine test sessions, and, of course, playing golf courses like Pebble Beach and Killearn.
After thinking about it for a bit, I shared the concept with Jon Birdsong to get his ideas. He hadn’t used a simulator in a long time, and in the interim, the technology had improved dramatically. Once he experienced the latest equipment, he became convinced there was something to this indoor golf club concept. Jon, I, and several friends had been batting around the idea for a while when we were at lunch at Jack’s Deli near the Atlanta Tech Village. In walks Michael Williamson, a fellow tech entrepreneur who had been at ATV for many years and had recently sold his software company. Knowing that Michael loved golf as well, we asked him when was the last time he hit on a golf simulator. Immediately, he said, “last night while watching the football game.” Little did we know, he had a simulator at his house and absolutely loved it. We pitched the idea of building an indoor golf club starting in Atlanta and expanding nationwide. Michael loved it, and we were off to the races.
Our next major step in the concept was taking one of the large boardrooms in the Atlanta Tech Village and renovating it with a high-end golf simulator, renaming it “Lenox National” as it faced Lenox Road. With Lenox National in place, we started inviting friends, acquaintances, and anyone who would listen over to hang out. We’d hit some golf balls, experience the technology, and brainstorm ideas around building an indoor golf club. After great experiences at Lenox National, it became clear that there was a huge opportunity to build what became Intown Golf Club.
Our next step was finding a great location. We went out to the market and looked at a couple of old restaurant sites on Piedmont Road and a few in the greater Buckhead area. After several months of searching without much luck, we got word that one of the tenants in an amazing space at Two Buckhead Plaza wanted to move out, but they had another year left on their lease. We started spending more time with the landlord, looking for solutions. We finally agreed to terms and were ready to sign a lease when COVID hit in early 2020, and the world shut down. Not knowing when life would return to normal, we paused the lease negotiations.
Several months later, it became clear that things were, in fact, going to return to normal, and we signed the lease to build our first location at 3050 Peachtree Rd. NE. Thanks to a referral from Fred Castellucci, we hired Dan Maas and his team at ai3 as our architects to build out a private high-end, modern indoor golf concept. The space has 10 TrackMan bays, one of which is a True Spec Golf fitting bay, one has Tour Putt, and two of them are oversized with doors and curtains to turn them into private dining rooms. In the center, we have an upscale bar and restaurant, and in the back half, we have a high-end lounge with a fireplace. Outside, we have a patio with large putting green. The TrackMan bays run along the perimeter of the 12,000-square-foot space.
We ended up opening the private club in the spring of 2021, and our timing couldn’t have been better. People wanted to get back together with their friends, and golf, as a game, has a huge, passionate base. In fact, one out of every seven Americans played golf last year. It was an instant success.
Now, running a restaurant, bar, and golf facility is not easy. Everything you’ve heard and read about running a restaurant is true. While we’re far from having mastered hospitality, we’re learning fast and evolving as we go. Fast-forward to today, and we have locations in Atlanta, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Columbus, Ohio, along with new locations under construction in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Houston, Texas; and Nashville, Tennessee. Our goal is to bring the golf club camaraderie and experience to every major market across the country and eventually the world.
Entrepreneurial ideas often come from the simplest of places, and Intown Golf Club is no different. Congratulations to Michael, the team, and everyone involved in building one of the fastest-growing private companies in the United States.
Every year, I enjoy reading the Inc. magazine’s Inc. 5000 awards. It’s one of the best ways to see what’s trending and popular in the small business world, and you never know which companies might become large breakout successes one day. Specifically, within the Inc. 5000 list, I also enjoy seeing which Atlanta companies are doing the best and growing the fastest. Without further ado, here are the some of the fastest growing Atlanta tech and tech-enabled businesses in the Inc. 5000.
VIVA Finance offers affordable, unsecured personal loans up to $10,000, designed with flexible repayment plans based on employment. They focus on financial empowerment through ethical lending, providing an alternative to traditional credit models.
Fusus offers a real-time intelligence platform that integrates public safety assets for law enforcement and private security. Their cloud-based solutions enhance situational awareness, enabling agencies to monitor and respond to incidents more effectively.
Intown Golf Club – The Private Social Club For Golfers
Intown Golf Club is a private social club for golf enthusiasts, offering an elevated golf experience with world-class food and beverage services. It aims to create a convenient and inviting community for golfers, regardless of weather conditions.
Adtechnacity – The Leading Performance Marketing Solution
Adtechnacity provides performance marketing solutions, focusing on helping businesses navigate the digital landscape through data-driven strategies. The company specializes in optimizing ad spend and improving customer acquisition.
Mile Auto offers a pay-per-mile auto insurance solution designed for low-mileage drivers. The platform provides a cost-effective alternative to traditional car insurance by only charging customers for the miles they drive, making it ideal for those who drive infrequently.
DataSeers offers AI-driven SaaS solutions designed for the banking and payments industry. Their platform enhances compliance, fraud detection, reconciliation, and customer lifecycle management, helping financial institutions automate processes and make data-driven decisions.
Polygon.io provides real-time and historical market data through APIs. The platform is designed for developers and financial professionals, offering standardized data formats, client libraries, and extensive documentation. It aims to modernize access to financial data and supports building trading apps, research tools, and other financial products.
Relay Payments – Fast, secure digital payments for logistics
Relay Payments provides a secure digital payment network designed specifically for the logistics industry. Their platform connects freight brokers, fleets, drivers, and merchants to streamline payments for diesel fuel, lumper fees, scales, truck repairs, and more. By digitizing these transactions, Relay aims to save time, reduce costs, and enhance operational efficiency.
Verusen provides AI-driven solutions for optimizing MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) inventory and supply chains. Their platform helps organizations reduce costs, mitigate risks, and improve operational efficiency by analyzing data from various systems, identifying redundancies, and streamlining procurement and inventory management processes.
AdvizorPro provides a comprehensive and constantly updated database for RIA (Registered Investment Advisor) firms, financial advisors, and other financial professionals. The platform offers tools for targeted lead generation, CRM integration, and data enrichment, helping asset managers, recruiters, and SaaS companies create accurate and high-quality lead lists to optimize their sales and marketing efforts.
Stord – Make Your Supply Chain A Competitive Advantage
Stord offers cloud supply chain solutions combining software and logistics services. They help e-commerce brands optimize their supply chain for better efficiency, reduced costs, and enhanced customer experiences. Their platform provides a unified view of the supply chain, including order management, inventory tracking, and last-mile delivery, tailored to the needs of omnichannel and DTC brands.
Safely provides short-term rental insurance and guest screening services. Their platform offers protection for property managers and homeowners by covering damages, theft, and liability issues caused by guests, while also ensuring guest reliability through screening. Safely aims to make vacation rental management safer and more secure.
Florence Healthcare – Remote Workflows for Clinical Trials
Florence Healthcare offers a Site Enablement Platform designed to streamline clinical trials by enabling remote collaboration between sponsors and sites. The platform addresses challenges in site start-up, conduct, and closeout by digitizing workflows, enhancing compliance, and reducing bottlenecks, ultimately accelerating the clinical trial process.
Affordable Rooms for Rent, Homes, Weekly Rentals & More
PadSplit offers affordable co-living spaces by renting out individual rooms on a weekly basis. The platform emphasizes flexible stays, fast move-ins, and credit-building opportunities for members. It also provides a streamlined process for finding and booking rooms, aiming to make shared housing more accessible and financially beneficial.
Cove.tool – Expert, Sustainable Building Design Consulting
Cove.tool provides AI-powered architectural and sustainability consulting services, offering advanced energy modeling and performance analysis to optimize building designs. The platform supports architects, engineers, and manufacturers by integrating sustainability into projects, reducing costs, and improving design outcomes. Cove.tool emphasizes transparency, accuracy, and efficiency in helping the AEC industry meet environmental goals.
Connected, Continuous, Insight-driven Multidisciplinary Cancer Care
OncoLens provides a platform for multidisciplinary cancer care that integrates patient data across different systems, enhancing collaboration among care teams. The platform uses AI and machine learning to support clinical decision-making, streamline tumor board processes, and improve patient outcomes. It’s designed to help cancer centers and life sciences organizations manage complex cases and optimize treatment planning.
Groundfloor – Build Wealth with Real Estate Investing
Groundfloor is a real estate investing platform that allows individuals to invest in short-term, high-yield debt backed by real estate. With as little as $10, investors can diversify their portfolios and earn passive income. The platform offers automatic investing options, low barriers to entry, and a focus on providing consistent returns, making it accessible for both new and seasoned investors.
Cognosos offers real-time location intelligence solutions powered by AI and machine learning for industries like logistics and healthcare. Their platform improves operational efficiency, safety, and asset management by providing precise location data and actionable insights. With a focus on easy installation and rapid deployment, Cognosos helps organizations uncover bottlenecks, reduce costs, and enhance overall performance.
PlayOn – The Future of School Athletics and Activities
PlayOn Sports provides comprehensive solutions for school athletics and activities, including digital ticketing, broadcasting, athletic management, and sponsorships. The platform integrates services like streaming through the NFHS Network and digital ticketing with GoFan, aiming to streamline school operations and enhance community engagement in school sports and activities.
IRONSCALES – Email Security Software for Enterprise & MSP
IRONSCALES provides advanced email security solutions using AI to protect enterprises and MSPs from phishing, BEC, ATO, and other email-based threats. The platform automates threat detection and response, integrates phishing simulation training, and offers continuous adaptive learning to enhance overall email security.
Kahua offers construction program and project management software tailored for owners, program managers, general contractors, and subcontractors. The platform enhances collaboration, improves data management, and provides robust tools for handling the entire construction lifecycle from preconstruction to operations, aiming to streamline processes and boost efficiency in construction projects.
MessageGears offers a customer engagement platform that integrates directly with your data warehouse, allowing for seamless cross-channel messaging and real-time personalization. Designed for enterprise brands, the platform eliminates data inefficiencies and enables marketers to deliver highly targeted campaigns without the usual technical limitations.
As a bonus, this list was compiled using ChatGPT. What I did was go to the Inc. 5000 website, copy and paste the URLs of each of the top 22 Atlanta winners into a text document, and then went to ChatGPT. I gave it the following prompt:
I’d like you to visit several websites, pull the page title, and summarize the contents of the homepage. Then output a table that has the following columns: number, website address, page title, and page summary where number is result number (e.g. 1 for the first site, 2 for the second site, etc.)
After answering with the first few results, it asked if I wanted to keep going, and I said, “Yes, please keep going.” Finally, when it finished, I said “Please compile all the results into one large table.” I then copied and pasted that table into this blog post you see above.
With tremendous support and encouragement following the announcement of Atlanta Tech Village’s expansion to downtown Atlanta, many people have asked how it will actually work in South Downtown. It’s one thing to put a new startup space in one building, but it’s a whole different challenge to take 56 buildings, 11 parking lots, and turn a neglected historic neighborhood into a thriving startup district.
To start, we’ve focused on the core of the neighborhood, which we affectionately refer to as “Elle” as it makes an “L” shape. This path runs from Mercedes-Benz Stadium down Mitchell Street and then up Broad Street to the Five Points MARTA station. Mercedes-Benz Stadium is the most iconic venue in Atlanta, and Five Points MARTA station is the busiest subway station in the city.
Previous developers invested significant capital into Hotel Row, so we’ll begin with a massive 31,000-square-foot Atlanta Tech Village location in one of the buildings closest to Mercedes-Benz Stadium previously known at Hotel Sylvan. Hotel Row will be further anchored by new shops and restaurants. As the neighborhood grows, we’ll continue developing the historic Hotel Scoville building and the historic Concordia building, both on Hotel Row.
ATV Sylvan LoungeATV Sylvan BreakroomATV Sylvan Conf RoomATV Sylvan at 235 Mitchell St
Moving up Mitchell Street from Hotel Row to the center of the neighborhood and the middle block of historic Broad Street, we’ll establish a dozen private offices for founders and creatives. These will be combined with many new restaurants, bars, and stores, anchored by a 15,000-square-foot outdoor town square and the historic HL Green Five and Dime, which will house another 30,000-square-foot Atlanta Tech Village (ATV Green!). Our goal with historic Broad Street is to establish a center of gravity for the neighborhood, with a strong emphasis on community for the startup district.
HL Green as ATV Green
With historic Hotel Row on the southwest side of the neighborhood and historic Broad Street in the center, the area will feature a variety of great startup spaces, food and beverage shops, and a true sense of Atlanta’s history. Hotel Row and historic Broad Street represent 22 of our buildings.
Looking at it on a map, you can see dozens of our buildings north of historic Broad Street and a number of buildings and large parking lots south of historic Broad Street. North of historic Broad, buildings like the original Rich’s Department Store at 82 Peachtree will become incredible loft apartments. The original Bass Dry Goods building at 85 Peachtree, along with the Kress building at 69 Peachtree, are perfect for adaptive reuse. And the list continues. Southeast of historic Broad, the Bass Furniture Building at 142 Mitchell is another beautiful adaptive reuse building. And lastly, directly across from Hotel Row, the large C&S Bank building at 222 Mitchell is another excellent project.
Finally, the many acres of empty parking lots provide decades of new development opportunities to bring more housing to the neighborhood. When finished, it’ll be a complete live/work/play startup district.
The heart of the South Downtown Atlanta startup district is Hotel Row and historic Broad Street, with dozens of startup/creative spaces combined with local restaurateurs, retailers, and a strong sense of history and placemaking at the town square. From this initial foundation, more housing will be built through adaptive reuse and ground-up development. Ultimately, the multi-decade goal is a large startup district that encompasses over 100,000 square feet of creative spaces across many historic buildings, over 1,000 apartment units, dozens of food and beverage options, great shops, and an incredible sense of place where Atlanta was literally founded—and now, a district for founders and startups.
David Cummings on Startups 