Category: Community

Core values are an important part of any business. For me personally, I like to approach them slightly differently than other companies by having two simple ideas. For the overarching idea, I like “be the best place to work and the best place to be a customer.” For the people values, which are the most important, I like “positive, self-starting, and supportive.”

Now, with the Atlanta Tech Village being a double bottom line enterprise having goals of helping enhance the Atlanta technology community while also being a for-profit enterprise, I want to have more descriptive core values that cover a wider range of items, while not being so numerous that they are easily forgotten.

Here’s a laundry list of ideas for core values for Atlanta Tech Village that I’d like feedback and input on from the community:

• Pay it forward
• Be scrappy
• Be lean
• Be respectful
• Be open and honest
• Don’t be annoying
• Never stop learning
• Share openly
• Value relationships
• Deliver on promises
• Treat people well
• Work hard, play hard

Core values become especially important with large coworking areas where people from different companies are regularly interacting, and a common standard has to be met. We need strong core values to create the best technology and entrepreneurial center possible.

What else? What core values do you like and what values would you add?

So, I’m on a mission to help grow the Atlanta startup community into one of the top 10 in the country. Much like Austin and Boulder are mentioned as two up-and-comers, my goal is for Atlanta to be mentioned in the breath. Atlanta has all the natural resources to be a major player, including an awesome engineering school (GA Tech), tons of young professionals, a low cost of living, the world’s busiest airport, low taxes, and a mild climate (if you don’t mind humidity). Some of the knocks on the Atlanta startup community include a risk-averse culture, lack of high-risk capital, geographic dispersion of startups, no anchor billion dollar tech company, and few venture backable entrepreneurs.

On the risk capital and venture backable entrepreneurs front, the debate is around what’s needed first. If we have more high quality entrepreneurs, we’ll attract more capital vs if we have more capital here, more quality entrepreneurs will emerge that will be successful. My personal belief is that capital is portable such that it will find the best opportunities, regardless of geographic location. Even with the theory of the Series A crunch, there’s plenty of money out there to fund the best ventures.

Here are a few ideas to grow a startup community:

• Increase the density of startups in a geographic area (see Atlanta Tech Village and ATDC)
• Recruit talent from outside the region to the region
• Keep more of the talent that’s already in the region (e.g. get even more of the GA Tech engineers to stay in Atlanta)
• Facilitate recycling of talent so that there’s rapport and awareness of talented team members to join other teams in the event their startup fails
• Actively work to build community to learn, share, and create relationships
• Highlight successful startups and great exits
• Accelerate the rate at which startups achieve profitability so that they can then control their own destiny
• Coordinate more introductions between entrepreneurs and capital providers including angels, venture capitalists, and family offices

At the end of the day, the sure fire way to grow a startup community is through cultivating more successful startups. More successful startups will then breed more successful startups in a virtuous cycle.

What else? What are some other ways to grow a startup community?

With the new Atlanta Tech Village a reality, it’s time to start brainstorming and planning what we need to do to make it a success. The true measure of success, over a 10 year horizon, is the number of startups, tech or otherwise, that grow into real, sustainable businesses creating jobs and wealth for our community. More successful tech companies will also enhance the tech-related service providers in the Village as well as the desirability of larger tech companies to have a remote office in the building (e.g. for engineering or sales). Now that we have the end in mind, let’s backup to the present and start working on how to build community at ATV.

Community isn’t something that can be forced and will come from a number of places including serendipitous interactions (imagine how many great conversations will take place at Chipotle across the street!). Here are a few ideas to help build community at ATV:

• Host meetups, get togethers, and conferences in the cool boardroom and awesome event space (room for up to 150 people as well as smaller options)
• Provide an amazing training lab for teachers and training companies to teach courses (e.g. learn Ruby on Rails in 10 weeks) and do workshops (e.g. SEO 101 for entrepreneurs — a half day session) — learning with a group of peers or as a cohort is one of the best ways to build trust and relationships
• Facilitate office hours with venture capitalists, coordinate job fairs, and “speed dating” for members of the Village to meet each other
• Collaborate with other tech and startup organizations in town (e.g. ATDC, Flashpoint, Hypepotamus, TAG, etc)
• Great coffee shop with tons of indoor and outdoor seating

Community is one of the most important aspects of the Atlanta Tech Village and it’ll take time to build it.

What else? What are some other ideas for building community at Atlanta Tech Village?

In late August this year I was heavily involved in the Pardot acquisition process with ExactTarget and an idea hit me: if this deal goes through, I want to buy a large building and turn it into the Atlanta Tech Village. On August 30th I blogged about the idea generically, calling the post Physical Atlanta Startup Village Idea. The idea is a combination community center and office complex geared specifically towards innovative companies doing cool things while promoting serendipitous interactions. After thinking about it for a while, the name Atlanta Startup Village was too narrow as it implied it was only for startups whereas a technology community needs remote offices of larger tech companies, startups, and tech-related companies like marketing, PR, accounting, legal, and venture firms. A community is all types of people, not just fledgling two-person startups.

Post Pardot acquisition, I immediately set out looking at all different types of office buildings and empty land throughout Midtown, West Midtown, and Buckhead. After 30 days of researching options and talking to as many people as would listen to me, one building became obvious as far and away the best option: 3423 Piedmont Rd NE (Google Maps). Super important things like great interstate access, MARTA access, walkability to a dozen restaurants, large windows, tall ceilings, indoor/outdoor areas, tons of parking, massive space (100,000 square feet!), and immediate usability were all present. There were some good land options in Midtown and West Midtown but no good buildings that were for sale at a reasonable per square foot price, and I didn’t want to get in the construction business and have a three year horizon before having something usable. Nothing on the market even compared to 3423 Piedmont Rd.

Midtown, with its startup density at Tech Square, would have been ideal, but land and buildings in that area are significantly more expensive than 3423 Piedmont Rd. Buckhead as a location opens up northern suburbs like Alpharetta, Roswell, Dunwoody, and Sandy Springs to a shorter commute to get to a high density tech community while still being very accessible to the intown crowd that lives in Midtown, Virginia Highlands, and Inman Park. There’s another important piece being in the heart of Buckhead: proximity to the wealthiest Atlantans with an eye towards helping increase investment in local tech companies.

After a quick tour of the building (it was the last one I looked at), we put in an offer on it the week before Thanksgiving, negotiated for a week, and had it under contract by Thanksgiving. Now, 30 days later, the closing is done and the building is called Atlanta Tech Village.

Take a look at the Atlanta Tech Village website, read the Atlanta Business Chronicle article on the Atlanta Tech Village, and check out the post on it on the Startup Communities site. I’m excited to get tech companies in the building and start renovations.

What else? What are your thoughts on the Atlanta Tech Village and what are some ideas to make it great?

Earlier this week two separate people that are in the process of moving to Atlanta from the Northeast reached out to me to learn how to get involved in the local startup community. In both cases there’s the desire to be closer to family — a popular reason for people moving to Atlanta.

Here are a few ideas on how to get involved in a startup community:

• Look for your college’s local alumni group (hopefully there’s a local entrepreneurship group for your college as well)
• Network to meet the connectors who enjoy putting people together and help out
• Find the influential venture capitalists in the area as they are almost always very involved
• Attend meetups and entrepreneurial get togethers to find like-minded people
• Write blog posts about your community experiences and tweet interesting information
• Join organizations like EO and YPO

Getting involved in a local startup community is rewarding and worthwhile. It takes time to develop rapport and build relationships, as with anything you get out of it what you put into it.

What else? What are some other ways to get involved in the startup community?

In entrepreneurship and life there’s a concept I’m a big fan of: pay it forward. The idea of pay it forward is that you help other people without expecting anything in return. Sometimes the help is returned 100x over and most of the time nothing is returned. Regardless, paying it forward is the right thing to do. Now, I can’t respond to every inquiry for help, especially requests for an hour of my time in person, but I do shoot to spend at least a few hours per week helping others.

Here are several ways to pay it forward:

• When your product or service doesn’t meet the needs of a prospect, you go out of your way to find someone that can help
• When an acquaintance forwards a resume over, you pass it on to someone that might be interested in it
• When an entrepreneur asks for help, you spend 15 minutes listening and giving feedback (it’s amazing how effective 15 minutes can be when you remove the layers and get right to the important stuff)
• When you identify two people that should meet, OK the intro, and connect them such that they meet and get value

Entrepreneurs should always pay it forward.

What else? What are your thoughts on paying it forward and what are some other examples?

It was the first week of January 1999 and I was an eager second semester freshman at Duke camping out for the Duke vs UNC basketball game, set for early February. Camping outside for a month in the cold North Carolina winter didn’t seem like such a bad thing, especially when I got to tell my friends we were tent #1, meaning we were the first 10 people to walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium and chose the best seats on the floor (in reality, we stood the whole game on the actual basketball floor right at half court).

Now, it was during my time in Krzyzewskiville that I had the opportunity to meet several upperclassmen and hear their stories of life at a much wiser age. Right around the corner was the main career fair for summer internship opportunities and these two computer science majors were rigorously debating the pros and cons of doing an internship at Microsoft or Trilogy. Microsoft was familiar to me but Trilogy wasn’t even on my radar.

The debate went something like this: Microsoft pays well ($20/hr at the time), provides a convertible mustang for each intern for the summer, and you get the opportunity to go to a picnic at Bill Gates’ house and meet him personally. Trilogy pays better ($22/hr at the time), has an amazing campus on a lake with ski boats and jet skis for everyone to use, and is in Austin, TX, a fun college town with many coeds.

I still didn’t know what Trilogy did but they were competing with Microsoft for the best academic talent at Duke (Microsoft is known for requiring high GPAs, among other things) and Trilogy was winning. At the end of the debate it was clear that Trilogy was more desirable and more competitive than Microsoft, and any other tech company recruiting at the career fair.

Earlier today Bob Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet, tweeted out an article on Forbes titled John Price is Bringing Silicon Valley to Austin where the author recounts a bit of history about Trilogy and the fact that John trained many of the Trilogy employees at the in-house Trilogy University. Trilogy was fanatical about recruiting the best talent from around the country to Austin and taking them through an intense training program. Trilogy had a strong work hard, play hard culture where long hours and serious partying were the norm.

Many of the Trilogy employees went on to participate in the Austin startup community and a couple hit it big with companies that IPOd, creating thousands of jobs. Even with a massive engineering school in their own backyard at UT Austin, Trilogy made it a core strength to recruit technical talent from beyond their region and train them on their own dime internally. There’s no single best way to recruit talent at a large scale but Trilogy showed you could do, and do it well, in a city outside the standard technology hubs.

What else? What are your thoughts on Trilogy recruiting tech talent to Austin at scale?

One of the questions that still nags me is why aren’t more entrepreneurs successful? We have amazing information and resources online, tons of community events, and a wealth of people that truly want to help out. On the surface, it appears that the necessary ingredients are present to have a higher success rate. Now, I don’t know the previous success rates or the current success rates, so this is merely based on my gut.

As I look around the community, I want to see many more startups that are clearly on their way to being a viable, on going concern (my definition of a successful business). The lean startup movement and tools like the business model canvas are great for helping entrepreneurs spend their time more wisely, thus increasing the likelihood of success. I haven’t seen the increased success yet, but I’m hopeful.

Another theory is that you can’t pick winners and some people will make it and most won’t make it. If that’s the case, and the resources for success are better and costs lower than ever to launch a tech startup, the next area of focus is to get more people that are thinking through ideas to take the plunge. Accelerator programs like Y Combinator and Flashpoint are great entry points for entrepreneurs to jump in with a group of peers around them.

I don’t have the answers but it appears that the next area of focus is increasing the top of the funnel of total number of entrepreneurs to increase the number of successes.

What else? What are your thoughts on helping more people become entrepreneurs or investing more in resources for existing entrepreneurs?

Earlier today I spent several hours at Hypepotamus, an awesome coworking space right next to Georgia Tech and Tech Square in the heart of Midtown Atlanta. Hypepotamus, if you haven’t heard of it, is a free (no charge!) facility for designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs sponsored by Kevin Wallace (@kevinbwallace) and Heath Hyneman (@hhyneman) purely to help grow the tech startup community. In addition, Hype, as it’s affectionately known, is expertly managed and run by Scott Henderson (@scottyhendo).

Here’s some of the thinking about the Hypepotamus gift to Atlanta:

• Serendipitous interaction is key to growing a community
• Startup leaders are all types of people, not just company co-founders
• Startups, being resource constrained, benefit by helping each other
• Community events foster relationships and help with the human desire to be a part of a tribe

Regardless, the community should be measured by the number of successful companies (not money raised) and I’m optimistic Hypepotamus fills a gap that will help improve the startup community.

What else? What are your thoughts on the Hypepotamus gift to Atlanta?

Last week a friend approached me and confirmed the issue raised in the Coworking Conundrum for Startups Slacking post. He had previously worked in a coworking space for several months and said the distraction challenges, both in a big communal area as well as other entrepreneurs not working hard, are very real. I then asked more questions about what he liked, and didn’t like, with the co-working experience.

Here are some key items for an effective co-working space:

• Super fast, plentiful bandwidth
• Amazing coffee
• Great chairs
• Multiple sitting areas (desks, standing desks, lounge chairs, etc)
• Bright natural light
• Private conference rooms and phone booths (super small conference rooms for phone calls — no phone calls in the large communal room)
• Easy parking/transportation options with 24/7 access

Coworking spaces continue to grow in popularity and are perfect for creative professionals that want to be around other people while working in a productive environment.

What else? What are some other key items for an effective coworking space?