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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?

Within the past month, three different local Atlanta groups brought up the question, “What does the Atlanta startup community need most?” Now, I don’t have the answer, but I’ve heard a number of suggestions.

Here are a few ideas that were brought up for the Atlanta startup community:

• More Risk Capital – Additional idea and seed stage capital to address the earliest and riskiest startup stages
• More Growth Capital – Additional growth capital for local startups that have already de-risked most of the equation, have north of $5 million in recurring revenue, and have a shot at being a home run (growth capital is already readily available since it is so mobile, but the challenge now is that most of the value created from big wins goes to investors in other parts of the country)
• More Modern Entrepreneur Training – Too many programs are geared towards traditional ways of thinking about entrepreneurship including business plan writing and getting ready to raise money without having customer proof points — there’s a need for lean startup, customer discovery, and business model canvas training
• Major Annual Tech Startup Conference – Similar to SXSW in Austin, the idea is to bring together a number of events into a packed week and draw attendees from around the country
• More Community Coordination – With all the organizations and events in town, there’s overlap and competing agendas, which is to be expected, leading to some desire to more centrally coordinate things

If I had to pick one, I’d choose more modern entrepreneur training. With more modern entrepreneur training, there will be more lean startups, which will result in more compelling startups, which will result in more success stories. More successful startups is what Atlanta needs most.

What else? What are your thoughts on these ideas for the Atlanta startup community as well as other ideas?

With the launch of the Atlanta Ventures Accelerator, one of the questions I’ve received is what did we learn from Shotput Ventures that we’re going to do differently this time. As a quick back story, Shotput Ventures was launched at the beginning of 2009 as a Y Combinator clone in Atlanta. We invested in nine companies, had one great exit, and learned a ton.

Here are a few takeaways from Shotput Ventures:

• Startups with strong technical co-founders made the most progress during the three month program (as expected)
• Non-technical co-founders that were relentlessly resourceful made much stronger contributions to their company (some business co-founders didn’t feel they could contribute since they didn’t code, which is patently false)
• Most teams didn’t launch a minimum viable product soon enough and had little to show come demo day
• Lack of a shared office hurt the camaraderie aspect of the program (most people worked out of their apartments and came in for Wednesday night dinners)
• Mentoring and coaching from the community was great and exceeded expectations

Overall, Shotput Ventures was a good learning experience but didn’t have the desired impact on Atlanta. Now, with the Atlanta Ventures Accelerator, we’re going to use what we learned and make a serious impact on Atlanta.

What else? What were some other observations or lessons learned from Shotput Ventures?

Today, we launched the new Atlanta Ventures Accelerator for prototype-stage startups (great ABC coverage). As part of the program, startups receive a $20,000 investment from Atlanta Ventures and a $100,000 convertible note from the BIP Early Stage Fund. Our goal is to help coach and mentor the startups to then raise a $500,000 seed round after the program.

Here are a few details on the Atlanta Ventures Accelerator:

• Two or more co-founders are required with an in-house technical person or a technical person identified that will join at the start of the program
• Rolling admission and not cohort based (we don’t do cohorts since we want to be flexible to the timing needs of startups and we have the Atlanta Tech Village education programs, mentors, and speakers)
• Focus is on helping startups find product / market fit and complete stage 1 of the startup process, followed by raising a seed round of financing
• Instant community comes from the Village and the 100+ other startups
• Office space during the program is included at the Village

With the new Atlanta Ventures Accelerator, we’re working hard to help grow and nurture more successful tech startups in Atlanta. Please apply today.

What else? What are your thoughts on the new Atlanta Ventures Accelerator?