

The Spread of Start-Up America and the Rise of the High-Tech South - Sato
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/the-spread-of-start-up-america-and-the-rise-of-the-high-tech-south/246916/

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rebel19
This is all great until you actually try to raise money in one of these towns.
Atlanta is a great example of that. There are a lot of ideas, and very few
people that can actually execute on them. Also, even if you have a viable
product you will still play hell getting a decent round of funding in Atlanta
which is why a lot of startups and talent have left for the Valley.

~~~
paulfreet
Great startups can and do raise money in Atlanta. It's only harder for the
stupid ideas to raise money. Have to got to the Valley for that. :-)

~~~
rebel19
I'm sure that was the reason why Appcelerator went out to the Valley....it was
a pretty stupid idea.

[http://blog.jeffhaynie.us/whats-wrong-with-the-atlanta-
start...](http://blog.jeffhaynie.us/whats-wrong-with-the-atlanta-startup-
ecosystem-and-how-to-fix-it.html) Yes this is a couple of years old, but sadly
not a lot has changed.

If you have a product that is low risk and already earning revenue you will
get funding in Atlanta.....with terms requiring you to give up a lot more of
your company, a lot of extra overhead with financials etc..

I would like to see this change, but this is the state of things today and if
it is going to get fixed people need to be honest about how bad the problem
is. The first step to recovery is admitting that you have a problem.

~~~
paulfreet
That was three years ago. One company. Can you name any others?

Meanwhile a hundred technology companies have received VC money and remained
in Atlanta.

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cliftonmckinney
Memphian here. Bootstrapping (mostly) a startup here in town and working
through the funding struggles. I think pg alluded to a lot of this in a recent
post:

Here, if you're trying to start a company--and especially a tech company--the
general feedback is the quintessentially southern "Oh, that's really nice. So
are you going to put it on "Shark Tank" or something?" In other words, the
support is minimal from everyday citizens. This is not a town filled with
early adopters. There's very little chance of meeting another founder at the
local coffee house.

I think Memphis is trying to change this, and they're doing a fine job, but
these things take time. There's Emerge Memphis, which right now is just a
building. But that building is our little coffee house in the valley. Every
time I walk in, without fail, I have an engaging conversation with someone
who's completely interested in what I'm doing. It's on a smaller scale, but
it's there.

And I think the key is that the building, and its support organization Launch
Memphis, are themselves run like a startup. They try something and if it
doesn't work out they scrap it and try something else. Minimal bureaucracy,
and minimal bs.

And for what it's worth, I don't completely agree that squelchers make that
much of a difference. What's missing are champions, all the way up the chain.
Champions at the grassroots supporting education and entrepreneurship,
champions who commit to funding home grown companies, and champions who
support those companies with guidance and advice. I'll take one of those folks
for every 100 squelchers. Luckily, Memphis has a few. Not enough though. Not
yet.

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m0th87
North Carolinian here. I wrote a study on entrepreneurial opportunities in the
area.

tl;dr: The startup scene is definitely booming, most especially in Durham. Due
to cost of living, there aren't many places that are better to bootstrap than
here. But local investors are far behind. Starting a funded startup is still
extremely difficult here.

~~~
javery
I think it's hard to raise money anywhere - the key to raising money in Durham
is to make sure you aren't just talking to people in Durham. We raised money
from NYC, SF, and Seattle (with less than 10% coming from locals).

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wensing
The article talks about $9.1 bn invested in SV in 2010 vs $1.2 bn in the South
and then goes on to say that approximately 1 out of 10 raises are in the
South.

Unfortunately this overlooks the power of having 4x as much money concentrated
in a drivable radius vs multiple neighboring states. It's not linear. Same
thing can be said of the expertise of the investors themselves. In the Valley
you can actually find an entire firm that focuses on B2B SaaS because the
volume makes it possible. In other cities, investors can't be as focused
because the volume simply isn't there. This makes a big difference when you
are pitching. If your startup fits their niche, it's going to click much
easier.

Stormpulse is a startup that the South should invest in (yes, I'm completely
biased), but when we started to pitch aggressively we found ourselves getting
the most traction in Austin and the Valley.

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irickt
A journalist from The Atlantic is on a startup tour of the south:
[http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/a-road...](http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2011/10/a-road-
trip-through-the-souths-tech-startup-landscape/246008/)

Here's a chance to visit in Atlanta:
[http://www.atlsuds.com/2011/10/19/special-event-the-
atlantic...](http://www.atlsuds.com/2011/10/19/special-event-the-atlantic-
startup-community-happy-hour/)

~~~
lylejohnson
As one of the commenters asked, I wonder what startup(s) they're visiting in
Greensboro, AL?

~~~
hugh3
Maybe they got Greensboro AL (population 3000) confused with Greensboro NC
(population 300,000)?

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sciurus
I'll second the article's contention that Athens, GA is a pleasant place to be
if you work in tech. We even have some folks trying to nurture a startup scene
- <http://www.fourathens.com/>

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sehugg
Bootstrapping is awesome in the South. For example in Melbourne, Florida you
can live at the beach for $500/mo. Internet is goodly fast, and the Orlando
airport is an hour away. There's enough high-tech activity from KSC and the
defense industry to provide services you might need (office space, tech-savvy
lawyers).

But besides access to funding and influence, there's another overlooked
drawback to living in certain small towns: You'd be advised to bring your own
boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse.

~~~
rebel19
Bootstrapping is great in the south......until you need funding.

------
DanielBMarkham
I live in the rural south. How rural? I was on the phone last week with
Verizon begging them for some kind of internet access besides the crappy
satellite I use now.

It took over an hour just to get to the correct department. What? A regular
person wanting internet way out there? But I finally got an answer -- about
400 bucks a month for a 1.5MB T-1 line.

So it's not all attitude, but that's a huge part of it. There's also a lot of
infrastructure problems out here that are, frankly, shameful. I know my state
has had money for a long time that was supposed to bring broadband to the
masses. But so far that's just a dream. [insert long, emotional rant here]

On the flip side, the net, what little I have of it, has helped out a great
deal. On here I get to hang out with famous and not-so-famous startup folks,
learn marketing, watch videos and read blogs on how to form and run a startup.

I see a great future for a lot of the South, but there's going to be a lot of
bootstrapping going on. Startup growth is going to happen here in a much
different way than Silicon Valley. The culture isn't going to be all in one
spot, it's going to be spread out widely, with little "islands" like Austin,
Raleigh or the DC beltway. Founders are also more likely to be individualistic
and older. The crazy thing is how much is going on under the radar. I have no
doubt that within a 20-mile radius there are a couple of hundred or more folks
working on profitable startups, but heck if I know who they are. I seriously
doubt the local Chamber of Commerce or government startup efforts have any
idea either. Makes me wonder how trustworthy many of the statistics we see
about entrepreneurship really are.

~~~
hugh3
Surely that's a function of "rural" rather than "South"? You can get great
internet in some parts of the South, and crappy internet if you move to remote
parts of California.

Or so I would assume, having never tried to get internet in the South or in
remote parts of California.

~~~
DanielBMarkham
Yes. I forgot to qualify that. By being along the Southeast U.S. seaboard,
we're physically located close to some of the highest-bandwidth backbones in
the world. I live about 30 miles from the Mid-Atlantic Broadband fiber
backbone, one of the most advanced fiber backbones on the planet. So it's not
like we're lost somewhere in the middle of Utah; there's plenty of bandwidth
nearby. This is a local political problem -- no doubt we needed a big pipe,
but to take all that time and money and build a pipe that doesn't even help
those close-by? My opinion is that when these planners thought "economic
growth" they thought about bringing in a new factory or large business.
Therefore they spent the money in that manner. But the economy is growing in a
different manner entirely. As the article mentions, we have an impedance
mismatch between the way the old structures and institutions think things are
supposed to work and the way they are actually working.

~~~
lotharbot
> "it's not like we're lost somewhere in the middle of Utah"

Actually, rural Utah is remarkably well connected.

A lot of major backbones run through Salt Lake City, and many communities in
the middle of Utah have fiber to the home (via the Utah Telecommunication Open
Infrastructure Agency, or UTOPIA). Right now, I live in a town of under 20,000
people and get both download and upload speeds in the 20 megabit range with
pretty low latency.

As you said in a few posts up, it's a local problem. This community decided
broadband was important, so we voted for it and got it. Other communities and
governments don't really recognize the importance, so you can be just a few
miles from major backbone and yet be stuck with dialup or weak satellite.

------
richcollins
My hometown is Tampa, FL. In 2005 I decided I wanted to start a tech company.
I couldn't even get more than 4 people together for a programming meetup, let
alone something related to startups, so I moved to SF. I'm back for a couple
of months and was delighted to find out that there is a startup incubator
(Tampa Bay WaVE) that no only exists, but has put 80 startups through its
program!

