I moved here from Philadelphia and was surprised that from an engineer's perspective the tech scene was significantly better in ATL. There were more jobs at more interesting companies. Obviously this is anecdotal from one job search 5 years ago. Philly might also be surprisingly poor.
One cool company here is BitPay. Not sure what they are valued at these days but they are a big name in the bitcoin world. I think they have some solid engineering there. I worked with Oracle for a couple years here right after they acquired a company called Vitrue for $300 million. It's not unicorn status but that was one of several acquisitions around that time. Acquisitions like that in Philly were much more rare.
There are a lot of huge corporations here which can continually spin off startups and Georgia Tech is a good source of new engineering talent. I think Atlanta has a healthy tech scene but not one focused in headline grabbing areas.
From my experience going to meetups and seeing the kind of job postings that get thrown up out here, there's just more of an "enterprise" mindset here. A lot less "hard" tech being pursued. I think it's because there's not a lot of VC money (relative to the west coast and Boston/N.Y) so startups need to be more focused on generating revenue sooner. No long runways out here (for the most part).
This seems to select for business that find cash generating opportunities as opposed to chasing "changing the world."
Not OP but I'm a software engineer working for a startup in ATL. I'm not sure how we have a reputation for being "dominated by business types", but we do have a relatively high contingent of fintech and b2b companies here (our only unicorn, Kabbage, plus several others like Square, Salesloft, Salesforce). I think though that our pool of engineering talent is relatively high - I'd guess it's the most likely landing spot for good engineers from the southeast.
> I'm not sure how we have a reputation for being "dominated by business types"
Two things:
1. Atlanta's tech scene is largely b2b. Its driven a lot by people who worked in industry and then had a great idea for a company and left. Or serial entrepreneurs who are capable of building a business but not a product. So a lot of companies simply originate from "business types" because they're founded by them, for them.
2. ATV. ATV strived to make itself the face of the ATL startup scene, and generally succeeded. But the resources ATV provides are all primarily aimed at business types - pitch practices, VC events, demo days, and networking gatherings. And so business types gathered there, since that's a convenient place to be, and the successful companies went elsewhere due to rising rent. So now, ATV is largely the face of startups in Atlanta, and yet is a building filled with "business types" hustling to get their company started or funding secured. The optics on the startup ecosystem are consequently very heavily "business types" because everyone tends to just look at ATV as the thermometer.
I think by "business types" the OP means that most of the tech/startup scene consists of people more on the business-side: marketers, salespeople, general "hustlers", etc., rather than technical hackers.
There's a medtech and health-IT cluster as well, partly due to Emory's med school, and Atlanta being a regional hospital center. Much of that's b2b too (though there are a few Fitbit-style b2c health-IT companies), but different set of people than most b2b companies are, and with its own set of startup incubators (Neurolaunch, Sling Health Atlanta, Global Center for Medical Innovation, etc.).
I could be wrong here but my understanding is if a company is acquired they WERE a unicorn (if the acquisition was for $1B+) but they aren't a unicorn after the acquisition.
I go the other way. Your valuation means jack until you are acquired . It's just some VCs thinking you've built $1 billion business. For example YikYak being valued at $400M. Actually getting acquired for $1 billion... now that's special and rare
I just read an article that there revenue for 2016 was estimated to be $400 million. Not bad. I don't know what the profits were but I would guess that gets them 'unicorn status.' :)
I moved here from Philadelphia and was surprised that from an engineer's perspective the tech scene was significantly better in ATL. There were more jobs at more interesting companies. Obviously this is anecdotal from one job search 5 years ago. Philly might also be surprisingly poor.
One cool company here is BitPay. Not sure what they are valued at these days but they are a big name in the bitcoin world. I think they have some solid engineering there. I worked with Oracle for a couple years here right after they acquired a company called Vitrue for $300 million. It's not unicorn status but that was one of several acquisitions around that time. Acquisitions like that in Philly were much more rare.
There are a lot of huge corporations here which can continually spin off startups and Georgia Tech is a good source of new engineering talent. I think Atlanta has a healthy tech scene but not one focused in headline grabbing areas.