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Tuesday I was able to go to the Atlanta Technology Angels monthly meeting thanks to the generosity of President Gordon Rogers, who offered a few part-time internships to MBA students. The topic of the discussion was the title above: “Does Atlanta Kill Startups” and featured a presentation from Professor Dan Breznitz (PhD Political Science) from Georgia Tech’s Sam Nunn School of International Affairs.

Needless to say, the crowd reaction was rather divided.

Before I go much further, if you don’t have a background on some of this stuff, there are 5 things from just over a year ago you should check out, in order.

1. Sanjay Parekh – Why I Hate Spreadsheet Jockies
2. ABC – Haynie’s move to California makes local tech quake
3. Jeff Haynie – What’s wrong with the Atlanta startup ecosystem and how to fix it
4. Lance Weatherby – Observations on Observations
5. Sanjay Parekh – Observations^3

Obviously there is more of this out there and it shouldn’t be too hard to find if you click through the profiles of some of the comments on the blog posts, but this gives you a good idea of the background.

Go ahead and take an hour or so to familiarize your self, I’ll wait.

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Ok then, now that we’re all up to speed; needless to say that many in the investor community did not take kindly to these accusations 15 months ago. No one likes being called out, especially when some people are basically alleging that you’re doing business wrong.

Well, this meeting kinda went the same way, but it seems to have mellowed a lot from what I expected. The crux of Dr. Breznitz’s point was that Atlanta did a lot of stuff right: they have a very smart population, a good percentage of young people, a welcoming and diverse population, and pretty similar investment per capita numbers to places like Austin and Research Triangle. Everyone was happy at this point.

The bad part: there is not a strong interconnected network of people. So, while Atlanta has many of the tools for creating a company, there are not the anchors to keep someone from moving, and move they do. There are not common board members across the most promising companies, and the management teams from previous successes do not usually intermix in new companies.

There were a handful of people who made the argument that social networks in the South are more often things like country clubs and churches than business meet-ups, or that there was no way to measure all of this perfectly. However, another good percentage of the audience saw this as a problem, pointing out that networks behind closed doors are friends not business associates, and friends don’t stop you from taking a few million dollars and moving out West. Also, while we did not get to see any other graphs at the meeting, apparently the networks from these other cities are MUCH more connected.

It was a really interesting discussion and hopefully will turn in to something that people think about more often when it comes to “What can we do to help make Atlanta more friendly for startups?”