Atlanta Opportunity
Startups corporations and aspiring entrepreneurs are fleeing the Bay Area for the socalled black mecca. Here’s why the tech world’s center is shifting— and what it means for Atlanta
Black entrepreneurs, including Paul Judge of Techsquare Labs (below, left), are building a tech-startup scene down south.
“LOOK AT THIS, MAN,” TRISTAN WALKER SAYS AS HE LEANS INTO A WOODEN LAWN CHAIR IN HIS BACKYARD.
He forms his thumbs and index fingers into a rectangle and squints through it at the seven-bedroom literal house on a hill before us. It’s a warm April afternoon, too early yet for Georgia’s notorious swelter. Blues singer Tyrone Davis’s “Baby, Can I Change My Mind?” plays from a glowing Bluetooth speaker that doubles as a sleek outdoor light. “When I was 20 years old, and I was like, ‘What does the vision of [my] world look like?’ ” he recalls. “This frame is it.”
Walker and his family have been in this house, in Atlanta’s northern Buckhead neighborhood, for all of two weeks. It’s the first time the Queens, New York, native has had a backyard, and he’s been stringing lights, planting hydrangeas, and kicking around a soccer ball with his 4-year-old son, Avery James. In the fall, Avery James will attend a nearby private school with a black headmaster who, Walker informs me, is a patron of Bevel, the shaving system geared toward men of color that Walker launched in 2013. Walker’s wife, Amoy, steps out of the kitchen to greet me and announce that she’s making salmon burgers. In a month—on Mother’s Day—she’ll give birth to their second son, August Julian. “I’ll have a kid born in Palo Alto, and a kid born in Atlanta,” Walker tells me. “It’s a reset moment!”
Atlanta is where the Walkers were supposed to end up after they graduated from New York’s Stony Brook University, on Long Island, 14 years ago. Amoy had hoped to start their married life surrounded by a like-minded community in the southern city. Instead, Tristan took a risk on Silicon Valley, lured by its promises of meritocracy and innovative business thinking. He interned at Twitter and attended Stanford University’s business school; after making his name as the businessdevelopment lead for Foursquare, he became an entrepreneurin-residence at the Menlo Park–based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, then raised more than $30 million to create Walker & Company, a hair-and-skincare-product company focused on solving the needs of people of color. As a rare black founder raising money on Sand Hill Road, he got a lot of attention, and smartly used it to raise awareness for his brand and advocate for inclusive hiring and product development in the Valley. (Palo Alto, where Walker was headquartered, is only 1.9% black; San Francisco’s black population has dropped from 9% in 2017 to just 5% today.) He also cofounded the not-for-profit Code2040, which trains black and Latino college students in STEM and places them in Bay Area internships.
By 2018, though, Walker realized that he’d been recruiting other young minorities to a place he was no longer so keen on himself. He had difficulty raising additional capital, even as his investors sowed
hundreds of millions into mass-market competitors like Harry’s. Meanwhile, as the Bay Area’s inequity came into fuller view, Big Tech was doing little to address racial bias on its platforms or within its walls. Google, which continues to be plagued by racist results in its auto-complete feature, has been struggling to retain its 2.5% of black employees. Facebook—already criticized for its meager 4% black workforce and mired in a sea of privacy-related transgressions—is facing lawsuits over programs that allowed lenders and landlords to exclude minorities when advertising on its platform. It had become clear that Silicon Valley did not speak either Walker’s or his customers’ language. “Walker & Company should not have been built in Silicon Valley,” he says.
Over the years, Tristan and Amoy had flirted with the idea of leaving the West Coast. Last August, while visiting friends in Atlanta, they went house hunting, out of “curiosity,” Walker says. Within four months, that curiosity had given rise to a headline: Walker was selling Walker & Company to Procter & Gamble, staying on as CEO, and moving the company to Atlanta rather than to P&G’S corporate headquarters, in Cincinnati. Reports placed the acquisition price somewhere between $20 million and $40 million (which would mean investors didn’t generate a return), but Walker seems pleased with the outcome. “In a world where you can’t raise money and you need to ensure that your vision remains true, you gotta do what’s in the best interest of the company,” he says. Already, Atlanta has Bevel’s highest per capita concentration of customers. Now, with the backing of P&G’S corporate infrastructure— including its $2 billion R&D budget—walker is laying plans to learn from the nation’s black capital, and to send those findings back to his new parent company.
The Walkers have joined an exodus—what some have called the “reverse Great Migration”—of black Americans who are leaving dense and expensive northern metropolises to seek harbor in the same Southern cities that many of their ancestors fled. According to the Brookings Institution, the Atlanta area has attracted the majority of these migrants, the population quintupling since 1970.
The Atlanta metro area also has the second-fastestgrowing economy in the country (behind San Francisco), spurred by its tech industry, which accounts for nearly 12.5% of the city’s revenues, according to COMPTIA. Home Depot, UPS, Delta Airlines, the Coca-cola Company, and Equifax are headquartered here. Twilio, Salesforce, and Pandora have all recently set up outposts, drawn by the talent coming out of Georgia Tech and the Atlanta University Center, the largest and oldest consortium of historically black colleges and universities. And here’s the kicker: In Atlanta’s tech industry, an astounding 25% of employees are black. In San Francisco, it’s 6%.
As San Francisco’s high rents and dusty emphasis on “culture fit” repel enterprising talent, new innovation
hubs are emerging across the country to threaten its dominance. But Atlanta stands apart—and is uniquely positioned to fundamentally change the trajectory of entrepreneurship in this country—thanks to the community of black founders that have been coalescing here over the past decade. Some are homegrown; others are transplants, like Walker, who are seeking literal greener pastures and new opportunities. “Atlanta is just so black, like blackityblack,” says Iris Nevins, a 26-year-old software engineer for Mailchimp, the email-marketing platform. In February, she left the company’s Oakland, California, offices to join its Atlanta headquarters. “And I love that.”
Is it really a wonder, then, that technologists of color looking to launch or join an exciting new company would consider Atlanta—where trap music and Martin Luther King Jr. were born; Spelman and Morehouse colleges rise; a mayor named Keisha presides; Black Panther was produced and filmed; and more than half the population looks like you—a modern-day Wakanda? How long it can remain that way is another question.
AFTER A 15-MINUTE DRIVE FROM WALKER’S HOME, MY UBER
driver—one of several during my Atlanta stay who will try to sell me a piece of real estate—lets me off at KR Steakbar, a chic restaurant with a friendly maître d’ who guides me to a heavy curtain near the rear of the building. He pulls it back to reveal my first true glimpse of why the city is so often called the “black mecca”: Dozens of African American executives, tech entrepreneurs, influencers, and politicians, many of whom are millionaires several times over, are here for a private dinner.
A sunglasses-laden Tricky Stewart, the super-producer responsible for hits like Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” and Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” is chatting with Russell Stokes, president and CEO of GE’S energy-generation business. Ryan Glover, who sold his African American–focused digital broadcast network, Bouncetv, to Scripps in 2017, shares a joke with Kasim Reed, Atlanta’s mayor until 2018. Jewel Burks Solomon, cofounder and CEO of Partpic, a computer-vision startup that Amazon bought in 2016, is here too. (She negotiated to keep her team intact and in Atlanta.) In another corner of the room, I spot Walker sharing daps and shaving advice with George Azih, founder and CEO of Leasequery, an accounting app with more than $100 million in revenue.
“Everybody in this room, we’ve either been in the trenches together building companies or brought in the wee hours of the morning together . . . or we’ve done both,” says Paul Judge, the event’s host, as he settles people into their seats. Judge is the cofounder and chairman of eight-year-old Pindrop Security, which develops voicebased anti-fraud technology, and one of the city’s most prominent venture investors. The firm he cofounded, Techsquare Labs, has poured millions into some 30 seed-stage companies that specialize in everything from blockchain and finance to marketing technologies.
Judge is also a master networker, and he has orchestrated tonight’s gathering with a very specific goal: to show two Bay Area visitors that there is a thriving tech scene in Atlanta, with a wealth of young companies worth investing in. Judge stands at the head of the table and introduces the 30-odd guests to Lisa Gevelber, Google’s former VP of