How to Connect a Sprawling City

After David Cummings sold his marketing startup Pardot for $95 million in 2012, he decided to invest in filling a void in his city. Today, Cummings’s Atlanta Tech Village, a six-floor building on Piedmont Road, is a co-working space that 300-plus startups call home. It also helped birth a startup movement throughout the city’s sprawling patchwork of neighborhoods, which had historically existed in isolation. Soon after ATV launched, Switchyards Downtown Club and FlatironCity arrived downtown. Then, in 2016, private club the Gathering Spot set up shop between Atlanta’s trio of historic black schools—Morehouse, Spelman, and Clark Atlanta—and Georgia Tech. “By having these hubs, we have way more density of startups,” says Cummings, “and, big picture, we have a lot more success stories in the community.”