This post was written by an attorney as I pointed out at the beginning of the article. Personally I am not opposed to non-competes in all forms. We have a law in Georgia already and it is fine. The amendment would create a strong non compete environment in Georgia and strong non-competes have been shown to stifle innovation. We have enough challenges down here already without this new law coming into effect.
Many legal scholars believe it is the reason Silicon Valley surpassed Route 128 as the technology capital of the world.
The Green Banana Papers, Marketing Secrets For Technology Entrepreneurs is a good quick read that offers practical advice on what to do. http://bit.ly/GreenBananaPapers
I reached out to the primary author. He was not aware that it was online.
While the paper has some factual errors and conclusions (I do not think that anyone within the Atlanta technology community would call it "rich in venture capital" as an example) I do think that the conclusion that Atlanta's tech sector lacks social structure is dead on. I wrote an article for the local paper to this effect last month: http://blog.weatherby.net/2009/08/startups-are-hard.html
I also think that a main point is missed within the article. Companies that leave Atlanta are not doing so for social structure reasons, they leave because the venture capital factor is based elsewhere and requiring the companies to move in order for a funding event to occur.
You live in Akron, nobody is going to call you an elitist. :)
Being the folks to come up with the concept and having $2 million in backing from Sequoia clearly puts YC at the top heap. Clearly gives YC more choice. There are however plenty of talented and motivated people in all parts of the world.
It will be interesting to see if the ones that stay in Atlanta can get funded as well as the ones that are getting SV intros (a Shotput Ventures partner lives in SF and 2 Shotput companies moved West). It's early, we will need to do an update in 90 days.
You were dead on in your comment that Y Combinator style seed funding is not regional:
Thanks for the pointer PG. Great essay. There are like a dozen gem quotes in there. I will update my post with a pointer.
To pull directly from the article a technology startup is "measurement and leverage, where measurement comes from working with a small group, and leverage from developing new techniques."
If I pull from chunks I come up with:
A small group of people inventing a new way to solve a difficult problem that is hard for others to duplicate.
If you can't convince at least one person that your concept is good enough that they should devote their time to it the idea is most likely not worth pursuing.
The uniqueness of an MBA is that it teaches how to think strategically about a business.
While I can not articulate exactly 'what' it teaches, I do know that often times in the face of new circumstances and rapidly changing conditions it has enabled me to ask the right questions and create the right framework to make a decision.
What I love about startups is they require this type of thinking. It has helped me tremendously in scaling technology companies.
Here is a real example. Pretend like you are in a finance class. It's a case study. On Microsoft buying Yahoo! Determine how much Microsoft should be willing to pay for Yahoo! and the assumptions and rationale behind your conclusion. Or how much is AOL worth as a spinout of Time Warner. The core of the answer lies in something called the Capital Asset Pricing Model and it is as every bit as complex as the fixed point combinator for which YC was named.
A little more practical and more marketing aligned, doing real market research for a natural foods store to determine if they should expand their footprint to other locations or just increase the size of their current store. It took over a month to design the questionnaire before the prof deemed it acceptable.
With that said, the real challenge, and what any top school does, is teach students how to prioritize. They give you so much work that you can not possibly get it all complete at the level of excellence in which you want to operate so you have to learn when something is good enough and move on to the next pressing issue. Which, BTW, is pretty much what you need to do in a startup as well.
In what may be heresy here on HN I am going to partially disagree with PG. Regional YCs may indeed be of the nth quality bucket, but that does not necessarily doom them to failure anymore then not attending Stanford or MIT dooms a hacker to failure.
The proof as they say is in the pudding. TechStars seems to be doing just fine so far. Let's see what Shotput's births before we call their babies ugly.
The Logistic Regression Markov Chain developed at Georgia Tech to predict results of NCAA tournament games does a good job at picking both upsets and late round game winners. A bit soft in the middle rounds.
Amit Ranjan the co-founder of Slideshare, called it an "inspirational masterpiece." I suppose I could have gone in and written something up but at this point just should leave it alone.
It's not on fire. It has turned into a healthy discussion. What I am hearing is that lots of hackers have issue with moving to ATL due to perceptions with tolerance. Fair enough.
Now if we ever started writing $1 million checks it would be interesting to see how people would vote with their feet. In my day job I get inquires from all over the world from people that would move to Georgia for a little help.
Thanks for the article that inspired me and the spirited discussion.