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Oct 08, 2009 12:46 am |
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Atlanta City can’t keep tech startups |
John Stephen Veitch
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City can’t keep tech startups Atlanta Business Chronicle - by Urvaksh Karkaria Staff Writer
Byron E. Small Dan Breznitz: Atlanta is in danger of becoming a ‘huge incubation center and the success will be reaped by California and New York.’
In a gulp-inducing finding, a study by a Georgia Tech professor shows 40 percent of high-tech startup companies quit Atlanta within three years of raising their first institutional money.
The irony is Atlanta leads the nation in having infrastructure — think research universities and educated labor — to birth high-tech startups, the study found.
The primary reason entrepreneurs leave is not because they can’t get funded, but because they lack deep-rooted local connections or networks, said Dan Breznitz, the study’s co-author and an assistant professor at Georgia Tech.
Instead of building great high-tech companies, Atlanta has become a feeder system for great high-tech companies in other states, Breznitz said. Atlanta is in danger of becoming a “huge incubation center and the success will be reaped by California and New York,” he said.
I can't read the rest - Subscribers only. http://atlanta.bizjournals.com/atlanta/stories/2009/10/05/story2.html?b=1254715200
On LinkedIn Bill Wicksteed Senior Adviser/Research Associate at SQW Ltd and Univ of Cambridge, said:
"That's analogous to a concern we have in Cambridge UK - where we start many companies but don't see many grow big. The thought here is that we may have great resources for start up but lack the scale and/or culture for major expansion."
And here in New Zealand that's been the standard complaint for the last 20 years. Whenever we have a success, we attract international investors, and we're pleased about that. The business grows and we are pleased with our success. Then the International investor says "We're opening a factory in Malaysia, or China, and we're shifting the Head Office to Sydney, or San Francisco, or Boston."
Then they add, "But we'll keep research and development going in NZ." Of course in the long run they don't.
Big fish eat little fish.
(Small aside to Thomas who I snapped at a couple of days ago. The same thing happens to our medical research of which we are proud. Even though NZ is very tiny, and our funding is heavily restricted, our medical people have developed techniques, tools and theories that are part of a worldwide collaborative effort. Key things that come to mind are heart surgery on infants, prevention of brain injury for infants, the longest running study of human development in the world (1972 and continuing), many advances in cancer research, protection from common colds, research into dental care. But they suffer the same fate as our small businesses, they eventually get gobbled up by the guy with the most money. )
John Stephen Veitch; The Network Ambassador Open Future Limited - http://www.openfuture.co.nz/ Innovation Network - http://veech-network.ryze.com/ Building an Open Future - http://openfuture-network.ryze.com/Private Reply to John Stephen Veitch (new win) |
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