By Donnie Beamer

I often tell college students that choosing to become an entrepreneur takes a special combination of arrogance and ignorance. 

Ignorance has a negative connotation, but it simply means you don’t know how grueling the journey will be. But for what you do know, you have the arrogance to believe that despite the odds and all those who have failed before you, somehow your outcome will be different.

While entrepreneurship has become mainstream and romanticized by programs like Shark Tank and the lore of Silicon Valley, the journey remains intensely personal. I saw this firsthand on Mar. 11 while in the audience for this year’s Georgia Institute of Technology InVenture Prize – our local, Emmy-award-winning version of Shark Tank that airs on Georgia Public Broadcasting.

Seated near President Ángel Cabrera and Dr. Beth Cabrera, with Scott Marlette, a fellow Georgia Tech alum and cofounder of GoodRx, to my right, we reflected on a critical cultural shift. The focus at Georgia Tech, and across Atlanta’s institutions, is no longer solely on producing a “helluva engineer” for someone else’s company, but on training students to create their own. Having served as a judge on the show for the past three years, this resource is one that Scott and I both wish existed when we were students.

I am a reformed entrepreneur myself. Long before I walked the halls of Atlanta City Hall, I was in the trenches building my own startup, an artificially intelligent robotic bartender. I navigated the chaotic highs, the lonely nights and the countless pivots required to turn an ambitious idea into a scalable business. I understand the founder’s struggle because I lived it.

Today, however, that special combination of arrogance and ignorance also requires an immense amount of economic resilience.

We are currently watching a general softening of the national economy morph into a severe macroeconomic threat. Nationally, venture capital investment has seen a dramatic slowdown, and companies were recently rattled by a concerning jobs report that revealed a staggering loss of 92,000 jobs in a single month – with employers adding an average of just 15,000 new jobs per month throughout the past year. This is not a soft patch. It’s a structural challenge.

Against this backdrop of national labor stagnation, the mandate for Atlanta’s tech sector becomes brilliantly clear. We cannot rely solely on traditional corporate expansion to absorb our young workforce. Instead, we have a clear, unapologetic directive from Mayor Andre Dickens: Make Atlanta a top five tech ecosystem in the nation. 

To get there, and to insulate our local economy from national stagflation, we have to double down on the central maxim driving this city’s entrepreneurial spirit: We must teach our students to create a job, instead of just getting a job. 

To achieve this the Mayor’s Office of Technology and Innovation is not operating on “vibes” or anecdotal success. We are operating on hard math. According to a comprehensive report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), reaching that top five tier means Atlanta needs to achieve a massive leap in ecosystem throughput. We must jump from our historical average of producing about 200 startups a year to manufacturing 2,000 startups annually.

How do you 10x your entrepreneurial output when facing economic headwinds? 

You do it through a deliberate, structural strategy built on three pillars: adding measurement, connecting resources and changing perception. And the absolute foundation of that strategy relies on leaning into our greatest regional asset – our talent pipeline.

Forbes recently highlighted Atlanta as the “smartest city” in America, noting that roughly 60% of our population over 25 holds a four-year degree. The Atlanta region produces over 13,000 tech graduates a year. Training these students to become founders is no longer just an ambitious civic goal, it is an economic survival imperative because of the generational wealth it generates.

Historically, however, our university resources have been hampered by “startup sprawl.” Because our city is so geographically distributed we have historically operated in silos. A brilliant computer science student at Georgia Tech might be building an incredible algorithm, but they aren’t connecting with the visionary business major at Clark Atlanta University or the public health innovator at Emory University.

To fix this we are institutionalizing a citywide collaboration. This effort to break down silos is happening in parallel with other significant efforts, such as the University System of Georgia’s broader strategy to unify and elevate innovation and entrepreneurial efforts within their system. Through the newly launched Atlanta Collegiate Entrepreneurship Syndicate (ACES), we have brought together heavyweights like Georgia Tech, Emory, Georgia State, Spelman, Morehouse, Clark Atlanta and the Morehouse School of Medicine. This first-of-its-kind consortium is designed to break down geographic silos, share resources and actively measure our ecosystem’s growth so we know exactly where we stand in our march toward that 2,000-startup goal.

And we are already seeing the results of this collaboration. At our inaugural Avant South conference, ACES colleges presented student-led startups in a high-stakes pitch competition. Georgia Tech’s XR Navigation took first place, and Georgia State’s Culturally Relevant Science took second. As detailed in our impact report, this single event resulted in a reported $145,000 in additional funding and the creation of four new local jobs.

But celebrating these wins isn’t enough. We have to actively fund the earliest, riskiest stages of building. Through our Technology and Innovation Learning Experience (TILE) program, we are piloting what I like to call a “new co-op” model.

Historically, if a talented student wanted to build a startup they faced an impossible choice: drop out of school to pursue their dream, or take the safe route by accepting a traditional corporate internship. With TILE, we remove that friction. We actually pay students to work on their own ventures. We provide them with housing, deep mentorship and a stipend. We want to give them a safe space to take risks, fail, learn and iterate so that they never feel the need to leave Atlanta for Silicon Valley or New York to scale their dreams. We want them to know they can do it right here in their own backyard.

The resilience of Atlanta’s tech sector is not an accident, nor is it merely a fortunate byproduct of geography. From our unrivaled university talent to our vibrant cultural identity we have all the ingredients on the table to bake a really great cake.

Retaining our world-class talent is the vital first step. But as any founder knows, talent alone cannot scale a business.

No single office can build a top-five tech hub alone. This is where our established ecosystem must step up. We need our venture funds, corporate partners, and mentor-investors to lean in and provide the capital and expertise that TILE and ACES students need to scale. 

As Mayor Dickens frequently reminds us, Atlanta is a “group project.” In an era where getting a traditional job is harder than ever, we will continue to pull together to teach our students – and the world – how to build the companies that create the future.