Photograph by Growl
Around noon on New Year’s Day, the guy credited with putting Atlanta on the national tech startup map sent a text message about South Downtown. “Hey, if we hosted a public tour and lunch tomorrow, how many folks do you think we could get?” David Cummings asked. “Ten?”
The recipient of the text—as he often is for Cummings’s off-the-cuff ideas—was Jon Birdsong. Birdsong is a partner in Cummings’s company, Atlanta Ventures, which launched Buckhead’s small-business incubator, Atlanta Tech Village, in 2012.
“Yeah, maybe 10 or 15 people,” Birdsong replied to Cummings. He put an open invitation on social media to meet at Thai restaurant Tyde Tate Kitchen, housed in South Downtown’s revitalized, but mostly empty, Hotel Row.
Twenty-four hours later, the crowd spilled out of the restaurant and onto the Mitchell Street sidewalk. Like a blond Pied Piper in an overcoat and Atlanta United scarf, Birdsong led over 100 curious locals, media representatives, and real estate players on a tour of South Downtown, an eight-block stretch of historic buildings tucked between Underground Atlanta, the Gold Dome, and Mercedes-Benz Stadium. The once-proud streets have limped through decades of vacancy and decay, but the tour’s huge turnout emphasized the area’s eternal appeal. “It’s amazing how much passion there is for South Downtown,” says Cummings. For these two serial entrepreneurs, there’d better be.
Cummings is a Tallahassee native who moved to Atlanta in 2002 and made an estimated $95 million fortune selling his marketing automation firm, Pardot. Birdsong is from Brookhaven, attended the Olympics as a kid, and celebrated several monumental Braves victories downtown. The pair met in 2009 when Birdsong cold-emailed Cummings, simply asking for advice about startups.
The business partners are more tech entrepreneurs than real estate developers, but, like many in Atlanta,…
Read the full article here
