Pipefish sticking to Midtown and Hypepotamus

01/09/13 23:33:00    

By Michael Mealling

The hot topic for the past week around the Atlanta business scene is who is moving to Buckhead and who isn't. David's daily post from today reports on the customer response for the first 72 hours of Atlanta Technology Village. Thirty six memberships sold is pretty solid response.

As for Pipefish, I think we're going to stay at Hypepotamus. The major reasons are:

• Access to Georgia Tech - We depend on access to the latest in AI and machine learning research to stay ahead. And that only happens at Georgia Tech. While it isn't there yet, the planned HPC building going in next door will be a huge asset:
  
• An e-commerce hub - What Heath and Kevin have done at Hypepotamus is create a small e-commerce oriented hub. There are potential customers, partners, and experts in important verticals. Looking at tweets about ATV it appears that many of the companies moving to Buckhead are in or near the marketing automation space.
• Waffle House - There's a Waffle House on 5th Street. ;-)
• Pickup games - One feature I like about Hypepotamus that I hope ATV figures out a way to support is having some space that's free. Some place where you can go and work with others to figure out what it is you want to do. Our community has the equivalents to full blown gyms, personal trainers, private clubs, etc. But we still need some where for “pickup games”.

These are Pipefish's reasons for staying in Midtown. Someone else's company will have different reasons and its good that there's choice. Pipefish could get to the point where Buckhead makes sense. Or Alpharetta which is where our parent company is based. Regardless of our reasons, I think what David has done with ATV is a Good Thing™ and I'll strongly encourage others to go there if it makes sense.