Fintech South 2024: Aly Merritt with Atlanta Tech Village

Intro: Broadcasting live from the Business RadioX studio in Atlanta, Georgia. It’s time for Atlanta Business Radio, brought to you by Kennesaw State University’s Executive MBA program, the accelerated degree program for working professionals looking to advance their career and enhance their leadership skills. And now, here’s your host.

Lee Kantor: Lee Kantor here, broadcasting live from Fintech South 2024 at the Woodruff Arts Center. So excited to be talking to my next guest, Aly Merritt, with Atlanta Tech Village, and announcing a new development and expansion in south downtown. Welcome.

Aly Merritt: Thank you so much for having me today.

Lee Kantor: Well, for the two people who aren’t familiar with Atlanta Tech Village, why don’t you share a little bit about kind of mission purpose there? And then we’ll get into the expansion.

Aly Merritt: Absolutely. Atlanta Tech Village is the fourth largest tech hub in the US. We focus on supporting specificAly proprietary tech entrepreneurs. We have about 1300 of them in our building, give or take, and they make up about 250 to 350 companies. Our goal is to provide faster access to talent, capital and ideas.

Lee Kantor: So how has the tech community within Tech Village grown like maybe since its inception? Like, how many do you remember? How many businesses were there when you launched?

Aly Merritt: Oh, that’s such a fun story. We are a little over a decade old now. When Dave Cummings bought the building and started gutting it, he literAly had people come in and start building their own Ikea desks, floor by floor. It’s kind of a badge of pride, if you can say, I was there when I built my own Ikea desk. It wasn’t fancy. It grew very, very rapidly. There was actuAly a story in Hippotamus today that had a picture of when they hit their first 1000 members and had a lot of the original ATV team. And in 2019, we were completely full right before the pandemic, and even during the pandemic, we only dropped down to about 60% occupancy, even when we as a building were closed, because people reAly wanted to be a part of the community, even when they physicAly couldn’t be in the space.

Lee Kantor: And that’s the beauty of it. The community is not just the space.

Aly Merritt: That’s right. I like to say what I, I don’t sell office space. What I sell is community. I could sell office space. We have beautiful offices, but that’s just a piece of it. What we reAly do is focus on those serendipitous interactions between the entrepreneurs, the investors, the ecosystem folks, everybody in the ecosystem, which is why we’re here at Fintech South today.

Lee Kantor: Now, let’s talk a little bit about the expansion. And if you don’t mind, just share a little bit about the history that happened before you all invested in developing that south downtown area.

Aly Merritt: Yeah, it’s a funny story because it’s a very short history. We are doing real estate at startup speed. Absolutely. So David Cummings in October of last year. So less than a year ago got word that a large portfolio downtown which had been run by a German developer called Newport, was going up for sale. Bankruptcy. Style on the courthouse steps. Because apparently that’s still how we do things. As you stand on the courthouse steps and announce it to the world. And it was a large, contiguous chunk of downtown. And David thought.

Lee Kantor: And it’s a historic chunk.

Aly Merritt: Historic.

Lee Kantor: It’s not just a chunk of town. Yeah, it’s kind of the heart of of the, the world for a lot of people in a, in a certain part of history.

Aly Merritt: It is it was the original business and innovation district in downtown. And that was one of the reasons that it made such a big impact on David is he looked at it and thought, this is a part of history that reAly needs to be revitalized. We don’t want it to get sold into different people who maybe don’t have a big vision. This is an opportunity. And apparently we didn’t have enough to do so. We bought 15 acres, 53 buildings, the largest collection of historic assets ever sold in Atlanta.

Lee Kantor: And then the what’s kind of the vision to kind of reboot that, that part of town.

Aly Merritt: It’s a big vision and it changes literAly every day, as you do in startup world. Lots of pivoting, lots of testing and iterating and getting an MVP into the market and then saying, well, that didn’t work. Let’s figure out what we can do with that. Some days I come in and say, what is that? I thought that was a bagel shop. And they say things like, yesterday it was a bagel shop. Today it is a hairdresser. And I’m like, okay, um, so a little bit different than our focus in Buckhead is we’re moving not just into supporting our proprietary tech entrepreneurs, but also into supporting neighborhood businesses and helping Atlanta innovators and entrepreneurs grow from the ground up, regardless of the specific field that they’re in.

Lee Kantor: So it’s not just tech, which is a slight pivot. This could be a mom and pop. It could be a hairdresser, it could be a hairdresser. That’s fine.

Aly Merritt: Absolutely, because there’s so much space down there. In order to revitalize a neighborhood, you can’t just have proprietary tech startups, right? We want coffee shops. Yeah, you need coffee shops You need delis. You need pharmacies. You need. Grocers you need all the things that would allow people to move down there and live, work, play in a noncommercial real estate sort of way.

Lee Kantor: So it’s neighborhood as a service you’re selling.

Aly Merritt: It is neighborhood as a service in a lot of ways. Now it will have an additional fully resourced office similar to ATV Buckhead when we open in early 2025 at Atlanta Tech Village, Sylvan, it’s the former Sylvan Hotel, and that will house another minimum 200 entrepreneurs. We have about 36 offices there and that will focus on proprietary tech, but we are also building out space for our neighborhood entrepreneurs and businesses as well. And we currently have a co-working space open at Atlanta Tech Village Masons, the former Masons furniture store, and we have about 40 Masons only members there, in addition to a large amount of our Atlanta Tech Village Buckhead folks who are working down there too.

Lee Kantor: Now, is there any partnership with Georgia State since they’re down there as well? What a.

Aly Merritt: Great question. So they back up to our space, and we are working very hard on figuring out how we can better support them as they grow, as well as their graduate students who live down there. They have a huge pedestrian population and that’s very important to us too. They also back up to Underground Atlanta, who we work very closely with. And then on the other side, you have Centennial Yards and the new entertainment district there, as well as the CNN, formerly the CNN center, and that district that’s getting built out. And this is all a very symbiotic relationship. Any density that any of us can bring in or benefit across the board, even though we all have slightly different focuses and slightly different niche areas of interest.

Lee Kantor: So what do you need more of right now and how can we help you?

Aly Merritt: Thank you for asking that. We do a lot of public community tours because John Birdsong, the other partner in this in this development downtown, calls it transference of belief one tour at a time. You just don’t get it until you go. So I highly encourage folks to follow us on social media, see all the historic finds we’re finding in the building. You get heads up on everything that’s going on with the new buildings, all of the different designs and renderings, but you also get to come down and get a feel for the space. So that’s what we need. We need people to come down, come out, engage in the community. It’s not scary. We’ve got lots of parking. Of those 15 acres, we bought six surface parking lots.

Lee Kantor: There’s no shortage of.

Aly Merritt: Parking lot right now. Please come down and south. Downtown and Atlanta Tech Village are also doing a lot of lot parties. So you can find those on our social media. They’re open to the public. They’re kid friendly. We are celebrating not only the games that are going on in the Mercedes-Benz, which is walking distance away, but also we’re doing things like the party with the pass, with the Atlanta History Center coming down the line soon.

Lee Kantor: Now, as part of the kind of revitalization are you trying to keep kind of some of the architecture and the history from that standpoint, or is it something that, you know, because sometimes in Atlanta, they like to tear things down and put shiny things in its place.

Aly Merritt: Sometimes, frequently. I would say that’s often a challenge with Atlanta is that there’s a lot of history that’s no longer there. We are working our way through every single building, and we’ve acquired a few more since we bought the original portfolio. We are working with historical preservationists. We’re working on historic tax credits. We actuAly had our interns over the summer go into different buildings with a little cart, and they would pick up different pieces, whether they were beautiful lights or a typewriter or an old phone, all sorts of different fun things. And we’re putting them in a museum to showcase the spaces, even if a building isn’t structurAly sound. We’re working very hard to keep maybe a facade here and there. I saw a rendering this morning of a building that has trees growing in it, and the rendering turns it into a park with just a framework of the beautiful building.

Lee Kantor: That’s the the startup mentality. That’s an opportunity.

Aly Merritt: It’s an opportunity. We don’t say no. We say yes and yes.

Lee Kantor: And that’s right. Well, if somebody wants to connect and learn more, what again is the coordinates website and maybe social?

Aly Merritt: Absolutely. South downtown ATL is the Instagram for the entire portfolio. Atl Tech Village is specificAly for Atlanta Tech Village. So you can follow along on ATV, Sylvan and all the other fun things coming down the line. And we partner on a lot of those pieces, so either one will get you where you need to go.

Lee Kantor: All right, well, thank you so much for sharing your story. You’re doing such important work and we appreciate you. Thank you so.

Aly Merritt: Much for having me today. Oh, actuAly, I apologize. What I missed something. I do want to point out that even though we are revitalizing downtown, there is a lot already going on down there. So we are leaning into our neighbors tied to kitchen, Spiller Park, Wild Leap Brewery, Cat Eye Gallery shortly the Origin Hotel is going in, so there’s a lot of other folks doing great work that have been there for a long time and that are coming in new as well.

Lee Kantor: Right. So this is you don’t have to wait and go. There’s stuff to do now. Yeah, exactly. Early and often. Well, thank you again, Ali, for sharing your story.

Aly Merritt: Thank you for having me.

Lee Kantor: All right. This is Lee Kantor back in a few. At Fintech South 2024.