This is my new favorite airport.

Take a look at the booths in the airport restaurant: Ample space to spread out, easily accessible power outlets in each booth, friendly service, no blaring televisions, and free no-hassle Wi-Fi.

I spent three hours here, ordering a hamburger and tipping the waitress an extra five dollars for occupying the table. (It wasn't crowded, or I would have moved on.) Who needs a Crown Room?

There's a nifty little military aviation museum... only a couple of rooms, but a nice set of exhibits, including a restored Link trainer. (One of my aunts met one of my uncles when she was instructing on these trainers during WW2.) There are models of spacecraft strewn about the terminal, from the Redstone through Apollo to the Shuttle.

Even the bathroom floors have a "space" theme, with Hubble images at the entrance and a galactic mosaic on the floors:

Then you go out to the concourse, through an efficient security checkpoint. (I am continually amazed at how friendly and helpful TSA agents wherever I travel except Atlanta. At ATL, the agents have the demeanor of prison wardens in a bad movie.) And there are more power outlets near tables everywhere, including these little self-contained carrels:

(There are power outlets on the desktop surface, but my angle was wrong, and I didn't realize it until after boarding.)

The only bad thing I can say about Melbourne International is that Delta serves it with the dinky little CRJ jets that are comfortable only for children and hobbits. A guy my size can be crippled by sitting in one of those things for a couple of hours. But that's not the airport's fault!

I don't know who is running this place, but they're doing a darned good job. Can we put them in charge of Hartsfield, please?

Another of my letters-to-the-editor that will never be published, so you can read it here. This one was sent to Scientific American regarding their November 2009 issue.

Imagine my dismay, therefore, when this month's issue arrived with a cover article promising "A plan to get all energy from wind, water, and solar power by 2030." This is nonsense. One can be strongly in favor of greatly expanding renewable energy resources without supporting this illogical and impossible "plan."

Just to take two issues:

(1) The authors have "assumed... that most fossil-fuel transportation can be replaced by battery and fuel-cell vehicles." This is unsupported by any engineering reality. I suspect battery-powered vehicles will do a good job of replacing the four-door sedan for urban commuters. But without a fundamental breakthrough in battery technology, batteries will not be powering over-the-road trucks, or locomotives, or oceangoing vessels. Confusing "the transportation sector" with "automobiles" is an amateur error, and I would have expected better from these authors.

(2) In a single sentence, they declare that hydrogen, generated by electrically-driven hydrolysis, will fuel aircraft. No, it won't. Even tossing aside the incredible inefficiencies in manufacturing, transporting, and storing liquid hydrogen, the energy density of liquid hydrogen is only one-seventh that of gasoline or jet fuel. Ask today's airlines if they could survive with vastly more expensive fuel, but flights limited to only a few hundred miles.

It is certainly possible to greatly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels -- especially through a renewed commitment to clean, safe, abundant nuclear energy -- but the authors are not making that argument. By promoting an absurd vision for deriving "100% of the world's energy, for all purposes... from wind, water, and solar resources," the authors have actually done the clean-energy movement a disservice.

Which is nothing compared to the self-inflicted loss of credibility suffered by Scientific American. You should be ashamed of yourselves.

I suddenly noticed how many music technology companies have recently sprung up in Georgia!Here's a quick list, but I am probably missing some:

• BandMetrics
• BeatTweet
• FreeAllMusic
• Khu.sh (LaDiDa)
• Maestro.fm
• Music Intelligence Solutions (uPlaya)
• Neurotic Media (Amplified.com)
• Rank 'Em
• Vertical Acuity
• Zooz Mobile

Some of these have raised substantial venture money, some are operating on a shoestring, and at least one has multiple millions in revenue already.  One of the neat things is that these are coming from multiple directions—Georgia Tech, SCAD, even the Athens music scene.

Then you add in all the music studios that call Atlanta home. Think we're seeing a cluster being born? IndieMusicTech seems to think so...

I suspect that Dr. Loewy and I agree a lot more than we disagree, but I'm glad to have had the chance to have my position printed.

Click on the image below for a high-resolution PDF, or scroll to the bottom to read my original text:

The version above, edited for length but without changing my meaning, is 137 words. In case you're interested, my original submission (exactly 150 words!) before editing was:

NASA shouldn't go back to the Moon. But individual Americans should... as explorers and entrepreneurs and colonists.

In the 1960s, America won the space race with the Soviets... but we went to the Moon too early, before the technology was cost-effective, and we haven't been back in forty years. It's too expensive.

This time, we should find ways to explore, exploit, and colonize the Moon cost-effectively. That means a national space program designed to create and support a new space industry... not another "flags and footprints" mission with no real-world impact. We can build a new economic sector in which America leads the world -- and which supports tens of thousands of high-quality jobs here on Earth.

It's not NASA's job to send astronauts back to the Moon. NASA's job should be to make it possible for the National Geographic Society to send astronauts to the Moon.

And I couldn't acknowledge it within my 150-word limit, but that last sentence is modified from Rand Simberg; he deserves any credit for it. Check out his blog, and take the time to read his article on "A Space Program for the Rest of Us" at The New Atlantis.

We had two incredible open forum sessions yesterday to discuss the future of ATDC. The Hodges Room was pretty much filled both times, so I suspect nearly 200 people took the time to come down and share their ideas with us. Thank you!

We broadcast both sessions over the Internet, courtesy of ATDC member PlayOn Sports, and the video streams are archived at the ATDC web site here and here. From Twitter comments, there were people out there actually watching; one from as far away as Boston! We'll try to keep broadcasting as many events as possible for people who won't or can't get to Midtown Atlanta.

(And thanks for your patience with the various audio glitches. The Hodges Room is a hostile environment for microphones; we're investing in some new equipment that should make things like this work better in the future.)

Rather than scribble notes on a flipchart and never see the pages again, Melissa Zbeeb took notes in real-time on a shared Google Doc. Here are the community suggestions from the afternoon session:

http://tr.im/wPbj

And from the evening session:

http://tr.im/wPbs

And, for good measure, here are my speaker notes printed before the events:

http://tr.im/wPaO

Keep the good ideas coming! There are half a dozen things we're going to do that we'd never even thought of. That's the value of a community... all of us are smarter than any of us.

Thanks to everyone who came out... and thanks to the ATDC staff who is making all this possible! Exciting days ahead!

One of the reasons Bud Peterson rocks as the new president of Georgia Tech:

When walking him down to the lobby after our all-employee meeting yesterday, we ran into Ken Stewart (Commissioner of Economic Development), and had a brief but useful conversation. I mentioned how great it was to have so many related functions in the Centergy building, because we get to have casual serendipitous interactions with so many different members of the technology community.

Dr. Peterson treated us to a clear and concise 30-second lecture on Knudsen numbers and the concept of mean free path.

Yep, he's the big boss, and a talented administrator... but he's also still a helluva engineer!

This is different.

ATDC is almost thirty years old. (We're going to have a thirty-year birthday bash next year; be sure to come!) And, throughout most of ATDC's history, it's been a very exclusive club. We usually get a couple of hundred applications a year, and usually accept about a dozen into membership.

That's a lousy way to make friends... since, by definition, we're telling a couple of hundred entrepreneurs per year that they're not good enough to be in our club.

But it's a great way to validate that the applicants who survive the process are solid companies. Companies worth investing in. Maybe even companies worth catching an airplane from Boston or California to invest in. The ATDC "seal of approval" meant that a company was automatically worth visiting when a VC was coming to town to see what was cooking in Atlanta.

And that model served ATDC well for a long time. Since there were never more than a few dozen members at any one time, the ATDC staff could provide some serious personal service to the entrepreneurs: Consulting. Coaching. Making connections. And, since this was such a high-touch model, it was nice to squeeze everyone in as neighbors... originally the O'Keefe building, then the "storage warehouse" on Tenth Street, and finally a set of three top-notch facilities. ATDC currently manages the second floor of the Centergy building, a set of life sciences "wet labs" in the ES&T building, and a corner of the Georgia Tech Savannah facility.

Then the market changed. Lots has been written about this elsewhere, and I assume you've read it... but everyone in the angel/venture capital chain took one step to the right, then sat down. It became a lot harder for a new company to attract VC money. At the same time, in certain sectors, it became much less necessary to attract VC money. For Internet deals: borrow every dime you can, write code like crazy, push the infrastructure up into the cloud, live on ramen noodles until you get someone, somewhere, to pay for something, then finance growth out of cash flow until investors (or acquirors) come looking for you. No VC required. Heck, maybe no offices required. If you're in the cloud, you're not keeping your servers under lock and key, and if you don't need a PBX (hello, Skype and cellphones)... you can run a pretty substantial operation via laptops and coffee shops.

Then you factor in Atlanta traffic. ATDC has always had "remote members"—in fact, today, about 40% of ATDC's members are not bricks-and-mortar tenants—but, honestly, they've always been second-class citizens. They don't get the same intense hands-on experience as the tenant companies. But if you live in Suwanee, or Alpharetta, or Kennesaw, the idea of driving to Midtown every day can be pretty soul-killing. (Not to mention if you live in Newnan, or Gainesville, or Bainbridge! More about that later.)

So, over the last few years, the ATDC model of "run 'em through a gauntlet and only the best will survive" has become less relevant. Some companies—some good companies—have chosen to bypass the gauntlet and simply not apply.

VentureLab

Let's switch gears and talk about VentureLab. I've been running VentureLab for a little over four years now. It's a different model. First off, VentureLab only works with technologies belonging to Georgia Tech. (There are minor exceptions for student projects, but not enough to affect this argument.)

So the "gauntlet" to get in is different... at the time of admission, VentureLab tries to determine if any startup could exist in your target space, not if yours is the potential winner. That's very different. If we decide that there's room for a startup, everything is focused around assembling the resources to build a successful one... business plan, management team, seed capital... all those things that companies already needed to have to survive the ATDC admission process. It's not a coincidence that the VentureLab exit criteria looked a lot like the ATDC entrance criteria.

Too many of you have heard me tell my tired joke that "If ATDC is an incubator, then VentureLab is pre-natal care." And it works. But... it's high-quality, high-cost pre-natal care that you can't have. (Unless you're based on Georgia Tech intellectual property.) Look at the quadrants below.

If you have Georgia Tech intellectual property, VentureLab would work with you at the earliest seed/concept stage. (We're not just talking pre-revenue... we're talking pre-incorporation and pre-patent-application!) And, if you survived to the relative maturity of "early-stage" (I'm stealing definitions from Lance Weatherby's blog here), you'd be a great candidate for ATDC.

But if you're weren't based on GT intellectual property? Look above, at that vacuum in the lower left.

Nature abhors a vacuum, and innumerable groups, linkages, and organizations have sprung up to help fill this one. (That link is to a blog post talking about those groups, and an animated version of that incredibly cluttered chart in the lower left.)

Today's announcement changes all that. We're not trying to take the place of any of those organizations—they're the symbol of a thriving Atlanta startup ecosystem, and we're not arrogant enough to think we're smarter than the crowd. But we are going to make ATDC available as an umbrella... if any of those organizations can benefit from using ATDC as a clearinghouse, or a sponsor, or just a place to meet—let me know.

(The VentureLab function for Georgia Tech startups doesn't go away... and neither do the employees... and neither does the GRA VentureLab money. It's now just one more program managed by ATDC.)

SBIR Assistance Program

I'm already nearing 1000 words, so I'll keep this short. How many of you are even aware of the Federal government's mandate that the eleven most profligate Federal agencies need to devote 2.5% of their R&D spending to small companies? Companies like yours?

How many of you have ever applied for it?

How many of you would even know where to look?

The state of Georgia pays for a free SBIR Assistance Program (which also helps with STTRs; don't ask) that has helped dozens of companies land tens of millions of dollars in Federal grants and contracts. But you've never called them, have you? Now, by merging this program into ATDC, every member will get asked "Have you looked at the latest solicitations? Any of them sound interesting? Need some help figuring out how to submit a proposal?"

Getting some of your taxes back from Uncle Sam with no loss of equity, and no incurring of debt. What could be better?

Scale

This post is already too long, and I'll come back to some of these topics in the future. But the challenge for the new expanded ATDC will be all about scale. Budgets are tight. We can't provide the same high-touch consulting services to 400 companies that we can to 40. And we certainly can't offer startup-friendly real estate deals to ten times as many companies; you won't all fit in our space!

We have some good ideas about this, but it will mean leveraging community involvement as a force multiplier. Some of you reading this will be helping out other entrepreneurs younger or less-experienced than you. Some of you already do this. Some of you will be asked to start.

And some of you won't be in Midtown Atlanta. By figuring out how to decouple our services from our real estate, we'll be figuring out how to offer access to ATDC in places other than Midtown (and Savannah). We'll want to see ATDC "circles" in Gwinnett, and Alpharetta, and Athens, and anywhere else in the state where there's sufficient entrepreneurial activity to justify it. Stay tuned for more information on how this will work. I can tell you right now—we'll need your help.

Whether you're a first-time entrepreneur needing someone to talk to, or you've already exited three companies and are willing to help the next generation, or somewhere in between... If you're a Georgia entrepreneur and this sounds interesting, please visit the new ATDC Web site at http://bit.ly/svYw6 and sign up!

Disclaimer

There's a professional disclaimer on this site, but I should probably repeat it here:

Any material posted on this site or other personal sites reflects my personal opinion and does not necessarily represent the position of Georgia Tech, the University System of Georgia, or the State of Georgia.

But, for those of you who are asking "Why are we doing this?"... you've just read my answer.

ATDC, one of the nation's largest, longest running, and best-known university-based technology accelerators, is expanding its mission. ATDC has been merged with Georgia Tech's VentureLab and with the Georgia SBIR Assistance Program. By pooling resources, the new ATDC has increased the staff available to serve its expanded mission of helping Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies. The change will allow ATDC to greatly extend its reach to serve more technology companies along multiple growth paths and at all stages of development.

Founded in 1980, ATDC has helped create millions of dollars in tax revenues by graduating more than 120 companies, which together have raised more than a billion dollars in outside financing. However, according to Stephen Fleming, vice provost at Georgia Tech, "the startup market has changed dramatically over the past few years. Many startup companies do not want or need to pursue venture funding. Some are not even seeking traditional office space. ATDC's new initiatives directly address the demands of today's startup environment."

ATDC will open its membership to all technology entrepreneurs in Georgia, from those at the earliest conception stage to the well-established, venture-fundable companies. "We're interested in any technology business opportunity" said David Sung, one of ATDC's startup catalysts and a former partner with H.I.G. Ventures. "There are many ways ATDC can help startups, from business coaching and providing networking opportunities to financing through angel investment, government grants and contracts, corporate partnerships, and classic bootstrapping. We will support all entrepreneurs, whatever path they may take, through their entire growth process."

ATDC will continue to offer traditional "bricks-and-mortar" incubation space on entrepreneur-friendly terms, both in midtown Atlanta and Savannah. The center will be expanding its recent SeedSpace offering of small single-office leases in Technology Square for the earliest entrepreneurs and will provide a variety of co-working spaces to promote casual interaction among entrepreneurs. Recognizing the sprawl of the Atlanta metro area, ATDC will offer programs outside the Perimeter where dense clusters of entrepreneurs can benefit from its services. ATDC will also take full advantage of social media to build connections with entrepreneurs across the entire state of Georgia.

Since 1999, the state-funded ATDC Seed Capital Fund has made equity investments in Georgia startup companies alongside angel investors and traditional venture firms. With this new merger, ATDC will also manage the Georgia Tech Edison Fund, an innovative investment fund established in 2007 which draws its resources from charitable donors who are interested in helping expand the entrepreneurial ecosystem surrounding Georgia Tech.

"ATDC has always been a focal point for entrepreneurship in Georgia" said Sig Mosley, president of Imlay Investments and member of ATDC's board of advisors. "With these moves, ATDC now is aligned to support the specific needs of the new startup environment. The open door policy is a strong, positive shift and reinforces ATDC's leadership role in the startup community not just within the Atlanta metro area, but throughout the entire state."

The merger of the three units will bring together a broader knowledge base to provide comprehensive services to Georgia's technology entrepreneurs.

"By working at the very earliest stage with university spinouts—not just pre-revenue but pre-incorporation—we have learned a great deal about the coaching required by brand-new entrepreneurial teams that are still establishing their business model" said Roberto Casas, previously assistant director of Georgia Tech's VentureLab. "To date, we've focused on startups based on Georgia Tech intellectual property. By merging with ATDC, we'll be able to offer similar services to any Georgia startup, whether connected to Georgia Tech or not."

ATDC, the former Georgia Tech VentureLab, and the SBIR Assistance program are part of the Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2) at Georgia Tech, which helps Georgia enterprises improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. Stephen Fleming, the former head of Georgia Tech VentureLab, was recently promoted to vice provost of Georgia Tech overseeing all of EI2. He will serve as the initial director of the new ATDC.

"Despite the economic downturn, it's still a great time to build a startup company in Georgia" said Fleming. "The last four years have seen an explosion of groups and organizations supporting the early-stage entrepreneur. With this expansion, we're rebooting the franchise of ATDC as the hub of technology entrepreneurship in Georgia. We hope to work with everyone, at any stage, along any path, to accelerate more technology startups and weave them into the economic fabric of Georgia."

All employees of ATDC, Georgia Tech VentureLab, and the SBIR Assistance Program will be retained in the consolidation. The new ATDC organization will continue to assist Georgia Tech faculty members and other research staff in forming new companies, and will continue to provide assistance to any Georgia small business seeking SBIR funding.

About ATDC
ATDC helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies. Founded in 1980, the Advanced Technology Development Center has provided business incubation and acceleration services to hundreds of Georgia startups—most of which are not based on Georgia Tech research, but which benefit from the close proximity to the university. ATDC currently has three facilities; two at Georgia Tech's main campus in Atlanta, and one at Georgia Tech's satellite campus in Savannah.

About SBIR Assistance Program of Georgia
The state of Georgia has one of the nation's leading SBIR/STTR assistance programs which, since being established in 2005, has educated and helped hundreds of Georgia entrepreneurs access these sources of federal funds. With the program's direct assistance, 150 companies have submitted one or more proposals resulting in more than $30 million in federal awards. By merging into ATDC, the program will be able to interact with more entrepreneurs across the state, including those who may have never considered applying for federal grants, and bring more of these awards into Georgia's startup ecosystem.

About VentureLab
In 2001, Georgia Tech became a founding member of VentureLab, a program of the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA). VentureLab helps build spinout companies around cutting-edge university research. With its emphasis on technologically-grounded business analysis, access to early-stage funds, and recruitment of experienced management, Georgia Tech's VentureLab has launched more than two dozen successful companies and serves as a model for other universities seeking to commercialize their discoveries. GRA's VentureLab Program now extends to four other research universities in Georgia; with an investment of some $13 million from GRA, more than 150 Georgia-based startups have been created around university intellectual property in the state. GRA also recently launched a new venture fund to make equity investments into these spinout companies.

If you're a Georgia entrepreneur and this sounds interesting, please visit the new ATDC Web site at http://bit.ly/svYw6 and sign up!

(Click for full-size image.)

Those of you at the Atlanta CEO Exchange this evening may have seen the lapel button I was wearing. It generated a lot of attention.

If you've been paying attention to the buzz around Atlanta, it's been almost a year since Jeff Haynie moved west, and left us his farewell message as to "What’s wrong with the Atlanta startup ecosystem and how to fix it."

If you haven't been paying attention to the conversation, here's a quick guide to catching up:

• Jeff Haynie
• Urvaksh Karkaria
• Scott Burkett
• Lance Weatherby
• Sanjay Parekh
• Russell Jurney
• Paul Graham
• Greg Foster
• Fred Wilson

Okay... ever since Hayes Microcomputer went bust, there's been great wailing and gnashing of teeth about how Atlanta isn't Silicon Valley. In my previous role as a venture capitalist, as my not-quite previous role running VentureLab, and in my brand-new role as the chief of economic development for Georgia Tech, one of the questions I'm most frequently asked is "How can we make Atlanta the next Silicon Valley?"

Not to put too fine a point on it -- but that's a foolish question. Silicon Valley is a unique aberration... a confluence of people, ideas, cash, and culture that will probably never be duplicated. And it's futile to try.

But, for most entrepreneurs and most companies, it's also irrelevant. Build a fabulous product that delights customers while solving a real problem, and geography is irrelevant. To quote Fred Wilson from his post above, "You can build a great startup in any of the dozen to two dozen startup hotbeds around the world. Pick a place you want to live and work and possibly raise a family. And then get busy."

Atlantans, repeat after me:

• We're not Silicon Valley.
• We don't want to be Silicon Valley.
• We don't need to be Silicon Valley.

If you agree, stop me and ask for a "Not The Valley" lapel button. If anybody wants them, I'll print stickers, too. And, if you disagree... well, I grew up in Atlanta, and Delta has been my hometown airline for my entire life. For me, they'll never have a slogan as memorable as this one from the 1960s and 1970s:

Delta is ready when you are.

I made an expedition to Gwinnett County recently to look at a blimp. (For those reading this who aren't familiar with Metro Atlanta, Gwinnett County is a huge fast-growing region northeast of the city of Atlanta. It has a substantial high-tech base and a committed evangelist. Those of us Inside the Perimeter make a lot of jokes about those hinterlands Outside The Perimeter. They return the favor with nonsensical blather about big houses, great schools, and the absence of random gunfire. De gustibus non est disputandum.)

Anyhow, Tamir Sagle, the CEO of TopEyeView, invited me to a demo of his product. Unlike most demos I see, this one couldn't be done in a Starbucks or in a university lab. This one required an empty parking lot, a honkin' big truck/trailer, and a handful of people. (Tamir says they can do it all with three people in twenty minutes, and I see no reason to disbelieve him.)

Out of the truck comes a partially-inflated blimp. You can get an idea of the scale from the pictures above. You can't ride it, but it can carry a few dozen pounds of useful payload. In this case, a gyroscopically-stabilized broadcast-quality video camera.

Click on the photograph above for a better view: there's a pair of nylon ropes stretching up to the blimp, which is hovering at 450 feet. (TopEyeView has been cleared by the FAA to operate up to 500 feet just about anywhere in the U.S. that's not near an active runway.) A wireless transmitter on the blimp shoots the video signal down to the control station; the line-of-sight ground antenna is about the size of a big hardback book.

The flight director sits at a portable control station where he controls the camera with a joystick. He can zoom in and out, pan up and down, and rotate it 360°. The blimp acts like a huge weathervane, so if you're filming a static target (like a concert stage), the director has to manually keep the camera aimed in the right direction. That job will belong to software in a future version.

The zoom is incredible. The image above is of a baseball field three miles from our parking lot. (All I had was my iPhone camera; it looks a lot better than this photograph implies.) Keeping the image stable was no problem, and the quality was clearly good enough to put on the national news.

When you're done, you let out some of the helium, winch it down, and stuff the partially-inflated blimp back into the truck.

Who would need such a thing?

• Television news stations, obviously. It would have been riveting to have one of these filming from 500 feet up, a quarter mile away from the burning Georgia Theatre this morning.

• Major sporting venues. The Goodyear blimp is an icon over the SuperBowl (although, with roofed stadiums, I don't know why they bother) but this could be deployed for college football games. (Or, in Plano, for high school... )

• Concert and festival promoters. That's a twofer... a security "eye in the sky" during the event, and top-quality video footage to be used for the TV special or DVD later.

• The Border Patrol. The Secret Service. Greenpeace (what's really going on on the other side of that factory fence?). The list goes on.

TopEyeView provides the same quality video that you'd get from a broadcast-equipped helicopter. But you can use it to silently observe your event from the sky all day long for just a few thousand bucks. A helicopter plus a pilot will run you tens of thousands of dollars per deployment, plus they make a hellacious racket, plus they can't fly low over crowds, plus they can only stay on station for a limited time until their fuel runs out. UAVs like this Georgia Tech spin-out are stealthier and quicker to deploy—handy for your local SWAT team!—but can't provide the staying power ("loiter time") or crowd appeal of a blimp.

Tamir and TopEyeView have done all the right things... built a working prototype, gotten some early customers, navigated the FAA's regulatory path, and are—if you'll pardon the pun—ready for takeoff. The next step is to upgrade the blimp to transmit HD video, so they're looking for investment. I met then through Space Angels Network, one of the investment groups I participate in. If you're interested in more information (on the company or on Space Angels Network), drop me an email.

It's refreshing to see an old concept thoroughly reworked with modern technology. And this demonstrates one of the strengths of Atlanta's entrepreneurial community... we're not all Web 2.0 developers (although we're good at that). We're aerospace, and materials science, and semiconductors, and telecomm, and medical devices, and vaccines, and solar cells, and biofuels, and Lord knows what we'll see next. Amid all the economic doom and gloom, Tamir is a reminder that it's a great time to be an entrepreneur in Atlanta!