Cracking the Code: Atlanta Is Changing the Face of Startup Culture

Women in Atlanta are proving that you don't have to be in Silicon Valley to explore your tech dreams. Over the past few years, Atlanta has been growing as hub for female entrepreneurs and defying the status quo with its increasing number of women in tech.

Does it come as any surprise as to why we made the big peach of the south our next stop for Create & Cultivate?

According to Allyson Eman, Executive Director of Venture Atlanta, the premier tech conference held every October for Georgia’s top technology innovators and top-tier investors told Forbes,  "Women are seizing the opportunity to start tech companies in Atlanta’s key industries—fintech, health IT and IT security—as well as in emerging industries, such as marketing automation." According to Eman, Atlanta is much more open to female techies than many other cities. In San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle, for example, tech workforces are more than 75% male. 

At the beginning of 2016, Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed announced the inaugural class of a new program geared at women in business. Called the Women's Entrepreneurship Initiative, Mayor Reed said the program is "an important step forward in strengthening our city’s entrepreneurial ecosystem." The group of women, selected through a rigorous process in the fall of 2015, now have opportunity to operate their small businesses in an incubator environment, with designated workspace. The WEI initiative lasts for 15 months and is housed on the 11th floor of Downtown Atlanta’s iconic Flatiron Building – the city’s oldest standing skyscraper. This signifies an important step forward in the city's diverse history and demographics.

Likewise there are venture firms, Atlanta-based Valor Ventures for one, that are focussing on female entrepreneurs in Atlanta and setting up women-only capital funds. Designed to fill the gap in the startup world, Valor also sees this as smart business.  In Quarter 2 of 2015, Atlanta tech companies raised more venture capital — $206.8 million — than in any quarter since Q2 2001. General Partner of Valor told Upstart Biz Journals, "Of the $48 billion in venture capital invested last year, just 7 percent went to female founders. It’s a market niche that’s incredibly underserved, yet is high opportunity.”

She also told them that female-led companies perform better. 

Tickets for Create & Cultivate Atlanta are on sale now! Get yours before they go. 

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The Blogging Business Key Nobody Is Talking About

Being a style publisher in 2016 is a multi-faceted job if there ever was one. Creating blog posts, photoshoots, running a website, liaising with brands, networking, researching, snapping, Instagramming, and more - all within a week’s work. If you categorize all these tasks, you’ll see they fall into three block pillars: Content, Business Management, and Tech.

This division is technically right, but it doesn’t identify the most crucial factor: that all three pillars overlap, and understanding the intrinsic relationship between them is the key towards the longevity of your blogging business.

So what is this mysterious intersection between the pillars of your business? And why is it important to understand and develop it?

WHAT IS THIS MYSTERIOUS INTERSECTION BETWEEN THE PILLARS OF YOUR BUSINESS?

Translating an overarching business vision through your digital presence is the one thing most publishers should consider when thinking of all the tasks their job entails. And it’s not even their fault. To put it simply, nobody in the industry is really acknowledging it. Well, almost nobody.

I launched my company, chloédigital, when it became clear to me that there was a gap between the fashion and tech worlds that was stopping great publishers from moving forward. Through our membership, my team and I now offer bloggers access to an all-rounded support system to strengthen their personal brands and power their online empires.

At chloédigital we look after some of the most successful blogs in the industry and the common factor that makes top-tier bloggers stand out from the competition is very clear: their business vision is holistic and cohesive.

Working closely with leading influencers around the world (a few of which will be panelists and mentors beside me at C+C DTLA!) has put me in a unique position to gain insights on the fashion industry whilst still having a foot in the tech world myself.  I have seen first hand how working with a multidisciplinary tech and strategy team can be a pivotal point to grow a blogger’s online authority. But there is still much more to be done in terms of connecting all aspects of an influencer’s presence and decisions, on and offline. Working with a PR agency on one end and a tech team on the opposite end, with any content decisions torn in the middle, is just not an efficient way of approaching your business anymore.

The future of digital publishing lays within integrating every team and detail cohesively to reach new goals.

A very extended misconception about style publishers is that, as mainly creative professionals, content creation is the aspect of their business that drives most of their strategic decisions. But the reality in digital publishing is that, when there is a disconnect between the technical and creative side, it is actually the technical side that holds the veto power in key decisions. Let me give you a couple of examples of things that are commonly heard:

“I would love to add a new awesome functionality to my blog that I’m sure my community would love, but I’ve never seen anything like it so I doubt I can do that on my site,” or “I was very excited about the new style of blog post I published recently but it seems my readers didn’t respond very well to it; I’m not quite sure how to look deeper into these reasons, so I will just go back to standard content”.

Great ideas, content, and opportunities for innovation that get lost in translation as soon as a tech barrier is encountered. This is exactly why bridging the gap between fashion and technology is essential in order to keep digital publishing thriving. When there is seamless communication between content creators, agents, sponsors, designers, developers - that is when new things can be both conceptualized and well executed.

"Bridging the gap between fashion and tech is essential to keep digital publishing thriving." 

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If you’re a style publisher truly looking to create a sustainable business, stop thinking of tech and fashion as opposites. Connect your teams, think always big, and start creating a multidisciplinary space within your working process that allows you to push boundaries.