The most important part of a city’s start-up ecosystem is the people in the ecosystem: founders, investors, university personnel, service providers, community builders, etc. How they think and the lens they view things through. How freely they share information and relationships with early founders. This all creates the culture of the ecosystem.

How people think and act is heavily influenced by the start-up history of a city. Changing that culture can be a slow process, but it can happen faster with big events (positive or negative). If a company has a big exit, people start to think a little bigger about what’s possible. The reverse can be true if a company creates a massive crater.

Remote work will stick around (in some form or fashion) for the foreseeable future. I suspect that a material number of people left cities where dreaming and thinking big was part of the start-up culture. They’ve seen the impossible happen and witnessed outsize outcomes from those efforts. As they settle into new cities and get acclimated to the start-up ecosystem there, I suspect they’ll add diversity of thought. I’m curious how this will affect the start-up cultures (for better or worse) of cities like Atlanta. Will the mass migration be a big event that has a lasting impact on start-up cultures?