Chattanooga, TN: Geek City of the Future

Let’s be honest: if I listed Chattanooga among Boston, San Francisco, New York, Austin, and Raleigh-Durham as one of the most interesting places in the country for people who want to build awesome new stuff, you’d probably think I was joking. And if I told you that a few weeks ago, I would have been.

Through a fortuitous connection, I was recently introduced to a group of forward-thinking entrepreneurs. They’ve all had success in big business - from brokering stocks to brokering freight. But they see potential in Chattanooga, a small town, not set in its ways; a town that you can realistically imagine leaving your stamp on for decades to come; a town that you can shape to your vision, if your vision is sound. New York and Palo Alto have become what they’ve become, but there’s an excitement and a power that comes from the process of becoming, and that’s what I found underway this week in Chattanooga.

You see, this group of individuals (who call themselves the Lamp Post Group) are passionately committed to a vision of Chattanooga as a thriving, modern city with a technology-driven economy. But they understand that making that happen requires attracting the right kind of people, and forming the right kind of culture (a sort of chicken-and-egg problem). So, in order to help kick-start that process, they brought me to the city to show me first-hand the developments that are unfolding.

Boy, was I surprised by what I saw. They’ve installed the most advanced consumer fiber network in the country - gigabit speed on tap; they’ve got a national supercomputing center where cutting-edge research on finite difference analysis is being conducted; they’ve got a hackerspace; their public buses are 100% electric; they’ve got a Gehry-esque art gallery overlooking the river, a beautiful aquarium, even Indian and Thai food (which, for some reason, I wasn’t expecting). Not only that, but I met a number of smart people working on cool projects, and just last week I heard they had a collective startup launch event. Yet although there’s a rapidly growing startup community, you won’t have to compete just to be noticed by local VCs and angels (who do, in fact, exist!).

Chattanooga is still far from the obvious choice for locating a high-tech startup. But if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t usually take the obvious choice, you owe it to yourself to check it out. I know I’ll be back before long.