Georgia: Top Founders
A pharmacist chasing a morphine cure. A woman who cut the feet off her own pantyhose. A Nigerian immigrant who'd already failed at five companies. A 20-year-old who dropped out of Georgia Tech to start a security company in his dorm room. None of them had a network.
A pharmacist chasing a morphine cure. A woman who cut the feet off her own pantyhose. A Nigerian immigrant who'd already failed at five companies. A 20-year-old who dropped out of Georgia Tech to start a security company in his dorm room. None of them had a network. All of them built something worth billions anyway.
Georgia's founder story splits two ways: the people who built empires from a standing start right here, and the talent the state trained and then exported to the rest of the country.
Sara Blakely moved to Atlanta at 27 with $5,000 in savings, no fashion background, and a day job selling fax machines. She patented her own idea, trademarked the name herself (Spanx), and never took a single outside investor. By 2012 she was the youngest self-made female billionaire in the country.
Tope Awotona moved to Georgia as a kid after his family fled Nigeria. He failed at five different startups before he mortgaged his own condo to keep the sixth one alive. That company, Calendly, is now worth more than $3 billion, and he still runs it out of Atlanta.
Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius built Mailchimp for nearly two decades without raising venture capital. Intuit paid $12 billion for that independence in 2021. Kabir Barday started OneTrust in Atlanta and built it into a $5.1 billion privacy compliance company. Rob Frohwein and Kathryn Petralia built Kabbage into a small-business lender that sold to American Express for roughly $850 million.
Chris Klaus dropped out of Georgia Tech at 20 to run Internet Security Systems full time. IBM bought it for $1.3 billion in 2006. He was barely 33.
Note that none of these are Silicon Valley stories relocated to Georgia. They started here and stayed.
John Pemberton was a wounded veteran and pharmacist in Columbus, self-medicating a morphine addiction, when he mixed the first batch of Coca-Cola syrup in 1886. He sold the rights before he died broke, never knowing what it would become.
Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank got fired from Handy Dan Home Improvement in 1978. Out of spite and $2 million borrowed from investors, they opened the first Home Depot in Atlanta that same year. Truett Cathy opened a diner called the Dwarf Grill in Hapeville and spent years perfecting a pressure-fried chicken sandwich before Chick-fil-A existed as a name. C.E. Woolman took over a failing crop-dusting operation in Macon in 1928 to fight the boll weevil and built what became the largest airline in the world by revenue.
These founders didn’t set out to build a Fortune 500 company, they were just solving the problem directly in front of them.
In 2016, Georgia Tech ranked 6th in the country as a feeder school into Silicon Valley's biggest tech companies, and 4th among the alumni recruiters wanted most in 2017. No Ivy League school cracked the top 10. Cornell was the first one to show up, at 15.
That's not a fluke of one graduating class. It's the predictable output of a school that's ranked among the top producers of startup founders in the country year after year, sitting in a state most of the country still doesn't associate with engineering talent.
Every founder in this piece proves the same point from a different angle: their idea mattered more than their zip code. Some of them built that idea into a company without ever leaving Georgia. Others carried what they learned here straight into the rest of the world.
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