Why Founders Like Tristan Walker Love Atlanta, America's New Startup Capital!

Startups corporations and aspiring entrepreneurs are fleeing the Bay Area for the socalled black mecca. Here’s why the tech world’s center is shifting— and what it means for Atlanta.

- J.J. McCorvey

“Look at this, man,” Tristan Walker says as he leans into a wooden lawn chair in his backyard. He forms his thumbs and index fingers into a rectangle and squints through it at the seven-bedroom literal house on a hill before us. It’s a warm April afternoon, too early yet for Georgia’s notorious swelter. Blues singer Tyrone Davis’s “Baby, Can I Change My Mind?” plays from a glowing Bluetooth speaker that doubles as a sleek outdoor light. “When I was 20 years old, and I was like, ‘What does the vision of [my] world look like?’ ” he recalls. “This frame is it.”

Walker and his family have been in this house, in Atlanta’s northern Buckhead neighborhood, for all of two weeks. It’s the first time the Queens, New York, native has had a backyard, and he’s been stringing lights, planting hydrangeas, and kicking around a soccer ball with his 4-year-old son, Avery James. In the fall, Avery James will attend a nearby private school with a black headmaster who, Walker informs me, is a patron of Bevel, the shaving system geared toward men of color that Walker launched in 2013. Walker’s wife, Amoy, steps out of the kitchen to greet me and announce that she’s making salmon burgers. In a month—on Mother’s Day—she’ll give birth to their second son, August Julian. “I’ll have a kid born in Palo Alto, and a kid born in Atlanta,” Walker tells me. “It’s a reset moment!”