By Amy Lopp Y ou may not have heard of Roundsphere. Or Snagshout. Or Seller Labs. Or Bookscouter. If you have, then I commend you for being cooler than me, but I bet you s ll couldn’t guess how it is that they came to be in Athens. We as economic developers employ all kinds of techniques to en ce new companies to our community, but we never would’ve predicted how start‐up guru Brandon Checke s chose our town. Checke s and his wife were living in Maryland when they decided to complete a survey on a website called FindMyPlace.com. A er filling out the somewhat exhaus ve list of ques ons, they were rewarded with a list of locales perfectly suited to them. Athens topped that list and they took the plunge. Making a major life decision based on the results of a website quiz may seem nuts to most, but to Checke s it really is no big deal. He’s an expert at mixing a li le risk‐taking with some well‐thought out market research. That a tude is what led him to start Bookscouter.com several years ago. Bookscouter, a website that uses ISBN numbers to provide users with the best sales price for their used textbooks, was the venture that aligned him with his now‐partner, Paul Johnson, who has helped to catapult the organiza on into several new ventures. Johnson and Checke s now house all their companies under one organiza on called Roundsphere that calls the Press Place building downtown home. Their office was buzzing with ac vity on the Friday that I visited, maybe in part because Roundsphere provides a company‐wide lunch on Fridays which draws employees together for informal fellowship. I heard more than a couple of new ideas being tossed around and everyone seemed so, well, excited. Johnson and Checke s certainly encourage employee par cipa on at every turn. From the endless snack and soda supply to a lenient open door policy, these guys were engaged. I watched as Checke s discussed code with a new hire, Johnson reviewed the most in mida ng spreadsheet I’ve ever seen and they both got deep into discussions with a vendor over a new marke ng structure. If it sounds like they were busy, they were. Roundsphere is home to several ventures including Seller Labs, a company whose product line is set to assist ecommerce relevant merchants in providing transac onal communica on and to improve their sales presence on Amazon and elsewhere; Snagshout, a website and social pla orm that allows merchants to offer their product at a deep discount in exchange for relevant feedback and reviews; and Scope, a new Big Data analy cs tool for ecommerce. They have even partnered with a game developer who just launched a game for the Android and Apple marketplace. (There’s so much going on in that office that even Paul didn’t know the game had launched. His response when Checke s told him was, “What? We have a game now? That’s so cool!) Start‐ups like this are so cool. The office was open and welcoming. It is right in the heart of Athens, close to UGA and in the thick of downtown. The employees were young and fresh and full of enthusiasm. It’s exactly the kind of corporate headquarters our community has been talking about for ages. And they just chose us. It almost seems too easy. Scoring another Roundsphere in Athens can’t be that easy though. We can’t count on another genius entrepreneur taking an online quiz and se ling down here. Besides, a tech‐based venture in Athens is not without its challenges ‐ namely a workforce challenge. Athens competes against Atlanta for talent, but also against bigger tradi onal tech‐focused ci es like San Francisco and Boston. Even though our cost‐of‐living is lower, the wages necessary to a ract top talent s ll have to be compe ve with larger markets. Roundsphere is able to rely on its excellent company culture and exis ng rela onships to recruit solid programmers and engineers, but they’ve also learned to invest in raw talent – even self‐taught folks with a few years of experience – as long as they possess an entrepreneurial spirit. People who are driven and can “think like a computer” as Johnson says. Training more talent is the name of the game for our community, and with an increased focus on S.T.E.M. in the K‐12 school system, o