Hey.
Welcome to ATL Grind.
I’m Andrew(your host) who’ll be showing you the best events, news, jobs, and more in Atlanta’s business world. Let’s get started.
CREATE-X Spring Startup Launch Showcase lands May 21 from 5 to 7 p.m. at The Biltmore Ballrooms in Midtown. Georgia Tech will put 26 newly launched startups in front of investors, operators, and early customers across AI, healthcare, fintech, cybersecurity, and robotics. Read more here.
Square One Startup Showcase #10 runs May 21 from 6:30 to 8 p.m. at Atlanta Tech Village in Buckhead. Square One Startup School is bringing 11 early-stage startups into its first in-person showcase, with product demos, booths, and a founder-heavy room. Read more here.
Atlanta Startup Village returns June 1 from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. at Atlanta Tech Village in Buckhead. Emerging founders get 4 minutes to pitch, then take Q&A and feedback from the room. Good fit for investors, operators, and people who want to see Atlanta startups before they are polished. Read more here.
Elise Riley learned entertainment marketing in an environment most companies say they want but rarely build: startup-like trust with corporate-scale budgets.
Her agency, My Global Presence, is built from that experience.
Riley started at Wired during the dot-com boom, then moved into film marketing at Warner Bros. Pictures, where the work stretched across Harry Potter, Swordfish, Training Day, Ocean’s Eleven, and The Matrix. She later handled marketing initiatives for The Weather Channel and Cartoon Network, and supervised a $26 million theatrical budget for roughly 30 movies a year at Warner Bros. Pictures.
The better detail is how those campaigns actually moved.
Riley told ATL Grind her Warner Bros. group had about five people. The team worked near the old Ziegfeld Theatre in New York, helped with premieres, built individual movie websites, handled contests, and had enough trust to test ideas quickly. Small team, large budgets. Short clocks.
That combination shaped how she thinks about marketing now.
For Riley, creative work starts with the story, not the deliverable. A website, pitch, social campaign, press push, event, or partnership only works if the team understands what the project is really about and why anyone should care.
Today, My Global Presence works across PR, social media, email, websites, entertainment marketing, authors, publishing houses, independent filmmakers, studios, nonprofits, and business brands. Her hiring filter is simple: people who are creative, collaborative, willing to take risks, and open to other people’s ideas.
The same standard applies to clients. Her ideal partner is someone open to new ideas, who doesn’t suffocate the process before the work has a chance to become interesting.
Atlanta has spent years building the production layer. Riley is working on the visibility layer: helping the people inside that creative economy get seen, funded, booked, distributed, and remembered. Read more here.
Whoopsie’s
This place is the move if you want a Reynoldstown dinner that not uptight without feeling lazy. Michelin lists it as $$ and a Bib Gourmand, with generous portions and “humble but well executed” cooking. Order the Southern snack tray, something off the short cocktail list, and go on prime rib night if you can get in. Read more here.
Director of Brand & Advocacy at Calendly. Own brand amplification across social, PR, communications, and customer advocacy at one of Atlanta’s best-known software companies. Reports to the VP of Brand and Product Marketing, manages social, advocacy, and PR leadership, and lists salary up to $279,793 depending on tier. Apply here.
Senior Principal Software Engineer, AI Governance at OneTrust. Build the technical layer for enterprise AI governance, including RAG, agent workflows, model orchestration, and LLM systems. Atlanta office-first, $165,000 to $220,000. Apply here.
Senior Strategic Customer Success Manager at Calendly. Own adoption, retention, and expansion across complex accounts, including customers above $40,000 ARR. Salary reaches $189,000 in top-tier markets. Apply here.
Embedded Engineer, Electrical Controls at Flock Safety. Work on hardware systems at the safety-tech company building across camera, sensor, and connected infrastructure products. Apply here.
Director, Marketing Analytics at Greenlight. Lead measurement for offline and brand channels across TV, podcast, out-of-home, direct mail, and brand. Atlanta remote-friendly. Apply here.
Strategic Finance Manager at Greenlight. Finance seat at the Atlanta fintech serving families, with roles still listed across product, analytics, risk, engineering, and finance. Apply here.
Camp Days started with the kind of spreadsheet that shows up when software ignores a real household workflow.
Katie Mansour was an Atlanta parent with three kids, a full-time job, and the same annual problem as thousands of other parents: camps open early, spots move fast, and the information sits everywhere except one usable place.
Her spreadsheet tracked kids, interests, prices, locations, dates, and camp details. The search process ran through Google, word of mouth, parent texts, and camp websites. In Atlanta, some camp planning starts in January, and the earlier registration cycle has become its own quiet parental operating burden. Axios Atlanta reported this year that some metro camp registration now opens as early as December or the fall.
Camp Days is trying to turn that scramble into infrastructure.
The company gives parents a searchable place to compare camps and activities. The larger bet is on the other side of the marketplace: giving camps a cleaner way to manage listings, reviews, photos, program details, and analytics.
Mansour moved quickly. After the idea surfaced over coffee last summer, she hired a brand team and software engineering team roughly a month later, then pushed toward production in January.
The next step is booking. Right now, parents still click out to camp websites. The goal is to let families book on Camp Days, keep the parent side accessible, and monetize from bookings that move through the platform.
Read more here.
805 Lenox Rd NE
The 1953 mid-century modern estate sits on two lots with expansive glass, mature landscaping, a private heated gunite pool, front porch, patio, breezeway, and a 3-car attached garage. The scale is the story: 3.2 acres in the city, near parks, trails, restaurants, schools, and the Beltline. Check it out here.
5 other headlines to snack on:
Autolane is now running at Lenox Square and Westside Provisions, using smart curbside signs to manage autonomous-vehicle pickups and dropoffs. Hypepotamus reported Lenox Square disruptions fell from 30 to 40 daily to one or two every few weeks. Read more here.
ReFiBuy raised $13.6 million to help brands show up inside AI shopping agents. Atlanta-based Silicon Road Ventures joined the seed round. Read more here.
Cloneable closed a $4.6 million seed round with Atlanta-based Overline participating. The Raleigh startup is building AI agents for infrastructure workflows like permitting and make-ready engineering. Read more here.
Starbucks is closing its Atlanta regional support office as part of a corporate reduction affecting 300 U.S. support roles. Café workers are not included. Read more here.
Atlanta Beltline has generated $23 billion in annual economic output and helped draw 318 private development projects over two decades. The trail keeps reading less like an amenity and more like infrastructure. Read more here
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See you next week.
Andrew