“We’re a yeoman company,” he says. “Our model drives toward a deeper relationship with a customer. We don’t need to be a 10,000-acre cotton plantation.”

Taylor says he hopes to apply some aspects of the accelerated, so-called “agile,” software development approach to his farm business.

Clearly, launching a tech startup in Atlanta is different from launching in California or New York. Due to the relative dearth of venture capital money, a lower cost of living and a lifestyle-oriented culture, Southern-based software companies seem to take a slower approach to growth than their West and East Coast brethren.

Geoff Graham, CEO of GuildQuality , an Atlanta-based software-as-a-service company that provides consumer feedback and monitoring data for real estate developers and builders, calls firms like his “slow-cooking barbecue,” compared to Silicon Valley companies, which he says are “igniting flambé.”

“We get a lot of calls from venture capital firms,” says Graham, 38, a real estate developer who co-founded his company in 1998. “But we spent a decade bootstrapping the company. We’re interested in recapitalizing, but not exiting.”

GuildQuality has 11 full-time employees and 24 part-time ones to service approximately 750 customers, mostly small- and medium-sized businesses.

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