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.
Wednesd.AI lands Wednesday, July 15, from 8:30 a.m. to noon at Atlanta Tech Village in Buckhead. A featured speaker spends 30 minutes showing a live AI tool, workflow, or problem, then the room turns into open coworking. Useful if you want something operational before your first call. Read more here.
Tech Catalyst Summit’s World Cup Edition runs Wednesday, July 15, from 6 to 10 p.m. at No18 Buckhead. The rooftop room is curated for CIOs, CISOs, CTOs, founders, investors, and senior operators across AI, cybersecurity, cloud, and software. Your $100 ticket covers an open bar and heavy hors d’oeuvres. Read more here.
Startup Chowdown runs Friday, July 17, from noon to 1 p.m. at Atlanta Tech Village in Buckhead. More than 100 founders, builders, and operators usually show up for a catered lunch with no formal programming. Stay afterward for the free Pitch Practice session if your investor story needs reps. Read more here.
I.Making Cancer Screening Easier to Complete
Dr. Sam Asgarian is working on a health-care problem every operator understands: the process can be right, the stakes can be obvious, and the user still does not complete the task.
In medicine, that gap is not churn. It is late detection.
Asgarian is a primary care doctor by training. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, went to medical school at Tulane in New Orleans, trained in Boston, and has lived in Nashville for about 10 years. At Guardant Health, he leads clinical development and clinical affairs around studies, product buildout, launches, and how physicians use the company’s blood tests.
The first major wedge is Shield, Guardant Health’s blood-based screening test for colorectal cancer.
The operating insight is simple: people do not avoid screening because the disease is irrelevant. They avoid the step in front of them.
Asgarian told ATL Grind that in a Harris Poll survey of roughly 1,000 doctors and more than 1,000 patients, the top answer from both groups was anxiety. A patient feels healthy, then hears colonoscopy, prep, time off work, anesthesia, or a stool sample. The decision gets delayed.
Shield moves the starting point into a workflow patients already understand: bloodwork.
“Okay, you want to check for cholesterol? Okay, you want to check for blood sugar? Oh, you want to check for colorectal cancer? Okay,” Asgarian said.
That sentence captures the whole business case.
The test received FDA approval in July 2024 for average-risk adults 45 and older, with positive results followed by colonoscopy. It is not a replacement for diagnostic or surveillance colonoscopies in high-risk patients. The pitch is not that every existing tool goes away, but that more people actually get screened.
Asgarian said thousands of doctors are now ordering the test and hundreds of thousands of patients have received it. Medicare coverage is in place, commercial coverage is beginning to come online, and the American Cancer Society has added a blood-based test option to its colorectal cancer screening recommendations.
His longer view is broader than colorectal cancer. Guardant Health already has a lung cancer study underway, and Asgarian talks about liver disease and other conditions the same way: detect earlier, treat sooner, and keep the patient closer to normal life.
The next era of medicine will measure more directly from blood. Asgarian’s work sits inside that shift, moving early detection from a procedure people avoid into a routine draw with much less friction.
Read more here.
Your Paycheck Has a Ceiling, This Business Doesn’t
Atlanta households move all year long, and most of them need a mover. Most of that work still goes to companies nobody recommends twice, which is exactly the gap Pink Zebra Moving was built to fill, with hot-pink zebra-striped trucks and a customer experience people actually rave about.
It comes from Ron Holt, who grew a single cleaning store into a $40 million, 90-location brand before selling it and pointing the same playbook at moving. Owners get comprehensive training, a recession-resistant service, and no moving experience is required, because the model can run semi-absentee alongside what you already do.
For founders and executives who already know how to hire, manage people, and read a P&L, the appeal is simple: apply those skills to a proven local service business without building the system from scratch.
The numbers show what is possible: franchisee Drue Chrisman’s location generated $2.5 million in revenue and $707,000 in net operating income in its first full calendar year, even after franchise expenses and new-truck purchases.* Across the network, franchise owners average $135,904 in net operating income.*
Atlanta gets only one owner, and whoever raises their hand first gets the territory.
If you’ve been looking to add a business with a proven operating model and no cap on the upside, tap below to request more information directly from the Pink Zebra team.
Historical results. Individual results may differ. There is no assurance you will sell or earn as much. See Item 19 of Pink Zebra Moving’s 2026 FDD.
So. Fox
So. Fox is the new Virginia-Highland move when you want serious food without turning dinner into a tasting-menu commitment. Kinship owners Myles Moody and Rachael Pack built the 50-seat room around hyper-seasonal Southern ingredients and low-intervention wine. Order the drop dumplings with confit rabbit, then grilled beef with Vidalia onions, braised leeks, and marrow. Use it for a client dinner where the wine list should carry part of the conversation.
Read more here.
II.Taking Georgia’s Entertainment Story to the World
Randy Davidson went to the Cannes Film Festival to change the narrative people use about Georgia’s creative and entertainment industries.
The familiar version is that Georgia is a place to shoot movies. Davidson’s argument is larger: Georgia is a place to build entertainment companies, finance projects, develop intellectual property, train talent, hire crews, deploy technology, and take content to market.
Cannes is where that argument matters. Beyond the premieres and red carpets, the festival’s Marché du Film is its business hub, bringing more than 15,000 film professionals from 140 countries together to buy, sell, finance, distribute, and form international partnerships.
Davidson, founder and CEO of Georgia Entertainment, built the company as the vehicle for that broader story. It operates as a media, branding, and convening platform for the state’s creative economy, connecting production infrastructure, technology, locations, incentives, crew, capital, universities, brands, and creators with the people making decisions outside Georgia.
From May 14 to 17, Georgia Entertainment brought its expanded From Story to Scale programming to Cannes for the third consecutive year. Panels, meetings, and activations connected Georgia operators with producers, financiers, executives, and entertainment professionals from around the world. Georgia, USA Day at the FilmUSA Pavilion anchored the schedule with conversations about brand, capital, technology, storytelling, and the infrastructure required to scale projects.
The speaker list showed the range of the pitch. Donnie Beamer represented Atlanta’s technology layer. Noah Washington brought the creator-platform perspective from Fanbase. Christina Routhier represented SCAD’s talent pipeline. Walker Dalton, Chelsea Spivey, and Honnie Korngold covered film commissions, production incentives, and project development. The point was not that Georgia has one strong corner of the business. It was that the pieces already connect.
Davidson has a clean line for the work: “Being passive is not an option.”
Georgia is competing with other states and countries for productions, investment, talent, and long-term entertainment companies. Georgia Entertainment’s role is to organize the state’s case, put credible operators behind it, and carry that case into rooms where projects and partnerships are decided.
The organization says the relationships formed at Cannes “do not stay in France.” That is the measure of the trip: whether conversations on the Croisette become spending, projects, hires, and companies back in Georgia.
Georgia is already known nationally as a place to make entertainment. Davidson wants the global market to recognize it as a place to build the business behind it. Read more here.
5000 Long Island Dr NW
Asking $4.999 million in Buckhead. The gated 1.5-acre compound has seven bedrooms, a two-story guesthouse, a heated pool with waterfalls, a home cinema, and a gym with a sauna and cold plunge. This is the rare city listing built for privacy, entertaining, and the occasional Hollywood production schedule.
Check it out here.
Has AI token cost been a problem in your business?
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See you next Tuesday.
Andrew