This post was originally published at TriangleStartUpFactory.com.
--
I first visited Downtown Durham to take a tour of the American Tobacco Campus, which was still very much a work in progress at the time. It was 2005 I think. There was an 8 foot barbed wire fence around the property and there were trees growing inside of the buildings. I was a Sales Associate at Bronto Software, which had 7 or 8 employees at the time. Bronto moved to the American Tobacco several months after my tour of the campus yet-to-be and my love affair with Downtown Durham was born.
In December 2009, when my business partner Adam Covati and I pinched our respective noses and decided to take the plunge with Argyle, we knew that we wanted to move into a Durham office as quickly as possible. After several months working anonymously in our respective home offices, we developed enough traction and raised enough money to move into a tiny office in the Snow Building at 331 W. Main St, right above Beyu Caffe.
I knew that we made the right decision the day we moved in. Adam and I were struggling to move a couch (that we bought from UNC surplus for $20) into our building and Jud Bowman, the Founder and CEO at Appia and Durham start-up veteran, happened to walk by and hold the door for us. We were bumping into guys like us on the street before we had even moved into our office.
Fast forward to today - Argyle has 21 employees and has carved out its own niche in Durham on Rigsbee Avenue, right around the corner from Rue Cler. The city is our 22nd employee. It helps us recruit, it keeps us entertained, and it inspires us to keep looking forward.
Durham is a momentum story - the culinary, artistic, and (of course!) start-up scenes have grown by leaps and bounds over the past several years. There is a palpable sense of forward movement in Downtown Durham that makes it a great place to launch and grow a start-up. I'm excited to see Triangle Start-Up Factory accelerate more good things in the Bull City.