Ernest Andrade came to Charleston in 1982 planning to spend two semesters at the College of Charleston, then transfer to a school in New Jersey.
He never transferred.
Forty-four years later, he is founder and executive director of Charleston Digital, the business development group he pitched to Mayor Joe Riley in 2000 as the Charleston Digital Corridor. It launched in February 2001 with 18 companies. Its job, then and now, is to help the region’s tech companies start, stay and grow.
From annexation maps to startups
Andrade grew up in Kuwait and attended a Jesuit boarding school in Bangalore, India, according to College of Charleston Magazine. He earned his bachelor’s degree from the college in 1985 and a master’s in public administration in 1987.
An internship in the city’s housing and community development office led to a job offer from Riley. From 1989 to 2001, Andrade was the city’s annexation coordinator, a stretch in which Charleston grew from 38 to about 100 square miles.
The Corridor came next. It started inside City Hall, and in 2003 Andrade was its only paid employee, the Post and Courier reported. In 2015 he left the city payroll to run the Charleston Digital Corridor Foundation full time.
The craft: asking, then fixing
Andrade’s method has stayed simple. Instead of hiring consultants, he asked local tech companies what they needed, according to a 2014 profile republished by the Corridor. In a 2014 WHQR interview, he said the Corridor did not recruit companies from outside the region and had no marketing budget.
The answer he kept hearing was talent. The work that followed was practical: office space, help with permits and parking, and a job board.
He set the tone early. “Philosophically, every company, including the one-man shop, is important, because you never know where that one-man company is going to end up,” he told the Post and Courier in 2003.
The space came in steps. The first Flagship incubator opened in 2009 with 14 offices at East Bay and Calhoun streets. Larger versions followed. In 2021 the group moved into the Charleston Tech Center, a six-story, roughly 92,000-square-foot building at 997 Morrison Drive, on city land leased for $1 a year.
The project took years longer than planned. A second building is still waiting.
“I thought we’d be a little further, but we had the triple whammy,” Andrade told the Post and Courier in January 2025, citing interest rates, construction costs and labor shortages. The group’s 2025 annual report says it is exploring a second building with 8.5 floors over a 12,000-square-foot floor plate. In the report, Andrade wrote that designs, partners and builders were coming together and that “if current momentum holds, you can expect shiny shovels within 2-3 years.”
Keeping score
Andrade measures the work in wages. Raising per-capita pay has been one of the group’s main goals since the start.
Member companies paid an average of $130,522 in 2025, according to the group’s annual wage survey, released in December. The statewide average was $56,990. In 2025, 53 companies worked out of the Flagship space at the Tech Center.
The group now goes by Charleston Digital, the name it began using with a September 2024 website relaunch. Its nonprofit arm is still the Charleston Digital Corridor Foundation, according to its website.
Its newest work is training. The Charleston Learning Center opened on the Charleston Tech Center campus in September 2023. An AI Academy followed in June 2026. In September, Comcast gave it $30,000. Andrade once summed up his life in four words. “My life is perfectly imbalanced,” he said in the 2014 profile. “I don’t separate my personal and professional life, it’s just one.”
In February 2026, Charleston Digital hired an associate director to handle operations, finance, membership, marketing and events.
In the group’s 2025 annual report, Andrade wrote that “simple, modest goals no longer match our true capacity and opportunity.”
“You can’t be complacent; we are always a work in progress,” he told College of Charleston Magazine in 2024.
