Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures in NYC, after touring the cool new digs of portfolio company Etsy, concluded: "You feel happy. But when you are less than ten people, it is hard to invest in stuff like this. All you can do is focus on getting your product right and launching it. You will work out of any space that is warm and hopefully quiet."
Why should founders have to wait? After all, you are creating most of the new jobs today. That’s why we built our 18,000 square-foot startup facility in Boston, an affordable, award-winning workspace designed by Sasaki Associates to meet the most demanding needs of technology and life science companies just getting started. Think series A digs at a startup price.
It features fully equipped offices and laboratories served by state-of-the-art infrastructure. Meeting spaces, lounge, kitchenette and coffee bar take advantage of the stunning location on the harbor.
Unlike most of Boston, the Venture Development Center is served by high-speed fiber cable with a 10Gbps network connected to Internet2, meeting bandwidth-intensive requirements such as simultaneous supercomputing, streaming and videoconferenceing.
We agree with a new VC accelerator in the San Francisco Bay area, 500startups: "Space matters. We’re designing an awesome physical space that fosters collaboration and productivity."
In a little survey we did last month why founders choose to launch at the Venture Development Center, Sunil Bhatia, founder of RetireHub, said: "The facilities are world-class, and plug-and-play – we were up and running in a few hours. But for me, it is about the people" at the Venture Development Center. Sure, great people always trump great space. But we also suspect that is because good design, when done well, is invisible.
The Venture Development Center is Boston’s leading startup incubator for technology and life science companies.