Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

SPACE

Every rapidly growing startup struggles with space. When you are a company of three people, you can easily figure it out. A spare bedroom, coffee shops, co-working spaces, and the dark corner of a friend’s office are all good places to start. By the time you get to 10 people, you are now paying a landlord rent. If you have rapid growth, you quickly run out of space, have to sublease your existing space (which can be even more complicated if you are already subleasing from someone), find new space, deal with the pain of moving, and then, when you outgrow that space in nine months, do it all over again.

This problem is exacerbated when you’ve got a bunch of rapidly growing companies in your city, especially if it’s small city like Boulder. Everyone wants to be downtown because that’s where the action and the entrepreneurial density are. However, growth in Boulder is deliberately constrained by the policies of the Boulder City Council, so there is very limited new office space. When existing inventory is tight, rents increase significantly. Being downtown becomes less cost-effective. Once you get over 100 people it is very difficult to find acceptable space.

It becomes an endless game of movable chairs that I’ve seen played out since the mid-1990s. It’s particularly painful right now because there are numerous fast-growing companies that simply can’t find space in Boulder. A year ago, people were still being creative about this. Recently they’ve given up and have started moving ...