CoCo’s first location in Lowertown St. Paul, as it looked days after opening. From left: Kyle Coolbroth, Amy Bryant and Phil Wilson.
On January 4, we turned 5 years old.
Thanks to the support of so many people, from members to partners, we’ve seen the CoCo community grow from just a few people to nearly 800 members across four locations.
Over the last five years, the CoCo community has helped incubate and accelerate many thriving businesses. Some have come to CoCo already on their way to greatness, while others have formed within CoCo. Many have also “graduated” from CoCo to become fast-growing businesses.
Like many of the startups that work at CoCo, our own beginnings were less than auspicious. The day we opened our doors was also the first day of light-rail construction—right outside our door. The entire building shook from the pile drivers as we gave tours and tried to convince prospective members of the benefits of coworking. Secretly, we wondered if we had made a mistake.
There’s no way we could have made it past Day One without the help of countless friends and supporters. Amy Bryant, Gary Leatherman, Brandi Brown, Rachele Cermak and Desarae Veit volunteered to help us paint our first space. The brilliant Kyia Downing helped us conceive of our name. Phil Wilson and Brian Stemmler created the clever video below to help us spread the word about coworking. Mykl Roventine not only built our website but brought us our first event. And so many of you, even if you couldn’t quit your day jobs to join CoCo, gave us your encouragement.
After a year, we had enough members to know that this coworking thing had legs. This modest success gave us the confidence to say “yes” when Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak approached us with an ambitious idea—to bring CoCo to the 16,000-square-foot former trading floor of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange.
We were already looking at spaces in Minneapolis when the mayor called. He seemed to think it would work and even suggested we rename it the “Brain Exchange.” We weren’t sure we could ever find enough members to fill the huge room, but we also knew that we’d never find a space as beautiful. So, we signed the lease and hustled to sign up as many members as possible.
Opening CoCo at the Grain Exchange was a watershed event for us. It brought a fair amount of media attention and a few surprising visitors. One such visitor was Google Chairman Eric Schmidt, who came in Nov. 2011 at the request of Mayor Rybak. It was a media circus, with a couple dozen reporters and videographers following Eric wherever he went. As founders, the best moment for us was at the end of his visit when Eric held a press conference and told the media that although he’d been all around the world, he hadn’t seen anything “quite like this.”
In 2012, CoCo was approached by Mary Grove, the director of Google for Entrepreneurs, a program that supports entrepreneurs across the world. She offered to partner with CoCo to generate educational events and programs for entrepreneurs. The partnership was further formalized when CoCo became one of Google’s 9 North American Tech Hubs in Sept. 2012. This partnership has made it possible for us to host thousands of attendees at free tech and entrepreneurial events, as well as provide members with funding opportunities.
In the last couple years, CoCo expanded twice more, opening a space in the heart of Uptown, and most recently in downtown Fargo, ND.
Over the last five years, we’ve played host to every kind of member you could imagine. Sure, we’ve attracted techies and freelance creatives. But we’ve also had historians, authors, fitness experts, inventors, engineers, tour guides, travel agents, real estate agents, financial planners, accountants and attorneys. And for the most part, whoever showed up seemed to fit in nicely. That’s why when we are asked, “who is your target market?” we don’t answer with a list of professions, but say that CoCo’s target market is all people who are curious and collaborative.
We’ve also had the honor of hosting a number of businesses have taken off, including:
Anaplan – graduated from CoCo to their own space due to rapid growth
Apruve – graduated to their own space in Butler Square
Docalytics – received funding from AOL Founder Steve Case at Google Demo Day
Hyper IQ – acquired by Buzzfeed in Dec. 2014
Kidizen – received funding from AOL Founder Steve Case at Google Demo Day
Lead Pages – grew from 10 to 100 employees in one year, before graduating into their own space
Mindsailing – a strategic marketing firm that is choosing to grow within CoCo
Mobiata – the mobile development arm of Expedia, which works out of CoCo Minneapolis
Mobile Realty Apps – grew up at CoCo St. Paul and later on CoCo Minneapolis before graduating into its own space
Rowbot – an ag-robotics firm that has received significant funding
Spark Devices – an Internet of Things startup whose cofounders met at CoCo
Zipnosis – graduated from CoCo Minneapolis into their own space
CoCo today
To give you a sense of the amount of activity and energy that occurs across all of CoCo, it’s worth noting that in 2014 alone, we hosted 176 events, gave 456 tours to prospective members, had over 10,000 visitors and served nearly 100,000 cups of coffee. Those are metrics we couldn’t have imagined back in December 2009 when Kyle, my son Sam and I were frantically assembling Ikea tables the weekend before launch.
CoCo tomorrow
What better time than on a big anniversary to talk about the future? Indeed, we spent much of 2014 preparing for 2015 and beyond. In a word, we’re gearing up for growth. Our goal is to attract many more people to CoCo and bring CoCo to new markets.
But more fundamentally, we’re thinking really hard about how to take the concept behind Jump! School, which we launched and tested last year, and make it a central feature in what we do. Jump! was all about overcoming obstacles so that you can do the work of your dreams—whether you want to launch a tech startup or open a flower shop.
Our hope in 2015 is to create what we now loosely call a “dream accelerator” (get it? like a tech accelerator?), which will be like Jump! on steroids. We’re just in the early design and prototyping stage, so we can’t say too much more. We believe it will incorporate some combination of group sessions, classes and events—whatever it will take to help people have breakthroughs and begin to do amazing and meaningful things. Look for more info over the coming weeks!
Featured image credit: stavioni via Compfight cc