The @4240 Building will be the future home of CIC St. Louis

CIC is excited to announce our plan to open our first out-of-state expansion location in St. Louis!  The story was broken this morning by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the St. Louis Business Journal, and CIC’s Dougan Sherwood is in St. Louis today attending a special hard hat tour with Mayor Francis Slay, and Washington University’s Vice Chancellor Hank Webber.

CIC St. Louis will be located in the newly-renovated @4240 building in heart of the CORTEX District in the Central West End.  To stay updated on our progress in St. Louis, sign up here.

Also big congrats to my friend Andy Palmer, Koa Labs founder, who received the Angel of the Year award, to Andy Ory who received both Exit of the Year and Entrepreneur of the Year for Acme Packet, and to CIC alum Sravish Sridhar of Kinvey, who received recognition as Rising Star — Entrepreneur.  Here are the full awards:

• Angel of the Year: Andy Palmer — Koa Labs
• Best New Startup: Jounce Therapeutics
• Hottest Startup: Wayfair
• Rising Star —Entrepreneur: Sravish Sridhar – Kinvey
• Rising Star — VC: Tie between Rob Go of NextView Ventures & Steve Kraus of Bessemer Venture Partners
• Deal of the Year — Tech: Actifio
• Exit of the Year — Tech: Acme Packet – Oracle
• Entrepreneur of the Year — Tech: Andy Ory, Acme Packet
• VC of the Year — Tech: Spark Capital
• Deal of the Year— Healthcare: Moderna Therapeutics Inc.
• Exit of the Year — Healthcare: Avila Therapeutics — Celgene
• Entrepreneur of the Year — Healthcare: Katrine Bosley – Avila Therapeutics
• VC of the Year — Healthcare: Third Rock Ventures

Senator Mary Landrieu with the Venture Cafe team.

Senator Landrieu is the Chair of the Senate Small Business and Entrepreneurship Committee and one of the major voices in the Senate on matters that relate to the startup community.  On April 4, she attended the Lab|Central launch with Governor Patrick, where she lauded Governor Patrick’s work to make Massachusetts “much better, much stronger, and a real hub of innovation.” Senator Landrieu then headed directly over to CIC where she toured, stopping in at many startups’ CIC offices, attended Venture Cafe, and then met privately with leaders from the Boston area who work to support startups, including Johannes Fruehauf of Lab|Central, Stas Gayshan of Space With A Soul, Jason Hanna of Greentown Labs, Bill Jacobson of Workbar, Mark Kasdorf of Intrepid Labs, Geoff Mamlet of Hub Boston and CIC, Carlos Martinez-Vela of Venture Cafe, Joanna Meiseles of MassChallenge, Tim Rowe of CIC, and Reed Sturtevant of TechStars.

We were very fortunate, on April 12, just a week later, to have the opportunity to play host to Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.  Senator Warren had asked to meet with entrepreneurs to hear their policy needs and issues.  We convened a small group of local entrepreneurs, including Jeff Avallon of IdeaPaint, Pritesh Gandhi of Ambient Devices, Bettina Hein of Pixability, Pilar Iglesias of PriceStats, and Ben Vigoda of Lyric Semiconductor.  CIC’s Tim Rowe opened the session by recapping the policy priorities we heard in February at our “State of the Tech” event, citing three top policy goals that came out of that session: finding a solution for the patent troll problem, developing innovative means to deliver lower-cost healthcare solutions (not subsidies, but actually cheaper ways to deliver healthcare, as in other countries), and passing legislation to make it easier for high skilled immigrants to come to this country to build businesses.  Another topic that was discussed at length was the plight of our decaying public transit infrastructure.  Senator Warren was joined on this visit by State Senator Sal DiDomenico, State Representative and Cambridge City Councilor Marjorie Decker, Cambridge Mayor Henrietta Davis, and Cambridge City Councilors Minka vanBeuzekom and Craig Kelley.

Senator Elizabeth Warren on her tour of CIC, along with Cambridge Mayor Henrietta Davis and CIC's CEO, Tim Rowe.

State Senator DiDomenico and State Representative Decker spoke at length of their support for public transportation financing, and the challenges they have had getting enough of the legislature to prioritize it.

We’re excited to be part of such an engaged community and to continue the dialogue on these issues of importance to startups and entrepreneurs everywhere.

As you know, crowdfunding plays a crucial role in the growth of entrepreneurship. Soon, investment-based crowdfunding platforms will also be supported through the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act, which President Obama signed last spring.

Do you know crowdfunding “Champions of Change”? Here are some examples of the work that these folks are doing:

• Contributing to community economic development or neighborhood revitalization
• Improving public health
• Manufacturing innovative products that are made in America
• Deploying clean energy solutions
• Democratizing investment in scientific research

If you know Champions of Change focused on crowdfunding, make sure they are recognized! Nominate them here by 12:00 pm on Wednesday, April 24.

Team CIC at the 2012 Kendall Square Klean Up

CICers,

Spring is here, and that means the fifth annual Kendall Square Spring Clean Up is coming up on Thursday, May 16th at 4 pm.  If you haven’t done this event before, it is a ton of fun, and a great opportunity to meet your neighbors and give back to the community.

To get involved, organize an office “Clean Team” and have one person register your team here by May 9th.  On the 16th, everyone will meet up at the Marriott Plaza at 4 pm to pick up supplies and have their team photo taken before heading to different areas of Kendall to clean up.  At 5:30 pm, everyone gathers back at the Marriott for food, drink, and live music.

As you can see from our awesome CIC team photo from last year, you won’t want to miss the fun.  If you want to participate but don’t have a team, shoot me an email.

See you there!

Anagha

This zoning sets in motion some big, big things that you may be interested in knowing about, including a new gateway to MIT facing the T, many more buildings to accommodate Kendall’s growth, and in a first at this scale: a substantial requirement to set aside space for startups.  This new zoning will transform our experience of Kendall Square.  Read on for more detail.

• It enables the construction of about 1.1 million square feet of new commercial space around the T stop (that’s the equivalent of about 3 more One Broadways), plus a residential tower on top of the parking lot next to One Broadway.  The residential tower will include some “micro-housing” on top oriented toward entrepreneurs.  Several floors of office space at the bottom of that tower could potentially be another expansion of CIC.
• It requires the creation of hundreds of new housing units around Kendall, bringing more activity and life to our streets, particularly on weekends and into the evening.  We have already seen the benefits of other nearby housing in terms of nearly two dozen new restaurant openings in the last few years.  This will continue the trend toward a more lively Kendall.
• Further to the above, it requires substantial additional restaurant and retail space on the ground floor of all the new buildings, and it requires that at least half of that space be operated by non-chain retailers (defining a chain as having more than 5 locations in MA).  This should help continue to cool-ify Kendall.
• The agreement requires MIT to work to create a new bike path (subject to a feasibility study) crossing Kendall Square along the Grand Junction Railroad right of way over near Catalyst.  This could eventually provide connections all the way to the Minuteman bike path.
• Very near and dear to my heart, this proposal requires that 5% of all new office space be set aside as “innovation space”, defined as small (avg. 200 sq. ft.) spaces that are rented on a month-to-month basis, with substantial shared-space components (kitchens, coworking areas).  In short, it defines what CIC, DogPatch, TechStars, Intrepid Labs, and Lab Central are doing, and says “you have got to have a fair amount of this kind of use”.  This is great news for startups.  It goes further to give extra incentives to the building owners if they increase the startup space to 20% of the total.  This is important, because it addresses the concern that with the success of Kendall Square, global corporations might otherwise squeeze the startups out, given their ability both to pay more, and landlords’ understandable preference for deep-credit tenants over non-credit tenants.
• As part of this proposal, MIT plans to build a new “gateway to MIT” around the Kendall T stop area, for the first time properly turning its face toward Kendall, which has become the de-facto center of this area.  Many design ideas have been floated, and the next step is for those to be refined.

It is hard to overstate the importance of this change to the future of Kendall.  One of the most interesting aspects of this is what made it possible.  Cities like Cambridge have historically had a strong anti-development bias.  Why should townfolk want big, new buildings creating traffic, noise, construction hassles, and the like?  Most don’t.  And many Cantabrigians did turn out to say those things.  Yet many other speakers at the City Council last night, and at previous public meetings on this topic, turned out to talk about the importance of innovation and entrepreneurship.  They spoke about how these endeavors are critical to our prosperity in these days of intense competition with other regions, how they bring jobs to residents all across the state, and how the fruits of the labors of our innovators and entrepreneurs are solutions to important problems facing the planet.  What is super-exciting to me is that our political leaders, by their vote, accepted these arguments.  This is a major win for innovation.

A second and important insight here is that one reason that they were able to draw this conclusion is that our Kendall Square community has in the past decade worked very hard to become a more desirable neighbor to the rest of Cambridge.  We are as a community committed to sustainable principles, and nothing is more telling than the fact that, over the past decade, despite millions of square feet of new buildings being built here during that period, traffic in Kendall Square has actually dropped.  As a Globe article reporting on this said, that statistic is so startling that you’d think it was a mistake.  We are walking more, biking more, and taking the T more.  Over half of CICers take the T to get to work, and only about a quarter drive.  Meanwhile, we are rebuilding the street-scape.  Something that has been on everyone’s lips is how Kendall Square has dramatically transformed in past years from a drab, dusty, empty, corporate wasteland to a place you go out at night.  We should not underestimate the degree to which our becoming a good neighbor (eliminating traffic, making Kendall a place you would actually want to be) influenced the greater Cambridge community’s willingness to step up for more of what we do here.  This was a pat on the back for us doing the right things.  Lets keep at it.

(As an aside, now we just need the state legislature to authorize the spending necessary to make sure that the Red Line can keep up with the demand here.  It is already essentially at capacity at peak times, and forecasts suggest demand will double over the next decade an a half.  The fix is investments in the Red Line that would allow trains to run more frequently.  If you know a state senator or state representative, please tell them that if they want more jobs in Massachusetts without adding more cars to the road, they should support Governor Patrick’s proposal to invest heavily in updating our transportation infrastructure.)

I want to recognize here some of the community leaders who helped make all of this Kendall Square zoning possible.  When I started to write this out, I realized just how many people there were.  And I’m certain I’m missing some key players — many apologies.  From the innovation/tech community that helped out with their time and their voices at public meetings to help get this done: Steve O’Leary, Katie Rae, Reed Sturtevant, Shaun Johnson, Brian Gilman, Mark Kasdorf, Chris Kasdorf, Pearl Freier, Johannes Fruehauf, Brian Dacey, Geoff Mamlet, Carlos Martinez-Vela, Kevin Wiant, David Barrett, Eileen Rudden, and Bettina Hein.  I also want to thank many of the members of our local neighborhood organization, the East Cambridge Planning Team, and its President Barbara Broussard, as well as the other adjacent neighborhood leaders in Area IV and Wellington Harrington who took part in this process.  I want to thank the City Council members who voted for this measure: Leland Cheung, Craig Kelley, Ken Reeves, Marjorie Decker, David Maher, Tim Toomey, and Mayor Henrietta Davis.  It took courage to cast your votes in favor of this vision for the future, knowing that many reasonable people are concerned about more development.  Thank you, Councillors Simmons and vanBeuzekom: while you had some concerns, you also told me that you saw much value in the proposal, and you invested significant time in making it what it is.  I want to recognize the tireless effort of the all volunteer Cambridge Planning Board, and Community Development staff, notably Iram Farooq, Stuart Dash, Jeff Roberts, Roger Boothe, Brian Murphy, Rich Rossi and Bob Healy, amongst many others. Kudos to Greg Bialecki, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development for the Commonwealth, for lending his far-seeing perspective to this dialogue.  I want to thank David Dixon and his team at Goody Clancy for providing intellectual leadership as Cambridge’s urban planning advisory firm, and all of the members of the Kendall Square Advisory Committee who worked for two years to shape many of the bones of what became the MIT petition.  I want to thank Terry Smith from the Cambridge Chamber, and Travis McCready, Alexandra Lee and Janneke House from the Kendall Square Association staff: community doesn’t happen magically, it is your work that pulls it together.  Lastly, I want to thank the MIT folks that made this happen, notably Steve Marsh, Michael Owu, John McQuaid, Meredith Christensen, Patrick Rowe, Maureen McCaffrey, Sarah Gallop, Kelley Brown, Marty Schmidt, Israel Ruiz, Rafael Reif, and Tom Kochan, amongst many others.  While this petition had your name on it, it incorporated the ideas of everyone I’ve listed here and more, and you did a masterful job pulling together everyone and responding to everyone’s interests.  Bravo.

Without all of our efforts working at this together, this would not have happened.  Thanks all.

Code for Boston Meetup

InsideTracker Triathlon Meetup

More Info & RSVP

Harvard Business School Women Entrepreneurs, Their Path to Success

The Art of Living Foundation – The Purposeful Individual

Babson College

April 20^th, 4:30 pm

3-5 players per team, 4 games guaranteed!

$80 per team, with music, prizes, raffles, and contests

Register online at: http://babs3on3.eventbrite.com/

Contact Adam Allen for details: aallen1@babson.edu

All proceeds benefit The Possible Project, a Cambridge-based nonprofit that teaches entrepreneurship to at-risk teens.

]]> http://cic.us/blog/2013/04/play-soccer-and-help-teach-entrepreneurship-to-teens/feed/ 0 http://cic.us/blog/2013/03/selected-public-events-at-cic-this-coming-week-21/ http://cic.us/blog/2013/03/selected-public-events-at-cic-this-coming-week-21/#comments Mon, 01 Apr 2013 03:35:56 +0000 Geoff Mamlet http://cic.us/blog/?p=6958 Continue reading →]]> Boston Japanese & English Language Club

Innovating for the Connected TV, Living Room & Home

CoronaSDK Meetup

Thursday, March 28, 2013 | Venture Café at CIC | 3:00 – 8:00 P.M.

More detailed information on the following events taking place at Venture Cafe is available here.

3:00 – 6:00 P.M. | TCN Upstart Roundtable

The expert at this monthly gathering is Andy Palmer, Seed Investor at DailyFeats. Meet fellow entrepreneurs and learn about starting a company.  Please register for the event if you plan to attend.

3:00 – 5:00 P.M. | Brad Kayton – Office Hours

Sign up here to meet with Brad Kayton, an upcoming seed-stage investor in web-centric companies.

3:00 – 6:00 P.M. | Stephen Davis – Office Hours

Meet with Stephen Davis, founder of The CXO Advisory Group, a company that works with businesses, entrepreneurs and service providers to accelerate revenue growth. Sign up here to schedule time with Stephen.

5:00 – 6:30 P.M. | TiE – Info Table

TiE Challenge is a startup accelerator program that turns great ideas into companies.

5:00 – 6:30 P.M. | MassChallenge  – Info Table

MassChallenge, the world’s largest startup accelerator, connects entrepreneurs with the resources they need to launch successful businesses. Applications close April 3.

5:00 – 8:00 P.M. | Boston Cleanweb Hackathon – Info Table

Boston’s biggest cleanweb event, the Boston Cleanweb Hackathon, is coming back this year from April 5th to the 7th.  Learn how you can help solve some of the world’s most pressing energy and water problems using a creative combination of clean tech and high tech.

5:30 – 7:00 P.M. | boston+acumen – Info Table

Learn about the Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty — improving access to affordable healthcare, water, housing, energy, and agricultural services. boston+acumen is a volunteer-run chapter of Acumen Fund.

6:00 – 8:00 P.M. | Communication for Technical Professionals

Maura Snow is an experienced biotechnology executive who will present her approach to developing communication skills.  Learn how your behavioral tendencies and preferences are perceived in the workplace and how you can become a more effective communicator and leader.

6:30 – 7:00 P.M. | Why Most Startups Fail

Bob Caspe, Managing Director of the International Entrepreneurship Center, returns for another thought-provoking discussion: Why Most Startups Fail.

6:30 – 7:30 P.M. |  Center for the Advancement of Science in Space – Info Session

Have you ever thought about using the International Space Station as a research and development platform for your startup? Representatives from the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space (CASIS), the nonprofit tasked by NASA to manage, promote and broker research on the ISS U.S. National Laboratory will be available to discuss the International Space Station. CASIS is teaming up with MassChallenge to provide a $100,000 prize and a flight opportunity for companies interested in using one of humankind’s greatest technological achievements.

We held an event last month at CIC, co-hosted by Google, CIC, and others, at the time of the State of the Union Address.  As part of it, we brainstormed and ranked the top policy concerns amongst innovators and entrepreneurs.  Making it easier for high-skilled individuals to move to this country to start companies was in our top three issues (other priorities included resolving the patent troll issue and improvements to public transportation).

In connection with high skilled immigration reform, there is real movement in Washington.  President Obama said in his SOTU address that he is committed to opening the door to high skilled immigrants around the world, and Sen. Chuck Schumer was just quoted this week saying that he thinks we are “on track” to getting a bi-lateral plan for this in place by the end of March.

Jeff Bussgang at Flybridge Ventures recently invited me to a small-group get-together with the head of an organization called the National Immigration Forum, which appears to be the most effective group pushing immigration reform.  Their head, Ali Noorani, a Muslim, pulled together a coalition of Christian religious leaders, law enforcement leaders, and business leaders (that’s you and me!) to support this, and his strategy seems to be working.  Jeff, Rich Miner from Google Ventures, Antonio Rodriguez from Matrix, Katie Rae from Techstars, and I, along with a bunch of others at the meeting, urged them to consider a crowd-funded initiative to finance their lobbying in favor of immigration reform.  Well…it seems they listened, and they have launched it here.  If you share my views on this issue, check out this organization for yourself.  If you also conclude that these are the right folks to help get this done, please invest $100 in the effort.  Collectively we can have a big impact on immigration reform, but it won’t happen by itself.

(Incidentally, I plan to communicate with the Globe and our legislators—we have a U.S. Senator visiting soon—about what we see here in Massachusetts as the top priorities for policy change related to technology and innovation.  If you would like to weigh in on what these issues are, please share your thoughts with me here.)

– Tim Rowe, Founder & CEO, CIC