A basement in downtown Ann Arbor, MI, has become the temporary home of 11 small start-ups and 30 student entrepreneurs from the University of Michigan in a high-energy community called TechArb. They share space (all of 2,000 square feet), equipment, and ideas, and are living proof, according to the student entrepreneur whose vision it was, that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. “It’s very hard to work on a start-up in the university library,” says Jason Bornhorst, a rising senior in Computer Science and Engineering and co-founder of Mobil33t, whose iPhone app DoGood was recently chosen as the New York Times ‘App of the Week.’ That might never have happened, he opines, without the symbiotic relationship among the start-ups. Every week, for example, he organizes a “Feedback Friday,” which gives everyone the opportunity to present what they’re working on and invite feedback from the group. This open forum has been particularly beneficial for Bornhorst, since the entrepreneurial community includes a number of iPhone app developers. “We went through six or seven design iterations based on their feedback, and one of the keys to our success was how well [the app] was designed,” he shares. “The first version was really terrible.” If he had been working alone in his basement and had hit a design roadblock, he notes, “I probably would have stopped for the day.”

Bornhorst adds that DoGood has also been covered by Forbes and CNET.com, and that some of the other TechArb companies have also gotten publicity in local publications and had some successes themselves. (For more details, go to www.techarb.org.) He and some fellow student entrepreneurs began kicking around ideas this spring. “We started looking at someone’s basement, but through a relationship with RPM Ventures (a local VC firm) we were able to secure our current space,” he says. Bornhorst had worked with RPM the previous summer on an earlier venture. “They run a program called RPM 10 — they offer teams $25,000, office space, mentorship, and financial services,” he explains. “It’s a community-building thing for them; it’s their intention to build more student entrepreneurs, in a joint venture with the UM College of Engineering. I was on one of the teams; that began a relationship that has continued.” Bornhorst approached RPM and said he had “five or six” student companies looking for space. As it turned out, RPM was also looking for space for their RPM 10 teams, “so we now had a critical mass of students needed to get this space,” he explains. While the total amount of space is 30,000 square feet, TechArb’s budding entrepreneurs are packed in “bullpen style.” A detailed article on TechArb appears in the August 2009 issue of Intellectual Property Marketing Advisor. For subscription information, CLICK HERE.

Posted August 11th, 2009 under Intellectual Property Marketing

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