Of all the occupational hazards overseen by OSHA, this one certainly must fall outside the list: a Ping Pong ball. But there it lies, on the hardwood floor of an 11,000-square-foot office space in downtown Burlington, threatening to trip up a clumsy reporter wide-eyed in wonder at the King Kong posters, horse’s head and swirling bubble chairs.
Look a little closer, though, and note that it’s not just any Ping Pong ball — it’s orange, emblazoned with the logo for the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies (VCET), a 10-year-old business incubator that expanded to this spot across from Edmunds Elementary in late 2014. Though VCET also has space at UVM and at Middlebury, it’s this Main Street address that has heads spinning, earning comparisons to Silicon Valley and contributing to VCET’s ranking as one the country’s leading business accelerators.
Take it from computer science major Christine Bolognino, ’17, who walks or rides her bike down the hill to spend every Friday here, sipping Italian espresso on a cowhide rug as an intern for ThinkMD. “When I first walked in,” she says, “I couldn’t believe this was Burlington.”
Start me up
With funding from UVM, VCET was founded as an independent 501(c)3 public benefit corporation serving the entire state. In its decade of life, it has assisted some 1,250 startups with mentoring and business advice, and its 45 portfolio companies have attracted more than $113 million in investment capital and earned over $93 million in revenues. But the ball has really been rolling in the past year (with 300 startups alone), since VCET moved into this place that is, quite literally, full of electricity and connectivity — it’s the central telecommunications hub for FairPoint Communications, which contributed a full floor of its building to housing the operation.
“It was an institutional-feeling space,” says designer Tania Kratt, whose work at trendy Stowe’s Plate restaurant caught the eye of fellow Stowe resident and social acquaintance David Bradbury ('88), VCET's president since 2008. “Lots of orphaned desks and cubicle walls — it was all just white and gray.”
Kratt’s mission: figure out the flow so that creative and tech types could use it functionally, and also put up with self-described “control nut” Bradbury, who insisted on the orange pops of color as well as the presence of a certain Japanese monster. “I just felt like we needed a Godzilla,” he says with a shrug. Kratt, meanwhile, brought in pop culture (Union Jack boxes, “In Mod We Trust” pillows) and pop art (Roy Lichtenstein prints) along with the Lego table that her kids, ages 6 and 12, set up one day.
In the see-saw world of startups, this place is careful balance of midcentury-modern, retro-kitsch winks — Risk, Battleship, Spill & Spell games in the bookshelves, plus bowling pins atop coffee tables — and futuristic touches that has pulled the state’s top creative minds and entrepreneurs to its couches, tables and standing desks like moths to a flame. More than 150 forward-thinking members have joined VCET@BTV, as the Burlington space is called, a sanctuary that has earned nods from Sen. Leahy and architects alike.
College of Medicine faculty member Chris Jones, one of three UVM docs with start-ups in the space, likens it to what “Google must have been like in the early stages. This kind of data-driven start-up culture will change how we come up with ideas together, and accelerate what we do with those ideas,” he says.
Job engine
Behind the scenes at VCET is a venture capital advisory board that includes David Aronoff ’86 of Boston’s Flybridge Capital Partners, who has seen incubators from coast to coast and calls VCET@BTV one of the best. “The layout is perfect,” he says. “It’s inviting, not overpowering, and it’s not too stark or too hipster, and it’s built upon years of integrating with entrepreneurs and fantastic people in Burlington and well beyond.”
The connectivity fostered by VCET mirrors that sparked by UVM networking long before the heady days of high-tech, says Aronoff. “When I see what VCET has done, I think it’s awesome,” he says. “This is an engine that keeps more jobs in the state — people who think of Woodstock and Killington don’t realize the strength of tech” in Vermont.
And speaking of Heady, the fridge in kitchen (a room with a va-va-voom view of Lake Champlain from one counter) just happens to be stocked with Vermont’s most-hyped hopped beverage one afternoon, a sign of an upcoming social hour. Intern Bolognino often finds herself a non-imbibing member of these small gatherings, which foster smart work relationships not fraught with typical office tension. “It’s collaborative,” she says.
“The goal was to make it a fun, cool space where innovators could do their work and gain information from each other,” Kratt says. “That’s the biggest reward — that people are using the space successfully.”
It’s a win-win, even for those who might lose at an impromptu game of Ping Pong. The tables, it turns out, were selected not only for play, but also for practicality; they’re cheap and easy to move around. And of one of those orange Ping Pong balls happens to land on the floor? Well, that’s how VCET rolls.
Some of the surprises of the space, says Bradbury, are how much people are using the standing desks, and how many people are popping in to work on nights and weekends, when he might be cranking Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. But at the end of the day, or in the wee hours, VCET and its super cool corners are for “curated discussions or spontaneous conversations,” says Bradbury. “That’s where the magic happens.”