An entrepreneurial center of gravity for Ames
Last September, a community of entrepreneurs, early-stage startups, freelancers, and remote employees launched Gravitate—the entrepreneurial center of gravity in downtown Des Moines. The idea was to facilitate "a dense enough group of people working in related and compatible fields to achieve some of the things that make places like Silicon Valley and Boulder so successful."
We focused the area on three areas:
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Low cost, high density coworking
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A platform for community events
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Front door to the Startup Community
Now we're hoping to do the same thing with the Ames community!
Over the past few months I've had several meetings with stakeholders in Ames and I think there is legitimate interest in seeing this happen (yeah!)
The next step is to make sure there is enough interest among potential coworkers in Ames to make it feasible and for that we need your help. If you'd like to join us, please let us know here.
Know of someone else in Ames who would be interested? Please share with them!
Finally, we're going to need the established community's support to get this thing off the ground. In Des Moines, we had great sponsors like Workiva, Google, CenturyLink, Dwolla and Funnelwise (and many others) help with the launch costs—office furniture is super expensive. Do you know leads on companies or organizations that would like to help? Let us know.
Geoff Wood is the founder, connector and space captain at Gravitate, a workplace community for entrepreneurs, freelancers and remote workers in the heart of downtown Des Moines. In addition to writing here, he hosts a podcast, speaks at conferences, organizes events and has been helping tell the story of the Iowa startup community since 2009.