A downtown hub for entrepreneurs will collapse this June.
The city will shut down Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation’s co-working space and tech incubator, SquareOne, and terminate the lease at 38 Victoria Cres. by the end of June, leaving tenants to find new homes for their businesses.
It will also cost the city $147,000 to end the lease early, which it hopes to offset with a takeover of the tech incubator’s more than $88,000 high-speed Internet connection that would replace the city’s current provider.
The space, the brainchild of the Nanaimo Economic Development Corporation and Innovation Island, was meant to coax people out of the home and into a ‘funky’ work environment where they could immerse themselves in a culture of startups with other companies, create new technologies and tap into coaching and mentoring resources. The goal then was to offer resources for entrepreneurs to be successful, stay in Nanaimo, hire and grow their companies.
But a city report said SquareOne is operating as a co-working space or “hot desk” rental, traditionally a private-sector function and the cost structure is “significant” due to existing lease agreements and limited revenue streams. Terminating the lease removes one of the last assets of NEDC and completes the wind down of the corporation.
Michael Reid, owner of Otacon Systems, is disappointed, seeing it as an opportunity lost.
He was the second tenant in the space when it opened in 2014 and for him it was about community, which was missing from Nanaimo’s tech sector and the hope was SquareOne would create it.
“When you start looking at other places like Boulder, Colo., Silicon Valley and all these places where ideas are happening the very first word that’s always used is ‘community.’ There’s a place to go to, you can meet people, you can talk, ideas are exchanged, you can get jobs, things are spun off, but it’s very much a community,” said Reid.
High-tech companies are going to be crucial to the future of this city, he said. Now that SquareOne is going away, it will just be that much harder for companies to get to the next level.
“It does sadden me knowing that other cities that have made this work it’s definitely had a great impact on the community at large and even for other businesses, too. At the same time, I am also a taxpayer of the city and I understand that if you’ve got something, and it’s costing a lot of money and there’s no hope of recouping any of those costs, those decisions are made,” he said.
“I understand where they are coming from. It’s upsetting knowing that with things being done a little differently and it was certainly on the right track, we could have gotten so much more out of it.”