To get access to an entrepreneur-in-residence, aspiring founders usually need a connection to the university or venture capital firm hosting such a startup veteran. Now, one of the city’s stalwarts of free, publicly accessible services is disrupting that arrangement.
The Boston Public Library Fund will use a grant from the Nasdaq Foundation to launch the library’s first entrepreneur-in-residence program. The entrepreneur in residence will provide free one-on-one mentoring and workshops for new and aspiring founders.
“I think the recognition that the library is a space that’s free to all has really come to fruition with this opportunity, because we see a lot of disparities within the community, particularly around small business and entrepreneurship,” said Paula Sakey, executive director of the Boston Public Library Fund.
The fund cited the lack of mentorship between thriving business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs, especially in the Black and Latinx community, as a primary reason to establish its own entrepreneur-in-residence program. About 25% of Black and Latinx-owned, first-year startups have access to only one business owner in their networks, per the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
“If you’re not part of that ecosystem, particularly within a university or college, you may not have access to the type of mentoring, advice, networking, funding, that others could,” Sakey said.
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The entrepreneur in residence will be based out of the Central Library’s Kirstein Business Library & Innovation Center. Sakey said the space has a slew of events and resources to support people from job seekers to media creators to entrepreneurs. Its free services include a coworking space, podcast production setup, meeting rooms and 3-D printers.
Sakey said they’ve chosen the library’s first entrepreneur-in-residence and plan to name them publicly in September. For now, Sakey said, she could share that the person used the Kirstein Business Library & Innovation Center to launch their own business and has since hosted workshops at the library on topics such as leveraging social media and pivoting a small-business pitch. Sakey said the person is a Boston-area resident and a person of color.
The grant from the Nasdaq Foundation will fund this position for 15 hours a week over eight months. Sakey said the Boston Public Library Fund is in the process of looking for additional private donors to fund a second entrepreneur-in-residence.
The entrepreneur-in-residence’s main areas of focus will be hosting one-on-one mentoring sessions and designing entrepreneurship programs, including a potential business plan competition, Sakey said.
“The other piece is community building. That will be really important for this role. Really making connections with the community, the BIPOC community, BIPOC entrepreneurs,” Sakey said. “Developing some extensive partnerships and really thinking about how to create the kind of ecosystem that we’d like to within the space that can evolve and grow.”
