Imagine this. You're sitting at a table with your fellow teammates, chipping away at a new code or product design. The clicks of tired keyboards and rattles of near-empty extra large black iced coffees fill the air. All of a sudden, your teammates' table folds up and into the wall. The fluorescent lights dim and neon strobes speckle every surface of the room. A disco ball drops over the center of the workspace-turned-dancefloor. You can barely hear the clock striking 6 p.m. over Lady Gaga's new single "Applause."
Scott Kirsner wrote yesterday that Kayak co-founder Paul English plans to open a new tech incubator-meets-discotheque, "code-named Blade." Yes, you read that right. Forget Boston's old, boring clubs Gypsy, Bijoux, Empire and Umbria. Now, we have Blade.
English says he's planning an "outrageous" workspace that will transform into a club at 6 PM, with regular events that "celebrate creative people" like dancers, sculptors, and clothing designers.
Dancers, sculptors and clothing designers, please meet coders, hackers and engineers. All the personas listed can arguably be classified as innovative folk. Perhaps this means that Blade will serve as the proverbial watering hole for Boston's creative community to let out their crazy in good company. All jokes aside, a conversation among a group of inventive people with specialties across sectors in an informal, playful setting could be extremely productive, probably even more so after a drink or two [Hemingway did it, after all]. Atmosphere is everything, people.
In the daylight hours, however, Blade and English will be dedicated to helping startups scale by setting up budding executives with chief technology officers, much like he and Kayak co-founder Steve Hafner.
At the incubator, he plans to serve as a matchmaker between CEO and CTO pairs, launching about three new companies a year. "We'll fund them for the first six months, hire the first ten people, help them raise money, and then kick them out," he says.
While there won't be any velvet rope involved, Kayak co-founder Paul English's new startup incubator will surely have a strict selection process given the perks of the program. The trio of companies in each class will have an amazing opportunity to build out their business and work closely with and learn from English.
According to Kirsner, English announced that he'll be only working part-time as Kayak's CTO at company meeting earlier this month, which will give him the time to work on Blade. He has also reportedly already signed a lease on a 6,000 square foot space at 250 Summer Street in the Fort Point Channel district. Along with Blade, English will also be working as a part-time senior lecturer at MIT's Sloan School of Management and helping design an MIT entrepreneurship class with Bill Aulet, a former entrepreneur and CFO who runs the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship.
I'm all for the incubator. After 18-hour days hunched over laptops and slaving away on new software and MVPs, entrepreneurs are entitled to let loose. I'm interested in seeing how the incubator will actually work, though. For example, will Blade stay open past 2 a.m.? In all seriousness, Blade stands out from the other incubator and accelerator programs in size and opportunity. MassChallenge, for example, has classes of around 130. Founders just want to have fun and get funding. Thanks to English's new incubator, they can now do both without ever having to leave the office.
English's incubator will most likely have a new name by the time it begins. What do you think it should be? Tell us in the comments below.
