The greatest innovations are born in challenging times, says Jenny Poon, a longtime Valley entrepreneur and social equity advocate.
During the Great Recession, Poon was laid off from a design job in the journalism industry, prompting her to enter the world of entrepreneurship. In 2009, she founded boutique design agency, Eeko Studio, which helped startups with communications and product marketing.
As a business owner, Poon saw a need to increase support for other entrepreneurs, leading her to launch Co+Hoots — the Valley’s first coworking space — with Odeen Domingo in 2010.
“Then, I fell in love with building community and helping people who were in the same situation,” she told AZ Inno. “It started with building the space and meeting all these incredibly talented people and realizing they just need to be better connected to each other. That’s where we started to lean into the coworking space components of connecting people and providing training and support for all of the things that come with being an entrepreneur.”
Since then, Co+Hoots has expanded to two Valley locations that serve more than 1,000 entrepreneurs a month.
Even when the pandemic took hold across the nation in 2020, causing businesses to temporarily shut down, Poon saw yet another opportunity.
She cofounded HUUB, a Mesa-based startup that created a digital platform to connect small businesses with government resources.
The platform also acts as an extension of municipal economic development departments, providing real-time data that allows cities to make informed decisions on allocating resources and funding based on the specific needs of their communities.
HUUB’s platform has been adopted by dozens of economic developers in Arizona — including in Mesa, Phoenix and Tucson — to centralize resources, measure impact, gather data and enhance technical assistance programs.
In April, HUUB was crowned the winner of CivStart’s 2024 Government Innovation Challenge and Pitchfest.
The company is planning to launch a new AI recommendation tool for its platform and is gearing up for a national expansion in the coming months, Poon said.
"My goal is to be able to expand to three to four more communities outside of Arizona before the end of the year," she said.
Advocating for businesses on a national level
Poon’s advocacy for small businesses extends beyond the Valley.
In 2023, she was selected as a board member for the National Women’s Business Council, which helps shape national policy for women-led small businesses.
The nonpartisan federal advisory committee provides advice and recommendations to the president, Congress and SBA’s administrator on issues of importance for women business owners, including access to capital and opportunity, STEM and inclusive ecosystems.
“Serving on the NWBC is a huge honor to help build inclusive policies for women and underrepresented communities through really analyzing and rethinking how we address systemic issues in our communities,” Poon said.
Poon aims to help remove barriers for women and underrepresented communities in accessing capital, she said, adding that she's benefited from HR 5050, otherwise known as the Women’s Business Ownership Act, which was signed into law in 1988.
The landmark federal legislation helped stop discriminatory lending practices and eliminated state laws that required women to have a husband or male cosigner on a business loan, among other things.
“Without this legislation, I would never have been able to access the loan to buy the (Co+Hoots) building and triple our margins,” she said. “We need to focus on removing the barriers that women specifically face in order to open the opportunities for all of our communities to prosper.”
The Valley’s tech ecosystem has come a long way in the past decade, Poon said, pointing to a growing number of organizations that support startups, including Seed Spot, StartupAZ, Arizona State University and Canyon Ventures at Grand Canyon University.
Now, entrepreneurs have the option of connecting to many groups with resources specific to their companies, she added.
“We've got something for everybody,” she said. “And that's a beautiful thing to know that in our city, you can start from anywhere and be successful.”
