Portland's Graybox turns unused CEID office space into a DIY startup coworking spot

Upstart Collective is a new coworking space that’s designed not to necessarily make money but instead make community.

It’s the result of a collaboration between entrepreneur and investor Josh Carter and Ben Parish, director of strategic accounts at digital agency Graybox. They hope it will connect founders and rebuild some of the Portland startup energy that was lost in the pandemic.

Graybox, which has a large and now sparsely used office in inner Southeast, is opening the space to founders who are looking to get out of their home offices and want to be around other founders. The price for Upstart Collective is purposely low.

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Parish’s pitch to the Graybox ownership for the idea was to subsidize 2/3 of the cost so, “any startup should be able to do it.”

A hot desk is $100 a month and a dedicated desk is $150 a month. The space is 4,000 square feet on the seventh floor of 107 S.E. Washington Ave. (the big yellow tower). Founders working in any industry vertical can apply online.

Harka Architecture also has space in the building.

Parish noted there is no education component or community manager. Instead, he said, founders can have the space, hopefully meet some new people and have access to the office amenities, “just clean-up after yourself in the kitchen,” he said.

“It’s not supposed to be a WeWork or cultivated thing,” Parish added. “(Upstart Collective) is a scrappy solution for a scrappy problem.”

The group is having a launch party and open house Sept. 16.

“During Covid, we moved to a distributed location model, but we have an incredible office space right in the heart of the Central Eastside neighborhood,” said Graybox founder and Managing Principal Paul Weinert. “A few of us still come in most days, but it lacks the same energy as before. We're excited to start a coworking space for the community and help revitalize our area.”

Does Portland need a startup hub?

Carter has been in the Portland startup space for years. Recently, he has been trying to get this idea of a dedicated startup space off the ground to rekindle the community in Portland that had been so vibrant following the Great Recession and in the 2010s. The Covid-19 pandemic and the isolation that came with it further dampened energy that was already starting to slow.

“The vision is magic happens when we are all together and it may seem weird coming out of a pandemic when remote work is the thing,” said Carter. “If you are a founder working solo (or even a small team) it’s a lonely journey.”

Carter is also hoping that getting founders together will allow them to learn from each other. If someone has a problem there is likely someone else who has faced a similar issue and can help, he said.

His idea is modeled on examples of startup spaces in other cities like 1871 in Chicago or Capital Factory in Austin.

“Portland is fragmented now. We have so many different entities and they all operate in a silo and micro-ecosystems,” he said. “Upstart Collective can be that catalyst so we have that critical mass that can facilitate growth to founder and startups.”

Building Portland startup founder connections

Carter and Parish have already been hosting monthly startup founder dinners as well as a founder poker game at Graybox. And Carter is a co-organizer of the revamped Coffee with Cofounders event that has been hosting meetups at coffee shops around the region.

This idea of shared space and bringing founders together has been bubbling for a while. Portland hasn’t had one location for startups and instead had many, many events hosted by different groups and resources around town prior to the pandemic.

Over the years, companies have also given startups desk space or conference rooms on an ad-hoc basis and usually through existing networks. For example, in the early years software maker Puppet gave desk space to Cloudability — both ended up being marquee names in the startup scene.

The Portland Incubator Experiment, when it had an office in the Weiden+Kennedy building, sort of served that purpose first as a coworking space then as an accelerator. PIE has had several locations since that first office but went remote for the last two years. The peer-mentoring group Starve Ups also tried a shared space.

PIE has started to bring its founders together in-person at one of its spaces in the Autodesk offices — just blocks from where Upstart will be — for a weekly co-working day, said PIE general manager Rick Turoczy.

Portland startup Radious, which is a sort of Airbnb for home offices space, has also hosted community coworking events with PIE to connect folks for coworking at one if its locations.

“The best thing about (Upstart Collective) is that it’s something new.,” said Turoczy. “It’s not a reboot or a retread of something that used to work. It’s not importing a concept from somewhere else. It’s homegrown and it’s from scratch. And it may very well be exactly what the community needs right now.”