UpStart Collective teams with Portland State for west side outpost

The UpStart Collective is partnering with Portland State University to open a second location on the west side of the Willamette and build on the group’s vision to gather founders and the startup community.

The location is a 2,548-square-foot suite within the Portland State Business Accelerator, at 2828 S. Corbett Ave. This new space is not replacing the group’s current outpost in the Central Eastside, said UpStart co-founder Josh Carter.

It’s an expansion and further proof to Carter that the region is hungry for a single place where founders can be surrounded by others who can help them.

“That has always been the long-tail goal of the UpStart Collective,” he said. “The model is 1871 in Chicago, where all the organization in an ecosystem are in one space.”

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With locations on the east and west sides of town, the group hopes to gather even more people together. UpStart isn’t an accelerator and doesn’t have formal curriculum. Instead, it relies on its community to offer shared knowledge and problem-solving.

UpStart offers space for regular events. Every other week the team holds what it calls a Standup Meeting where members can talk about what they are working on and solicit feedback, help or other advice. With two locations the group expects to rotate these events between the two sides of town.

UpStart Collective started in 2022. The idea came from Carter and Ben Parish, director of strategic accounts at digital agency Graybox, to open some of Graybox’s unused office space as a coworking space for startups.

Graybox has a large office in the Central Eastside Industrial District, but like many companies their team has become dispersed following the Covid-19 pandemic. The duo wanted to capture some of the energy that was lost when everything went remote.

UpStart, which recently became an LLC, has 70 members who pay for either hot desks in the space or dedicated desks. The group intentionally keeps prices low, at $100, so that price isn’t a barrier to a founder, said Carter. This is possible because Graybox subsidizes that office. In return, Graybox is a hub of activity in its building now.

It will be a similar situation on the west side for both activity and sponsorship. PSU will subsidize the space through grant funding aimed at building regional innovation hubs, said Arsh Haque, director of the PSU Business Accelerator. PSU along with 10 other metro partners is submitting a full proposal for the Portland Metro Regional Innovation Hub that would receive added funding from Business Oregon.

For PSU, the school is working on a bigger project to create a center of gravity for innovation and entrepreneurs. There are changes coming to the Business Accelerator, not the least of which will be a new location, said Haque.

PSU is planning physical space in a to-be-renovated building downtown that will act as a downtown center of innovation, said Haque. That project received $2 million in tax increment financing, and the entire business accelerator will move later this year, they said.

“For that new building, we are hoping to bring in stakeholders from across the ecosystem including startups, VCs, incubators, accelerators, service providers and founder communities. Partnering with the Upstart Collective was an opportunity to immediately begin that work,” Haque said. “Starting out with an experiment with a west side UpStart location at the Corbett building, and using what we learn there to inform and shape what community at the new building could look like.”

As for UpStart, members must be founders of product companies, rather than client-based businesses or service-providers, Carter said.

“We don’t want service providers in the room (for day-to-day work) so founders can share (successes and struggles) without being sold to,” said Carter. He added that the group has three pillars for the community: They can’t sell to each other, what is shared with the group is held in confidence, and founders are expected to give more than they receive to the group.

“Our thesis was pretty broad. Let’s put founders in the same space and get out of the way,” he said.

Carter and Parish have the keys to the new space and are now getting it ready for founders. They plan to hold the regular First Friday networking event for March in the new location.