In November, GoKart Labs co-founder A.J. Meyer quietly packed up his bags and moved from Minneapolis to Washington, D.C. The idea was to scope out the D.C. tech scene, see what's offered and figure out if it's the right home for GoKart's East Coast office.
Almost a year later, GoKart Labs isn't looking back. Instead, they plan to expand beyond their WeWork Dupont Circle office space and into their own custom space in the District in the coming year.
"We're big into long term planning here, and we knew as early as three years back that we wanted an East Coast presence, but we were never specific," co-founder Don Smithmier said. "We wanted our work to lead us to the right location."
GoKart isn't your typical company. Part-innovation lab, part-consultation group, they focus on helping a wide range of companies — small, medium or large — work through their various innovation challenges. It's easy to mistake them for an agency, but as Smithmier points out, GoKart doesn't assume that a startup's problem is in the marketing, like an agency would. Most of their clients — like Capital One and Allina Health — are in the education, healthcare and financial services industries. And GoKart also has its own business incubator set-up, much like 1776, where they create and spin out businesses on their own.
"We work with clients on a huge range of issues when it comes to digital innovation, from product ideas to marketing challenges to customer retention to whole business models," Smithmier said. "At the end of the day, we're really here to help companies thrive in the face of innovation challenges."
“We knew we wanted to land in a city that had an abundance of digital talent and an abundance of interesting work to be done."
The company knew for a while they wanted an East Coast presence, and as they kept looking around, D.C. kept popping up. Client Laureate Education is headquartered in Baltimore, and a fair number of the team members found themselves traveling to and from the D.C. metro area on a regular basis.
Around the same time, GoKart started doing work with National Geographic and AARP, both based in the D.C. metro area, and at some point, it just clicked.
"We knew we wanted to land in a city that had an abundance of digital talent and an abundance of interesting work to be done," Smithmier said. "It became clear that this was the right spot for us. D.C. matched all of those requirements."
So Meyer packed his bags and moved. They relocated their director of technology to the D.C. office and hired their first batch of D.C.-based employees, one of which is solutions lead Kate Nolan, one of the first 1776 employees. Now, they have seven full-time employees in the D.C. office.
Since landing in D.C., Smithmier said the company is having more conversations with people in the civic engagement space. They're finding more edtech companies seeing as edtech is such a hot industry locally. And, of course, they're attracting a new talent base to the company.
"What's cool is that there's just flavors of talent everywhere," Smithmier said. "I don't know what's going on, but D.C. buds lots of millennial talent. It comes with a lot of different experience than you'll find in the Midwest."
Going into the new office, GoKart wanted to make sure that the company's culture stayed consistent. Sure, the Minneapolis office is going to feel a bit different than the D.C. office, but the founders wanted to ensure that the general ethos of the company stayed in tact — which is easier said than done.
To do this, they're intentionally moving people from Minneapolis to D.C. to cross-fertilize the offices, and some of their new D.C. employees head up to the Twin Cities for training.
"We are really clear that we have one vision for this company, we have one set of values, we have one direction that we're going, so as we're interviewing and hiring and onboarding, that just gets handed down repeatedly," Smithmier said. "It's not just two businesses that are surviving on its own, it's one business with multiple locations."
The goal is to grow the D.C. office to about the size of the Minneapolis office, which currently sits at around 55 employees. In 2018, they're looking to find a permanent location for the company's D.C. space, and they plan to strengthen the GoKart ventures team in the metro area.
"So far, so good, and I'm knocking on wood as I say that," Smithmier said.
