While working in technology transfer and in the Brooklyn-based incubator at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University, Bruce Niswander says he saw a disconnect between the “high supply of talented, energetic students,” and hiring struggles at startup companies.
“One of biggest challenges for a small business is identifying talent that’s affordable and available,” says Niswander, who now runs the NYU-Poly Varick Street Incubator in SoHo.
The school created a technology consultancy, where tenant companies described what they needed for employees, and the school found them among the student population, hired them directly, and billed startups for their hours. Tenant companies flocked to the consultancy and incubator program, which was quickly confronted with the lack of physical space, he says. This hit just around recession time in 2009, when New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, “wanted the city to grow through an enhancement of entrepreneurship,” Niswander says.
So the city administration helped NYU-Poly secure a 16,500-square foot incubator space at 160 Varick Street in SoHo, provided by Trinity Real Estate, and a new incubator program launched there in July 2009. Since then, Varick Street companies have raised more than $20 million in funding, created more than 300 jobs, and generated about $14 million in salaries per year between the entrepreneurs and the students they contract to, Niswander says. The incubator currently houses about 40 tenant companies. Many of the original companies have begun to move out for bigger offices, he says.
“In the end it’s a great group of entrepreneurs,” says Niswander. “It’s kind of like soldiers in a foxhole. Everybody roots for everybody’s success.” The incubator continues to contract student employees from NYU-Poly and is also expanding its involvement with NYU’s business school, The Stern School, he says.
One of Varick Street’s success stories is Pixable, an online photo management startup that just last week raised $3.6 million in Series B funding from Menlo Ventures and Highland Capital Partners.
Also located under the Varick Street roof is the cleantech incubator ACRE (Accelerator for a Clean & Renewable Economy), which is powered by a $1.5 million grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. Xconomy New York editor Arlene Weintraub profiled ACRE in a story last week that generated a stream of user comments, both positive and negative, regarding the operations director Micah Kotch, the program itself, and its relationship to the university.
“They’ve been working within the confines of that grant to deliver that
