It's a START
Houston's own Silicon Valley? New co-working space tries to turn EaDo into atech hot spot
Apurva Sanghavi, left, and Gaurav Khandelwal are co-founders of STARTPhoto by Whitney Radley
The view from the common area into the atrium. An open workspace, to the right,is available 24/7 to all paying members.Photo by Whitney Radley
Though Apurva Sanghavi deals primarily in real estate, he has long lamented the lack of a technology community in Houston.
It took moving to New York, working for real estate website Trulia and witnessing the collaborative, creative interaction within the tech world there to recognize that a homegrown effort wasn't an impossibility.
"There were good indicators, and yet not really a sturdy space for people to incubate ideas," Gaurav Khandelwal, Sanghavi's longtime friend and CEO of mobile services company ChaiONE, told CultureMap.
Sanghavi returned to Houston and approached Khandelwal about creating this sort of co-working space. As Sanghavi recognized, "If we want it, we just have to build it."
The sum of their efforts is START, a co-working space dedicated to the mobile market.
The former offices of Crisp & Raw Studios (once the headquarters of Isaacson Chain & Belting) became available this spring, and the two have spent the last several months tweaking and renovating to give the space an appropriate feel for a new project.
The sum of their efforts is START, a co-working space dedicated to the mobile market. The space has been outfitted for an anchor tenant, with a spacious conference room, an open kitchen, a lounge area and a large working space that benefit from a sun-filled atrium.
A large, air conditioned garage currently houses a ping-pong table and a claw-footed tub (to hold beer during parties), but can be built out into permanent offices if demand arises, and a rooftop deck with unbeatable downtown views is in the works.
START will be used to host meetings and conferences, including Startup Weekend and a Google I/O event. Members will have 24/7 access to the facilities, where designers, developers, entrepreneurs and market researchers can rent chair space by the month, coming together to share ideas with the ultimate goal of creating a little Silicon Valley in EaDo.
This idea for a co-working space exclusively for the mobile industry is something that hasn't existed anywhere else in the country, and perhaps the world, until now.
Last weekend, START opened with a Kickoff Appy Hour and a Mobile App Hackathon on Saturday from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sanghavi and Khandelwal rewarded the best with prizes, and gifted all 30 participants free membership to the space through the end of July.
Want to check it out for yourself? Stop by — START is located at 1121 Delano Street.
