You know your entrepreneurship community is in need of ecosystem building when you host a very simple event (like bring a cupcake and get to know the community) and hundreds of people show up. And then it keeps happening. That’s how Jenny Poon stumbled upon the desperate need for cultivating and supporting the entrepreneurial community in Phoenix, Arizona. Since founding her organization ten years ago, Co+Hoots has served thousands of entrepreneurs and was the lightning rod to growing a robust entrepreneurial ecosystem there. Now, the organization is taking its knowledge and expertise to other cities that need practical tools and resources for supporting entrepreneurs.
Co+Hoots is an entrepreneurship center that supports 300+ entrepreneurs in a given month and has touched pretty much every aspect of the ecosystem in Phoenix since its founding (and initial cupcake event).
But Jenny didn’t set out to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem or become a hub for entrepreneurship. She simply wanted to be in community with and learn from other business owners. It was mid recession 2010 and Jenny was laid off from her job as an art director for The Arizona Republic. She decided to turn her side hustle into a full time marketing design agency.
After a while, the loneliness set in.
“It’s really scary to do this alone. I needed to be around people who were smarter than me. I knew a lot about business growing up in a restaurant but I really didn’t know how to grow and sustain it without killing myself. I really didn’t know anyone who was an entrepreneur who could talk to me about the problems I was running into,” explains Jenny.
She wanted to be around and learn from other people and so began looking for a physical space to share with other entrepreneurs to save costs and grow from each other.
Co+Hoots started with a very large space downtown that Jenny secured a great deal on due to the recession. She recruited four entrepreneurs to “cowork” (which wasn’t a term back then) with her.
“We were very lucky to be growing this in downtown Phoenix which at that time was a ghost town and in the middle of reurbanism. Growing this in downtown led us to be really involved in downtown activities. There just wasn’t a lot going on and so we jumped into being a central community space,” says Jenny.
Her space remains at the center of entrepreneurial activity in Phoenix. In fact, it was ranked the No. 4 Coworking space in the U.S. by Inc.com. But despite that impressive title, Jenny wants to be clear that Co+Hoots is not a coworking space; it’s an entrepreneur center that runs educational programs, events and brings people together in an inclusive space. Programming that began and was initially based on Jenny’s need for entrepreneurship education and guidance.
“I grew up in a family of immigrants. My parents came here as refugees from Vietnam and founded a family restaurant that I grew up in. I remember as a child being told to never become an entrepreneur because it’s one of the hardest things you’ll ever do. Seeing them constantly work, not have a day off, that was my view of entrepreneurship. I was told to go to school and get a degree. My siblings and I were the first generation to graduate from college and then went off to get a job,” says Jenny.
“I ran education events every week because that’s what I needed and really just built everything off of my needs: constant learning, networking, business development, etc.”
The ecosystem In Phoenix now
Co+Hoots brought the first Startup Weekend and Startup Week, hosted the first 1Million Cups, and other community events that have become the standard for ecosystem development. Since then, the business community in Phoenix has grown tremendously.
“Ten years ago we could host anything and hundreds of people would show up. Every event we held was very well attended because there was nothing else happening. We were building companies and nurturing them. Now that there’s a lot going on, we get to be picky about what we lead and own. We get to scan for the holes and bring more champions in to support this community together. We are in a stage where we don't need to be the spark. It feels like Phoenix has made it.,” says Jenny.
Now that the entrepreneurial ecosystem has expanded and the population is growing, the city is looking at what they want to be known for. For Jenny, what sets them apart is the people.
“Phoenix is really known for the people. There’s a general culture of generosity that goes all the way up to leadership. It still operates very much like it did ten years ago where everyone is accessible. In addition, people are also so willing to connect you to resources, which I think has to do with the foundational culture that we built in the very beginning. Every entrepreneur that essentially grew in Phoenix has touched Co+Hoots in some way and that is the culture that we’ve always leaned on,” says Jenny.
From an economic standpoint, Jenny says that Arizona is known for being the “wild wild west” where there’s a lot of support for testing new ideas. There are efforts underway to lower regulations to make it faster and easier for the state to test things. For example the autonomous vehicle testing in Phoenix. There’s also talk of Arizona becoming a potential site for semiconductor fabs.
Growing beyond the ecosystem (Huub)
After ten years of growing and supporting the ecosystem in Phoenix, it was time to think bigger and support even more entrepreneurs. Co+Hoots set out to expand into multiple locations and set its sights for Mesa, Arizona. While that location will be launching soon, the long lead process and need to have boots on the ground for community activation made the team start thinking beyond physical space.
“We like to be physically invested in a space. We have to put boots on the ground. It took 10 years to build up our community and we’ve created a lot of systems along the way to be able to do that. There’s a difference between real-estate and actual community building and we want to be in the space of community building and entrepreneurship nurturing,” explains Jenny.
“We don’t want to be the Starbucks of coworking. We don’t want to be We Work. In order for us to grow at that scale we would have to become real estate based and that is not the path we want to grow,” she adds.
So the question became: how can they continue to grow the community and serve more entrepreneurs without actually popping up multiple physical spaces? How can they serve underrepresented entrepreneurs who can’t take an hour out of their day to come to a physical space? How can they help spaces that already exist and have the same mindset serve their entrepreneurs? The answer: by taking the processes, programming, and culture they’ve already cultivated and making it a digital experience.
Huub is that platform. It’s a compilation of years of work that went into building Co+Hoots.
“There are a lot of patterns in small business and entrepreneurship growth. They go through similar challenges and stages. Some businesses are very unique, but in those early stages it’s all very similar in that you’re either struggling with finances, marketing, sales, technology, or legal challenges. Usually similar questions: What do I need to do at the end of the year for taxes? We’ve been running educational events weekly for a decade and so we’ve seen literally every problem,” explains Jenny.
Huub was initially built to serve the Co+Hoots community to bring all of their resources in one place and offer livestream educational opportunities pre-pandemic. As they started building out the digital platform, they started talking to cities that wanted to offer education centers in their libraries and support entrepreneurs in more accessible ways. The platform now offers a learning library, a technical assistance program, access to advisors, an up to date grant center, livestream educational events, digital reporting for localities, CRM, and a notification system for entrepreneurs to learn about new resources as they get added. It also offers more access to information for Main Street entrepreneurs who work long and late hours and can’t operate in the standard 9am-5pm government schedule.
“Huub essentially brings all of the resources we as an entrepeneur center share in one place so that businesses aren’t having to navigate to different organizations to find what they need. No waiting on hold. It’s very much a proactive wayfinding tool that can be measured. When cities come to us and ask us to open a Coworking space, what they want is the entrepeneur support spark we bring. We've packaged that up in HUUB so they can bring that spark, with or without space,” says Jenny.
Supporting the AAPI Community
In addition to expanding Huub to serve entrepreneurs nationally, Jenny has been advocating for increased support in the local AAPI business community. After the Atlanta Spa Shootings, she helped organize a march and built a task force made up of business owners, chamber leaders, nonprofit leaders, political leaders etc. to enact long-lasting change and create further understanding of the issues and challenges the AAPI community faces.
Jenny Poon speaking to the crowd at Stop Asian Hate rally in Phoenix, Arizona
“We have the commitment of our senators and house congressmen to meet on a bi-monthly basis to see what policies can be made. The meeting is meant to educate but also help collaboratively come up with solutions that can actually solve the systemic issues we run into and hopefully solve them for all our underrepresented communities.”
The discussions have been around looking deeply at new programs and initiatives (like PPP) and how they are rolled out to the community. For example ensuring there is language translation support and better access while also developing a relationship with Asian businesses owners to really understand the challenges they face. Much like Huub it’s about meeting entrepreneurs where they are with the resources they need.
“We can’t assume that we’re going to do it all for them but we can make inroads into helping them access things they wouldn’t typically have access to. Thinking about my parents. They’ve been in business for 40 years. Helping them with the PPP and looking at the spreadsheets they’ve been managing their business on was eye opening. They haven’t had a banker in 40 years because there hasn’t been a reason to build a relationship with one. They need to deposit checks and access their money. Why would a banker need anything from them? If we’re saying in order for you to access those funds you need to have a direct banker, it makes absolute sense that those people would be cut out of this opportunity,” explains Jenny.
Why are you a member of SCN?
“I only discovered SCN about a year ago. I had been really struggling with the term coworking. We’d been in it for a while but coworking has kind of evolved into what is simply just real estate sharing. Everytime I say the word, I kind of get this ewwy gross taste in my mouth because it just makes me think of this transactional relationship that WeWork has defined. While I appreciate the visibility around it, that’s not the definition of coworking in my head. Everybody has been saying you need to come up with a different word because what CO+HOOTS is doing is very different from what WeWork is doing. And so I started saying entrepreneurship center but that wasn’t quite it either and then at the beginning of last year before the pandemic hit, somebody introduced me to Startup Champions Network and the term "ecosystem building" and I was like OH! This is it!
I fell into SCN and I feel like I had finally found my people who spoke my language and understood my challenges and what we were all going through. Most of the people I meet are not in coworking, they are in ecosystem building, nonprofit, and entrepreneur support and so I’m a part of SCN because I believe in ecosystem building. I believe in the power of small entrepreneurs becoming big businesses that can be really impactful in our future. Especially our entrepreneurs of color and women. Studies show that women and POC give more back to their community than their white counterparts. So when you invest in these entrepreneurs, you invest in the success of your community.
Jenny Poon (middle) speaking during the 2020 SCN Spring Summit in San Antonio alongside Paulo Gregory Harris (left) and Fay Horwitt (right).
In a capitalist community and culture, our future is driven by people who have the money and power to decide the structure the rest of us operate in. That means banking, laws, access to wealth building activities are optimized for those who function well in this system. But the rest of us are not without agency. We can change this. We need to build wealth and opportunities for our underrepresented and we will begin to see the wage equity, race equity, gender equity we all want.
If we can close that wealth gap and bring more diverse leaders to success, I think we’ll have a much better nation for our future generations. I want my daughter to see this change in her lifetime. That’s why I’m part of SCN.”