A New York City co-working space called General Assemb.ly has been
lending its desks to highly regarded startups and serial entrepreneurs
for several months now, including: Postling, Art.sy, SeatGeek; and the
co-founders of Etsy and Vimeo respectively, Chris Maguire and Zach
Klein.
This weekend, the company replaced their single web page with a
full-fledged site. Today, the company announced that it has received a
$200,000 grant from NYC's Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC) to
offer design, technology and business classes to the public.
Located in Manhattan's Flatiron District, General Assemb.ly includes
an event space with capacity for 200 attendees, a 35-person classroom,
a library, seminar rooms, a media facility, kitchen and bar, mailroom,
lockers, a bike storage area and two work spaces for its invited
members. It's designed as an "urban campus." School will open there on
February 1, 2011 with classes priced from free, sponsored sessions to
several-thousand-dollar, ten week workshops according to company
co-founder Adam Pritzker.
The NYCEDC and city mayor Michael Bloomberg give grant funding to New
York's venerable, public and private academic institutions, too — on
Friday, they launched a multi-school effort to foster clean tech
sector development in the Big Apple. NYCEDC funded General Assemb.ly's
for-profit education and events business, Pritzker believes, because:
"The mayor's office understands that education around technology and
design, and educating a workforce is just a positive thing for the
city as a whole. Where big educational institutions aren't doing a
sufficient job of educating the public, I hope we can be a
complementary type of pedagogy."
An advisor to General Assemb.ly, Chris Hughes, chief executive of
Jumo, and a co-founder of Facebook, said on Monday:
"In a city like New York, it's still very difficult to work and live
around other people who share a sense of creativity, and want to have
an impact on the world whether it's in the sphere of technology,
design or business. [GA is] a physical space for creative people to
learn from one another and conspire. I haven't seen anything like it
in or around New York.
[My company] Jumo is a network to help people find non-profits of
interest, keep up with their work, and eventually support them. I
would have loved to have the General Assembly space open to us when we
got started a little less than a year ago, but unfortunately it didn't
exist yet."
General Assemb.ly is also supported by corporations including design
and innovation consultants IDEO, Skype, Silicon Valley Bank, Rackspace
and Wilson Sonsini.
The co-founders of General Assemb.ly — Brad Hargreaves, Adam Pritzker,
Matthew O. Brimer and Jake Schwartz (left to right in photo, above) —
initially determined the members of their club by word of mouth
recruiting and personal interviews. Demand was so strong that the
space already boasts a waiting list of 100 entrepreneurs hoping to
become communal members.
Pritzker reported that in the next wave, his company will adopt a more
formalized process, including an application and review by an advisory
board to bring in future tenants and communal members. Startups
currently pay $500 per desk for dedicated memberships; communal
members pay $300 per month; and Programming Members pay $25 per month
for levels of access to the space and some of its events.
General Assemb.ly plans to offer 30 to 50 classes a month, including
one keynote lecture each week when its business is up and running in
full.
