OregonBusiness

Business accelerators grow outside Portland

Linda Baker

Thursday, February 02, 2012

Oregon has business accelerator fever. In the last two years alone, Portland birthed The Portland Seed Fund, Portland Incubator Experiment, and the TIE Westside Tech Incubator, among others. The business models vary, but the common goal is to provide early stage companies, mostly in tech sectors, with small amounts of funding and access to mentors, workshops and angel investors.

Now rural areas are part of the contagion. VentureBox, a for-profit tech accelerator in Bend, will debut its first class of seven companies on Feb. 15. An initiative of EDCO, the program also grew out of discussions with the Oregon Entrepreneurs Network, which landed a $75,000 grant to create a series of Accelerator Boot Camps in Central and Eastern Oregon. Founded in 2010, the nonprofit Sustainable Valley Technology Group in Ashland just hired its first permanent executive director and is seeking start up companies that aim to increase efficiencies or decrease consumption.

The sluggish economy helped catalyze VentureBox, says executive director Jim Boeddeker. “It grew out of an organic desire to replace the [area’s] intoxication with real estate,” he says. Aiming to grow a technology cluster in Bend, VentureBox provides participating companies —which pay $1,500 for a 12 week class in addition to putting up 2 percent equity in their companies — with volunteer mentors and project coordinators. Participants develop their business skills and improve efforts to attract investors and secure angel capital.

I asked Boeddeker why, as he puts it, accelerators are “the hottest topic in the country.” Credit the “dramatic drop” in the cost of starting up companies, he says. In “the old days,” launching a new company cost about $3-$10 million to and required a lot of hardware. Today $150,000-$300,000 can realistically fund a web or mobile application company "and it can often happen inside of a four to six month period," Boeddeker says. That range is a good fit for angel investors, who don’t have the resources of a venture capital team to evaluate bigger deals. “So they are more interested in companies with an accelerator model.”