In a city that has gained national recognition for its efforts in sustaining small business innovation, a recently-launched company in Boston’s Fenway neighborhood is hoping to make startup creation more manageable.
Hatch Fenway, an initiative of the real estate developer Samuels & Associates, offers lease agreements to up-and-coming startup businesses to allow them to grow, without making a several-year commitment to a space. According to Kate Haranis, a spokeswoman for Hatch Fenway, the leases are offered at Landmark Center and last for 12 to 24 months.
“If you’re a company that doesn’t know what your size is going to be in five years, it’s hard to sign a lease to commit to five or 10,” she said. “But you’ve outgrown, maybe, a traditional co-working space. You need more than a few desks. You want your own front door. You want your own footprint. There’s kind of this in-between [where] there really wasn’t anything in the market that was meeting that need.”
Thus, Hatch Fenway was born.
The space, which opened in August, aspires to be a hub for the startup businesses it will house, but like many of its clients, Hatch Fenway is in the early stages of figuring out what will work and what will not. It has one company signed on so far, and several others interested. In total, they expect to accommodate eight to 10 startups. However, Haranis said, the future of Hatch Fenway is uncertain, and will adjust based on the Boston startup climate.
“It’s not necessarily something that’s going to run forever,” she said. “We’ll see what the interest continues to be and we’ll see what we want to do.”
But as the engineers of Hatch Fenway work out the details, the driving goal is locked in: harbor more innovation in the neighborhood and provide a haven for the development, expansion and collaboration of startups.
In the spirit of collaboration, the 100,000-square-foot floor plan will be a far cry from traditional office space, complete with swing sets and a community work center for each business to use. And it all comes at a “significantly lower price,” Haranis said.
“We know that these are folks who are extremely nimble and are extremely creative, so [this is about] creating opportunities for folks to have more serendipitous conversations and work in different environments and have … different spaces with different energies and the opportunity for different kinds of interactions,” she said. “All of those things are really important.”
Hatch Fenway’s collaborative environment and short-lease guarantee also offers Boston students the opportunity to launch their startups while in school, without making any commitment to stay in the Landmark Center office after graduation.
Connor McEwen, a 2014 graduate of Boston University’s College of Engineering and a software engineer at the startup Wildcard Inc., said that although Hatch Fenway is guaranteeing a lower cost for office space, having to pay for space at all could still be a roadblock for many startups.
“We would have only used it if it was free,” McEwen said. “[Also], a lot of times, being in a space with other people can be distracting.”
Joe Zhou, a 2015 graduate of the Questrom School of Business, founded the startup Alt-Options, and said that a collaborative launch pad may only be helpful in some circumstances because “it depends on what the other companies are.”
But for startups working in the building that are entirely unrelated, “I don’t see how helpful that would be,” Zhou said.
Luke Sorenson, an ENG senior, had a more positive view of shared spaces, though. After co-founding the app, Sorenson and his company won a spot in Coalition, a co-working space in Downtown Crossing, and he said simply having an environment dedicated to work helped the company thrive.
“What makes these spaces special is the flexibility they give new businesses to actually have an office space,” he said. “Working from home just doesn’t cut it.”
And though Zhou wasn’t overly zealous about communal work spaces, when he remembered the frustrating process of bouncing from space to space to build his startup, he couldn’t entirely rule out using a business like Hatch Fenway.
“Right now, we stick with what we have, but in the future, for sure,” he said. “Especially when the team is growing, a co-working space might just not be a bad idea.”
