Quebec Valley

There were a few posts recently regarding incubators. This made me think a little but and I think there is a market for a “shared start-up business center”. If you read Guy Kawasaki’s blog recently then you probably know about TechShop, a place where people can subscribe (pretty much like a gym) and use heavy machinery and tools.

Traditional business centers already exist, but they are mostly equipped with basic amenities such as conference rooms, copiers, faxes and so on. Basic stuff and nothing very impressive. A geek-ish business center could have much more such as a shared small scale data center where you could “borrow” space on an existing server until your project is ready for prime time. Having a limited number of businesses could result in decent performances compared to an overcrowded shared hosting provider.

Having multiple of those geek-ish business centers would also allow redundancy and geographical load balance thus allowing users to benefit from a heavy duty data center at a very low cost. Try getting this from your current hosting company…

On the HR side, there could be many beneficial services such as accountants, lawyers, marketing gurus, programmers, designers and other freelance people. These resources could be available on a contract basis or be included as part of the regular package. Of course, VC folks would be very interested in following those new start-ups and I believe that high quality start-ups would come out of this machine.

Basically incubator meets business centers. This could allow people with ideas to come in, “add some water” and voila!

There are some incubators and similar services around here but none of them offer the equivalent of what TechShop offers.