It’s an incubator! It’s an accelerator! It’s a coworking space!
It’s Cowincuberator, the accelerator for other incubators, accelerators and coworking spaces, that launched yesterday in a refurbished and expanded suburban Kmart SuperK, to fanfare from the Philadelphia tech community.
“With all the different accelerators and incubators launching in the region, we felt there needed to be a space for all of those other spaces to get a jumpstart,” said Parker Whitney, the former Indy Hall-based video game developer who is leading the project. “With all of our desks for coworking spaces who have desks for startups, you can just think of us as those little yellow speed lines in Mario Kart — we’re like turboboost for Mario’s slot car, helping him defeat Wario, every single time.”
The new meta-accelerator could easily occupy numerous city blocks and rivals the late Steve Jobs’s plans for the Apple HQ spaceship, which won’t be ready until at least 2015. Each wing of the new space houses a different coworking upstart and has a name corresponding to the type of startup each tenant wants to accelerate. Wing names include, the IT Department, the Creative Department and the Human Resources department.
“Some people have told us the space looks like a cross between a Kmart and office park, but we’re pushing the envelope on how accelerators, incubators, and coworking spaces do business,” said Whitney. “We’re producing coworking spaces and accelerators, faster than you can say, ‘Corporate America.'”
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