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.'”
Before you go...
Please consider supporting Technical.ly to keep our independent journalism strong. Unlike most business-focused media outlets, we don’t have a paywall. Instead, we count on your personal and organizational support.
3 ways to support our work:- Contribute to the Journalism Fund. Charitable giving ensures our information remains free and accessible for residents to discover workforce programs and entrepreneurship pathways. This includes philanthropic grants and individual tax-deductible donations from readers like you.
- Use our Preferred Partners. Our directory of vetted providers offers high-quality recommendations for services our readers need, and each referral supports our journalism.
- Use our services. If you need entrepreneurs and tech leaders to buy your services, are seeking technologists to hire or want more professionals to know about your ecosystem, Technical.ly has the biggest and most engaged audience in the mid-Atlantic. We help companies tell their stories and answer big questions to meet and serve our community.
Join our growing Slack community
Join 5,000 tech professionals and entrepreneurs in our community Slack today!