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Upstart Business Journal
1776: Where
Traditional DC meets Startup DC
by Laura Baverman
March 18, 2013
If sequester means thousands of unemployed smart people end up in
Washington D.C., Evan Burfield wants to give them an office, train them
for startups and put them to work building businesses that transform
the way industries like healthcare, education, energy and government
operate.
The serial entrepreneur who last built and sold Synteractive, a firm
that built social apps for startups and government agencies, moves from
a post heading Startup America’s DC efforts to launch 1776, a hub of
entrepreneurial activity in the heart of this nation’s capital.
A 15,000-square-foot campus opens April 1st four blocks from the White
House and steps from the Washington Post, with a mission to make DC the
best place in the world to build and launch a startup in some
highly-regulated but uber-important national industry.
Housed in the building will be Startup DC, Fortify Ventures'
accelerator program, classrooms, event space (Founder Institute will
use it for an accelerator this year) and desks for dozens of startups
and the venture capitalists, lawyers, developers and accountants that
support them.
There will be classes to learn development and design and
business-building (think General Assembly in New York). Industry
workshops and networking events will be held at 1776, bringing together
corporations, government workers, trade associations, think tanks and
startups to solve the world's hairiest problems. And mid-summer
(perhaps around a certain, significant U.S. date), an inaugural class
of startups will enter the 1776 Accelerator.
“We want to be a platform for connecting up the hottest startups in the
world doing system-changing things with big, messy, deeply-broken,
industrial era institutions that make up 50 percent of our economy,”
Burfield said. “We want to bring them all together and really help
accelerate young companies using these unique assets of DC...
Read the rest of the article at Upstart Business Journal
http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/hatched/2013/03/18/1776-creates-startup-hub-in-dc.html?ana=e_du_ubj&s=article_du&ed=2013-03-18&u=12418821974e600fb8ae419cfa5335
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