Project Overview

The Spokane region has all the tools needed to start and build growth businesses with a national or international market. We have the money, we have the wisdom, we have the expertise, and we have the quality of life to attract the best engineers and managers and other experts. Likewise we have all the cultural diversity and resources necessary to build a thriving creative community. If this is so, then why have we been unable to develop the next hit business like Google or the next hot musician like Alicia Keyes?

What we lack is a dense network of relationships that allows anyone, even college kids like Google’s Sergei Brin and Larry Page, to find the people who can take an idea like mapping the Internet and help turn it into a business that grows from two employees to five thousand in a few years, and from zero computer servers to 100 thousand, and from zero customers to hundreds of millions. We lack the dense network of relationships that can put our future Brins and Pages in touch with a local computer maker willing to build them 100 thousand cheap, low-powered servers, helping two businesses grow off one idea.

This is the kind of network that has made Silicon Valley thrive through repeated booms and busts in the technology business. Proximity is less important in Silicon Valley because the network is so well established, but even there, the bulk of venture capital funds are located on one stretch of Sand Hill Road and a high proportion of startups begin life near University Avenue in Palo Alto, just blocks from the famous garage where Hewlett and Packard developed their first product.

We also lack the critical mass for our creative community to explode, even though we have a vibrant music scene and a thriving literary and arts community. Part of that critical mass involves linking creative people with creative business people. Seattle’s grunge movement would not have gone far without indie labels like Sub Pop Records. Pike Place Market brings together craftspeople and farmers with each other and their customers under the banner, “Meet the Producer,” as Spokane’s own Second City once did. The Sundance Institute has introduced would-be auteurs to the business of film, livening up sleepy Park City in the summer and drawing new visitors during the post-New Year’s slump at ski resorts. The Writers’ Grotto in San Francisco brings together writers and filmmakers to share tips and referrals. The same ferment can happen here.

The Phoenix Project is a way to create our own Silicon Valley in a Box, putting all the tools and resources a startup would need in one place, shortcutting the development and funding process, and facilitating the development of our own dense network of relationships. By combining startup space with cultural and creative space, also in one place, we can jumpstart creative enterprises, building a home for writers and artists and filmmakers. Spokane has done that before in Second City, which also led to several successful local retail, arts, and restaurant businesses and at least one purely local retailer that developed a national market.

The Phoenix Project will serve as a catalyst for the growth of startups and as a center for creative development. The projected location is the old Jensen-Byrd warehouse complex at 131 E. Main, which contains a total of 4.25 acres of floor space. (The building’s owner, WSU, has issued a request for proposals to develop the space, along with several acres of adjacent land.) The upper floors of the six-story central building would be dedicated to dirt-cheap startup space and professional services focused on the startup market. The startups would all target national or international markets. The ground floor and basement would be dedicated to the center for creative development, with space for a public market (including a farmer’s market in-season), an international marketplace (including startup restaurants), and support services for the building’s startups, which would also serve the region. Services would include everything from a copy shop and computer technicians to a recording studio, rehearsal space, and a digital video editing suite. Anchor tenants would possibly include several area institutions that are currently seeking or considering seeking inexpensive space: the public market, KPBX, and a Magic Lantern-type art-film theater. A true GigaPoP Internet node and meet-me room, with exceptionally high-speed processing and routing capacity, would provide the region’s colleges and universities and allied technology businesses direct access for the first time to the Internet2 (Abilene), National LambdaRail, and other high-speed government and private networks for development of next-generation technologies. These facilities would also promote peer-to-peer networking between Spokane’s five backbone fiber pipes, which currently pass through the city but are not locally accessible. With its new Tier 1 status, the entire region will become a primary location for advanced research, a boon to both higher education and the economy. As these technologies are tested and implemented, regional consumers, businesses, and employees will be the first to reap the benefits.

The Phoenix Project is not intended to be a permanent home for its startup tenants (except for some in the creative center). By providing low-cost space, supporting services, professional advice, and a cool location all in one package, the Project will nurture the startups only until they either succeed and move to a new home, or fail and open up their space for new startups. As in Silicon Valley, the most successful generator of new businesses in history, failure must be an option for many of the startups, just as falling down is an adjunct to learning to walk. The Project as a whole will still succeed by concentrating its resources where they will be most effective.

Startups and those professionals who work with them in close proximity will be able to bounce ideas off each other and learn from each other’s mistakes. Space will be available to any qualifying company meeting minimal criteria and willing to pay the rent because even the most astute analyst cannot predict all the winners in advance. But additional support will be given to selected companies through a set of programs for which those companies compete.