There’s more to living in Scottsdale golf homes than beautiful views and championship greens. Our beautiful city is also one of the best places to start a business.
DataFox recently named Scottsdale as one of 2015’s best places to launch a startup, outside of the traditional startup-minded locations of Silicon Valley and New York.
ASU’s SkySong Entrepreneurial Center
ASU President Michael Crow formally congratulated the city and wrote “We are honored to receive this acknowledgment and to be a strategic partner with the city to foster innovative opportunities for entrepreneurs, students, and community members that lead to economic growth and greater competitiveness.”
One of ASU’s biggest contributions to Scottsdale’s entrepreneurial spirit is the award-winning SkySong project located at the southeast corner of Scottsdale and McDowell Roads. Built and touted as the ASU Scottsdale Innovation Center, SkySong is home to 1.2 million square feet of mixed-use space for everything from fortune 500 companies to incubators, startups, and classrooms.
Groupon, American Solar, Solugenix, Safari Books Online, Pyxl, and Theranos are a small sampling of the diverse yet cutting-edge companies making SkySong and Scottsdale their home. The number of tenants continues to grow, too, as construction just started in October on the fourth SkySong office building. With the addition of luxury apartments, the area is a true mecca for startups and those seeking a live-work-play lifestyle.
The partnership with ASU and the City of Scottsdale is key. According to the article from DataFox, “by building connections with student entrepreneurs, Scottsdale gives them a reason to stay beyond graduation.”
So what qualifies as a startup these days? In its broadest meaning, a startup is simply a newly established business. However the term “startup” has been thrown around more in recent years in relation to technology and innovation.
In a Forbes article entitled “What is a Startup?”, Warby Parker co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal describes a startup more specifically as “a company working to solve a problem where the solution is not obvious and success is not guaranteed.”
Along the same trailblazing lines, Homejoy cofounder and CEO Adora Cheung thinks of startup more as a state of mind; the willingness to give up stability for the possibility and excitement of making an impact. The one attribute of a startup that almost everyone agrees on, however, is that a startup must be able to grow.
Scottsdale has proven it is a hot spot for business growth in the last decade. An estimated 13,000 companies with a revenue of $5 million or more were founded in the city since 2010, according to research by Hoover’s. This is one of the many reasons Scottsdale ranked in the top ten on DataFox’s list.
Other cities that made the list include Cambridge, MA, Fayetteville, AR, Boulder, CO, and Durham, NC. These cities also boast partnerships with local universities (MIT in Cambridge), but also fully embrace the local culture.
The major takeaways from DataFox’s research: universities are vital to the early stages of startups, centralized hubs are most effective, and not every startup city has to be fast-paced like San Francisco – individual identity is equally important to startup success.
More startups in Scottsdale can only mean good things for all businesses and the Scottsdale real estate market. The work hard, play hard mentality can be lived out in full in a number of amazing Arizona golf communities, too. We can help you find a place that might double as a home office for your own startup, per city codes and permitting. Feel free to give me a call to find out more about our city’s rapidly growing startup culture.
Don Matheson
Realtor | Founder
The Matheson Team – RE/MAX Fine Properties
21000 N. Pima Rd., #100, Scottsdale, AZ 85255
480-405-4228
[email protected]
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