Last month, NextSpace celebrated its first birthday. I’m equal parts thrilled and humbled by what NextSpace and our community have accomplished in the last year. We’ve created a community of over 150 members, we’ve helped stimulate the local economy, we’ve developed a strong relationship with UC Santa Cruz, and we’ve helped reshape the landscape of work. Not bad for a year’s effort. I’m grateful to the hundreds of members, supporters, evangelizers, mentors, investors, and teammates who have made our first year a huge success.
But given the current state of the economy, I think I’m most proud of this accomplishment: over the past year, NextSpace, Inc. has created five full- and part-time jobs. And that number doesn’t take into account the jobs that our members and their companies have created. At a time when the national unemployment rate is at its highest point in a generation and as the specter of a “jobless recovery” looms large, NextSpace and our members are doing something remarkable: we’re creating jobs.
How? By creating the infrastructure and the community that freelancers, independent consultants, and start-ups need to make their businesses successful. The economic downturn has forced a lot of people into these employment categories and NextSpace has been there to provide a safe haven. Even better, we’ve provided the networking and collaboration opportunities that many of them needed to land their first gigs, close their first deals, and connect with their first teammates. And through our sponsorship of Freelance Camp (http://www NULL.freelancecamp NULL.org/), Hope Foundry (http://hopefoundry NULL.com/), Girls in Tech (http://girlsintech NULL.net/), and the UC Santa Cruz Business Plan Competition (http://bizplancontest NULL.soe NULL.ucsc NULL.edu/), we’re providing the training that these new entrepreneurs need to make their ideas fly.
Over the past year, we’ve noticed an interesting trend: many of the people who have been forced into entrepreneurship (make no mistake, a freelancer is an entrepreneur and I’ve begun using the terms interchangeably) have no intention of ever getting another “real job.” Sure, they’ve been able to make a living and pay the bills. But they’re finding that entrepreneurship has a bunch of intangible benefits. These entrepreneurs like their newfound professional flexibility as opposed to the daily grind. Many have ditched their daily commutes. And they’ve become more engaged with their communities and their families.
For many of our members at NextSpace, freelancing and entrepreneurship have ceased to be a stop-gap measure or a “career of last resort.” Instead, they’re using freelancing to take control of their lives and their careers. Our members work when and how they want, on projects that make the best use of their skills and passions, and in a way that allows them to more fully integrate work, family, and the environment.
Companies like NextSpace are providing the community and physical infrastructure these entrepreneurs need. Companies like Elance (http://www NULL.elance NULL.com/) are creating new marketplaces that connect freelancers with clients and provide a virtual space to find, manage, and complete high-quality work. And (slowly!) policymakers are beginning to consider revamping the outdated legal and regulatory infrastructure that governs the “old” way of working (check out this op-ed (http://www NULL.metrosantacruz NULL.com/metro-santa-cruz/09 NULL.16 NULL.09/news2-0937 NULL.html) that my co-founder Ryan Coonerty and I wrote on healthcare and entrepreneurism). Collectively, we’re creating a new landscape that allows NextSpace members to choose entrepreneurism as their job, rather than instead of their job.
Which brings me back to job creation. When Ryan and I were doing our business planning for NextSpace in the spring of 2008, we made a remarkable discovery. More than 6,000 businesses are licensed to operate in the City of Santa Cruz and nearly two-thirds (dude, two-thirds!) of those businesses have exactly one employee. So Santa Cruz is a town full of freelancers numbering nearly 4000. And that number doesn’t count the hundreds of freelancers that haven’t bothered to get a business license. As Ryan has brilliantly observed, if half of those businesses were able to bring on one more employee, it would be the largest job-creation phenomenon in the history of Santa Cruz. Imagine replicating that phenomenon in hundreds of communities across the country. We’d chase away the specter of a “jobless recovery” pretty quickly.
Nice article, as is the norm for you. I particularly liked paragraph 5. Just a quick note from Thailand to say congrats on your first year. I miss my 100 meter (green as can be) commute to NS in the morning and look forward to doing it again in the Spring of 2010. To you and your team, as we say in the Land of Smiles, khap khun krup.
Social comments and analytics for this post…
This post was mentioned on Twitter by thesolster: RT @JJNeuner: New blog post on @NextSpace and the “Jobless” Recovery: http://bit.ly/15WTRa (http://bit NULL.ly/15WTRa) Please take a look and plz RT!…