By LAURA LOREK
Reporter with Silicon Hills News
Just in time for South by Southwest, TechSpace, Austin’s newest coworking site is opening its doors.
TechSpace Austin expects to open the first week of March, said Mallory Beck, TechSpace Austin’s site manager.
TechSpace, located at 98 San Jacinto Blvd. next to the Four Seasons Hotel, will occupy 8,000 square feet of space on the first floor, which will be dedicated to coworking and events. It features storage facilities and lockers, a full kitchen space, day use offices and conference rooms, community lounge areas, private phone booths, dedicated events space and an outdoor porch. The space features high ceilings and a lot of natural light. It can accommodate about 91 coworking seats. Its event center will be able to handle 200 to 250 people. A café is also opening on the first floor directly across from the center.
TechSpace also has another 20,000 square feet on the fourth floor featuring 24 private office suites and 250 workstations. The offices offer views of downtown Austin and Lady Bird Lake. Parkway Properties owns the building.
TechSpace also has eight locations nationwide in New York City, Los Angeles, Orange County and San Francisco. TechSpace has been eyeing an expansion to Austin for some time, said Victor Memenas, Chief Executive Officer for TechSpace.
“We have been tracking Austin’s prolific growth over the last five years. It’s a market we’ve always desired to be in with the demographics of the growing tech community,” Memenas said.
TechSpace has had a lot of demand from the local audience with more than 85 inquiries from companies and entrepreneurs interested in the space, Memenas said. TechSpace has always positioned itself as alternative and flexible office space to the small businesses and entrepreneurs, he said. It added a traditional coworking environment downstairs to capture the full lifecycle of a startup business, he said. Entrepreneurs can startup out on the first floor and then expand to the fourth once they’ve built a team and they need more dedicated space, he said.
“Our ideal customer is the small business owner,” Memenas said. “You don’t have to be a high tech entrepreneur to be at TechSpace. We have a ton of different entrepreneurs, small businesses owners whether they have finance companies, marketing companies, media companies…. we solve a major problem for a small business owner that has multiple employees.”
The TechSpace solution allows companies to preserve capital and keep overhead to a minimum, while focusing on enhancing their core competencies, Memenas said. TechSpace handles all the nitty-gritty details of running an office space from furniture to electricity and Internet connections, he said.
TechSpace Austin’s fourth floor features flexible space including interconnecting and scalable offices and an advanced on-site technology platform with a firewalled data network providing high speed Internet connections.
“We don’t target one vertical or one industry,” Memenas said.
TechSpace has been creating alternative office space for some time so it has really mastered the layout and design of office space for small businesses, Memenas said.
The Austin location has drawn on inspiration from TechSpace’s San Francisco and New York locations, he said.
“We really think the Austin location is going to be the best location in our entire portfolio,” Memenas said.
Location is everything when it comes to creating a TechSpace center, Memenas said. But the company is generally agnostic when it comes to the type of building. It has TechSpace locations in historic buildings and modern skyscrapers.
“It’s all about our build out where we foster a very creative environment, really cool open space” Memenas said. “It energizes the people that work there.”
Editor’s note: TechSpace is a sponsor of Silicon Hills News
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