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Let’s face it: Coloft’s third birthday is “just another reason to party.”
At least that’s what founder Avesta Rasouli said about the invite-only event, which will be celebrated in the space on Thursday.
“We’ve invited all our mentors, members and previous members,” Rasouli said. “It’s a fun night of getting together, but, to be honest, that happens pretty much anyway.”
It’s safe to say that Coloft, which is home to about 30 companies, has a pretty good reason to celebrate: it is known as the original entrepreneurial community that has helped the LA startup scene every step of the way.
“When we got started, there was no Silicon Beach; there wasn’t actually a vibrant LA tech scene that everyone would talk about,” Rasouli said. “We came at an early, very embryonic stage and gave these early meetups and events a home and then we became the hub of the tech activity. Now it’s just blooming.”
In addition to providing a community and a workspace for entrepreneurs, Coloft launched Coloft Academy last fall to provide demand-based courses on a wide range of topics, Academy Program Director Yohei Nakajima said.
This month, Coloft Academy added a four-week development course taught by instructor Brian Koch. Thanks to a partnership with Team Treehouse, the course will follow a hybrid model of online and offline curriculum, so students can both learn at their own pace and still work with peers and an instructor, Nakajima said. Coloft Academy will hopefully be adding more long-term classes like this one in the future, Nakajima said, in order to encourage more knowledge-sharing within the community.
The success of the Academy (well over 500 people have already taken Academy classes) and the constant demand for events and workspace is positioning Coloft for possible expansion again.
“We’re sort of starting to feel like we might be running out of space again; that already happened once and we doubled the size,” Rasouli said. “I definitely know that the community is growing fast. We’re definitely not in the business of workspace; we’re in the business of an entrepreneurial community and connecting these people. Based on that, our value proposition is very different from every other workspace or coworking space. So I don’t know if, and how soon, we will expand again, we may just deal with what we have.”
