Bruce Niswander and Varick Street’s Beginnings
“I want to empower people; I want people to find their own job, but I have to give them the skills to do that,” declared Bruce Niswander, director of NYU-Poly Office of Innovation Development and leader of the Varick Street business incubator located in the SoHo section of New York City. While empowering the nation seems like a lofty ideal, Niswander has wholeheartedly pursued his mission locally within the business incubator he manages, generating impressive results since its launch in mid 2009–though success was not instantaneous.
Niswander’s incubator work first began at the Brooklyn Enterprise on Science and Technology (BEST) where “there were 3 tenants and not much business,” Niswander reflects. However, Niswander drew from the tenets of entrepreneurship, innovation and an awareness of consumer needs- to adopt a novel agenda: accelerate the growth of his incubator by employing students as consultants and fostering a mutually beneficial relationship between his students and clients.
Looking back on his achievements, Niswander muses, “Lots of companies, even more so now, are in desperate need of access to technical talent in an affordable and non-permanent way, so students are a great source for that. We set the incubator up to do that, and the marketplace recognized us and rewarded us with additional business.”
The success of Niswander’s incubator garnered attention that included local media and even Mayor Bloomberg. Bloomberg, who Niswander says “wanted to entrepreneur his way out of the recession,” approached Niswander and offered space for a new incubator. In February of 2009 the City of New York’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC) announced its partnership with the Polytechnic Institute of NYU to open the Varick Street incubator.
Bloomberg’s partnership provided $1.5 million in grant funds to jumpstart the incubator, one of approximately 20 in New York City. Niswander feels this partnership highlights a governmental belief in bottom-up job creation, and that entrepreneurial innovation can quickly and efficiently develop new opportunities for college students, the unemployed, and aspiring business owners alike. However, Niswander is quick to note the fortuity of his receiving funding, since it is counter to one of the classic challenges of being an entrepreneur: “One of the things about entrepreneurship is you don’t expect subsidies; you expect opportunity and hopefully encouragement to do it.”
The EDC partnership enabled the Varick Street incubator to thrive, reaching noteworthy achievements in its first two years: it has supported 60 different tenants, seen funding rise to over $27 million, and been the birthplace of an estimated 430 new jobs.
Niswander argues that having an incubator in New York City offers advantages few cities can rival. “Everyone wants to be in New York, so that’s the beauty I leverage every chance I can. It’s easy to get people to come to New York; all the marketing and selling skills are here. You can reach any place in the world with a single phone call in New York City, and you can catch a cab or subway and the meeting occurs in the next 48 hours. You can’t do that anywhere else in the world,” Niswander said.
And while New York does not provide the low-priced rental space that is the historical standard of incubators, the setting does force “companies to focus on discipline and getting things done quickly and efficiently,” a key factor for entrepreneurial success, Niswander said. “At the end of the day it gets them out of the house and coffee shop. It puts them into an environment where there are other entrepreneurs, so when you talk about a co-development space, that’s a key element”.
The incubator environment also creates an intellectual atmosphere brimming with creativitythe optimal setting for young entrepreneurs. “Our tenants are sitting in rooms with other people that are facing the same issues, the same problemsand collectively these are smart people pushing the envelope,” Niswander said. “You have to believe that they’re going to know where the best X and best Y are. That’s what happens when you’re in these kinds of environments.”
Niswander’s savviness and leadership has been noticed as he was named one of Crain’s 37 People to Watch in New York. “It’s not that I’m looking for those things, I’m just doing what I know how to do, and what I know works.”
Niswander is cheerfully optimistic about the future of his incubator and, therefore entrepreneurship. “The biggest change is going to be that the people right now who have no hope begin to think that they do have hope. And it’s that belief that tomorrow is going to be better than today,” Niswander said. “I deal with these people every day and when they believe they can better the market, they’ve got the power of the gods.”
