When the Communitech Hub opened three years ago, it wasn’t long before people began to equate it with Waterloo Region’s startup scene.
As much sense as that might make – there are about 120 startups resident in the Hub, after all – it’s worth remembering what a hub actually is: the centre of a network.
It’s a network that includes an increasing number of large companies – many of them former tech startups themselves; others that aren’t tech companies at all – that find value in the creative collisions enabled by the facility’s open environment.
The latest big name to surface here this week was Intuit, a $25-billion player in financial software headquartered in California, with offices in Edmonton, Mississauga and around the world. The company, founded 30 years ago in a modest Palo Alto apartment, came to the Hub Tuesday bearing tacos and promoting its new Kick-Start program for small businesses.
The program offers companies free access to QuickBooks Online for a year and gives them a chance to win $15,000 in cash, consulting from a QuickBooks Pro advisor accountant and a marketing brand assessment from one of Canada’s top marketing agencies.
Intuit chose the Hub for its Canadian launch of the program “because we believe in the strength of small business in Waterloo Region as an example of a diversified economy that has a role on the global stage,” said Rob King, Small Business Lead for Intuit Canada. “There is no better accelerator for the future than small business and the potential of the people of this region.”
Intuit’s arrival here is not just about marketing its software to the 700-odd startups in Communitech’s Waterloo Region orbit, though that's certainly part of it. The company's goal is to become “the operating system of small business,” Intuit spokesman Stephen Sharpe told me.
It’s also about tapping into what Sharpe called “this huge pool of Canadian talent that can really help us become the company we want to be,” by improving Intuit’s software offerings.
To that end, the company has just opened up its API (or application programming interface for you non-techies) to allow developers to build new apps for QuickBooks Online.
“That’s definitely one of our huge motivations in starting to work with Communitech more closely,” Sharpe said. “Not only does it open us up with opportunities to talk to the entrepreneurs and small businesses who will use our product, but also to work with people who can actually make our product better for everyone else.”
Waterloo Region is not the only startup community in Canada, but its vibrancy stood out when Intuit went looking for a place to engage with young companies.
The company recently conducted research on startups founded by millennials, the cohort of people born between the early 1980s and early 2000s, “and we found that they’re actually twice as likely as the Canadian average to want to start a business in the next year,” Sharpe said.
The study, combined with other observations Intuit has made around startups, suggested “there’s no better destination for us to take that message and that content, and talk to people about the issues that really matter on the ground, than Kitchener-Waterloo,” he said.
“Intuit is a global company, but Kitchener-Waterloo stands out internationally as a hotbed of startup culture and innovation for Canada, so it was really not much of a tough choice of us at all.”
Intuit joins an ever-longer list of big companies that have recently tapped into the creative energy of the Communitech Hub, a list that includes Google, which chose Communitech for its sole Canadian entrepreneurship hub; BlackBerry, which relaunched its jam space for developers this week; Canadian Tire, which opened an innovation space earlier this year; Intel, which launched a developers’ zone in June; and Facebook, which held a successful industry collision day earlier this month.
Stay tuned for more boldfaced names to pop up amid the startups at the Hub in the months ahead.
Anthony Reinhart is Communitech’s Director of Editorial Strategy and senior staff writer. View from the ‘Loo is a weekly look at the issues, people and events that shape Waterloo Region’s technology sector.
