urbanSTL

^ my thought is along the legal lines of minimizing a St. Louis presence until they felt they were in a strong position with the patents behind Square's business. Having a patent ruling, I believe, puts it at the federal level and interstate commerce.

I could be completely way off base or not even in the ballpark in my legal understanding but my employer has two in house lawyers constantly reviewing and evaluating everything and anything because of the multiple states we work in and the workforce presence in those states with our crews. Having a business license in a particular state opens up our bidding opportunities to local jobs but also truly opens our business to a whole bunch of state laws and regulations beyond labor rules

Sounds like local tech and Biotech firms could be getting a shot in the arm.


From Today's Business Journal
Hillman eyes biotech, energy in $71 million fund
Just six months after announcing he’d be forming a new venture capital firm, Tom Hillman has raised more than $71.3 million to establish the firm’s first fund, called Lewis & Clark Ventures I.

Hillman announced Lewis & Clark Ventures in January, shortly after he sold his stake in Answers Corp. for an undisclosed amount — Answers was acquired by Apax Partners in a deal worth $900 million.

Hillman raised the money for Lewis & Clark Ventures from 33 investors. The fund is separate from Hillman’s work with FTL Capital and will invest in high-growth companies with typical investments of $3 million to $7 million. The group will focus on startups in sectors, including technology, energy, life sciences and biotech.
Hopcraft, who will run the day-to-day operations of the firm, said Lewis & Clark is now actively looking to invest in startups. “Our focus is the Midwest in general, although we’re not limited by geography,” he said. “St. Louis as such a great early-stage ecosystem. We’ve already seen a lot of promising companies that are based here and anticiapte being very active locally.”



http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/prin ... 1437743452

Jack Dorsey's frank talk yesterday tanked their stock yesterday but certainly interesting to get insight of finances now that Twitter is public and where the dollars are at. Which gets to the other question for the thread, will Square go public?

The other thought or rhetorical question for Jack and Jim if either will ever entertain me. What is the business purpose of having all of Square's functions and operations in San Fran? My business plan proposal for Square,

1) San Fran remains Square's HQ keeping key executives in place. Charter has a major and expanding St. Louis presence even though corporate HQ & Executive presence in Conn.
2) San Fran becomes a innovative center that keeps key talent in place
3) Customer service, day to day maintenance relocates to St. Louis. Your paying a premium in San Fran that adversely impacts the bottom line. Sorry, talent is everywhere and people will work for lifestyle and what cost of living affords. Guess what, Charles Schwab, Chevron among others has figured that out among others.
4) Square has already put up 50,000 square for sublease. Put up another 50 to 100,000 square feet up for sublease. You could be getting two to three times the real estate in downtown St. Louis, either downtown or CORTEX
5) Downtown St. Louis has the fiber infrastructure and Lambert domestic flight availability to effectively manage operations from San Fran.
6) Build your own data center. In the digital age, data centers are assets. Quit paying third parties to build their assets. Especially if that asset is in a premium location. Google's next data center might go in a Alabama decommissioned power plant owned by TVA.
7) Added bonus, Missouri now has data center tax credit in place as well as share of other tax credits and abatements that would most likely get approved if a major relocation is put forth

Couple good locations - maybe Post Dispatch building for sale, Better yet, Railway Exchange which would make a good location for launchcode.

My simple answer is you can build the space, square footage to last a lot longer then the use or what might be desired at the time a structure was built, example is Lofts on Washington whose original purpose was warehousing. At least they use to build for the long term. So what adaptable use at the moment can offer sizeable leases to a structure the size of say Railway Exchange building.

A mulit story department store is long gone for most downtowns. The regional business or company that filled office space such as Famous Barr or Missouri Pacific are coming tough to find. so on. What is sought in a digital era, the cloud. A lot of data centers have been built in greenfields, just one more loss of leaseable space opportunities for urban cores like St. Louis with lots of space to offer.

Part of the deal though requires them to move to San Francisco for 3 months. They say they'll come back, but what do you think the odds are? It would be pretty tough to leave all that talent.

pat wrote:Part of the deal though requires them to move to San Francisco for 3 months. They say they'll come back, but what do you think the odds are? It would be pretty tough to leave all that talent.

Thats interesting. Im surprised no one is talking about that.

that sucks. They better stay here!

If anything it's good for us. Scouting talent in Cali to potentially recruit back here would be great.

roger wyoming II wrote:^ Here is the NMTC submission for Green Street on the 2351 Market building...

http://www.novoco.com/new_markets/appli ... street.php

Basically Avatura would add 100 employees to its current 25 job roster plus an estimated 100 additional jobs. It is a great project, but a $13 million allocation for that amount of jobs does seem on the high side. Hopefully it works out one way or another.

looks like Avatara has now signed a 12 yr. lease according to nextstl and the project looks like a go.... not sure about any New Markets; hopefully they didn't need them so those can be allocated to other worthy projects.

Nicklaus in PD had a nice write up about CoFactor Genetics recent Silicon Valley experience. Now if they can get a some serious VC cash, hire a pile of people and sign a lease with Wexford/CORTEX to be anchor tenant for a new US metal site building. While I'm on the wish list mentality, maybe a few Bay area companies will sign leases for the other 500k sq feet of space or so that is going to be built out on the US Metals site.

But for the moment it was a pleasure to read Nicklaus article after seeing the cards box score and the pounding they took from the Reds and PD posters/Card fans.

http://www.stltoday.com/business/column ... f7a68.html

A recent analysis shows that downtownSTL is home to 200 innovative companies and 2000 workers. T-rex now exceeds 350 workers and has had 52 graduates with over 400 workers remaining in the region and 80+ percent remaining within walking distance of t-Rex. Almost all of this has occurred since the fall of 2011. The majority of this growth has been organic with very little capital used for infrastructure. Arch grants, capital innovators, sixthirty fintech accelerator, prosper, and cultivation capital has provided the lions share of growth capital to these companies to make this happen. 500 companies and 6000 workers should be possible at present trend by 2020. Additional capital and more focus on innovation within downtown could lead to 1000 companies and 10000 workers by 2020. The majority of these innovative companies are software technology and design. This trend should continue along with additional emphasis on fashion.

I recent article I read in Economist about the growth and risks of cloud based services got me thinking about the relatively quiet news about TierPoint's recent acquisition. The Economist article noted the Amazon's cloud based/data server business as a stand alone company would probably be worth more than Dell even with Dell & EMC recent merger.

I imagine having a growing data server firm based can only help the tech scene At the same time, the other thing about TierPoint was the fact that they don't have a St. Louis data center. Sounds like a recipe for an easy move or being an acquisition target themselves. Anyone know much about TeirPoint

http://www.bizjournals.com/stlouis/blog ... s-for.html

The BJ had a nice write up today on the St. Louis area Game Development Community. The area's Industry giant and larges employer in the sector (Riot Games) is looking to expand.

In St. Louis, Riot has more than 50 employees with plans for aggressive expansion on the horizon. “We’re looking to take another floor in this building,”

Why Riot Games loves St. Louis
21 Oct 2015/Sam Weigley
Silicon Prairie News



St. Louis engineers play a key role in producing the online battle arena game League of Legends.

Headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif., Riot Games, a subsidiary of Chinese investment behemoth Tencent Holdings, has offices in far-flung cities such as Berlin, Seoul, Istanbul and Sydney. Compared to those cities, it would seem peculiar that St. Louis would have such a large presence for a multinational video game company. Why not just move all these people back out to the Los Angeles area, the video game capital of the world? Or what about New York or San Francisco with their technology prowess?

The choice to continue investing in St. Louis is an obvious one, said Mike Seavers, Riot Games’ director of engineering and also head of the office.

“There are really awesome software engineers here in St. Louis,” said Seavers. He sees Washington University and St. Louis University, among other nearby schools, as great sources of top talent.

Part of the growing STL tech scene

Seavers noted the St. Louis office has actually been around since the early stages of the company, which was founded in 2006. The VP of Technology was based there and tapped into his network to get the office going. That “office” actually started as a few guys working in a basement.

“We eventually were told that wasn’t going to work anymore,” Seavers said laughing, and that began the offices in the St. Louis area.

Today, the office comprises about 50 people, primarily with an engineering focus. The St. Louis team includes people dedicated to improving features, as well as conducting research and development.

It helps that St. Louis has made a considerable push recently to become a tech hub for the Midwest. Just in the last few weeks alone, companies such as Square, Pandora and Uber have all announced the opening of offices in the region.

Read More

^You are 100% correct. Kent is one of the best. He is going to parlay these recent moves into big things for himself and in effect St. Louis

Take this with a grain of salt but I am friends with the daughter of a CEO from a major company in the region and according to her Twitter will be moving their HEADQUARTERS to St. Louis by 2017. Not only did she sound confident about this, she backed it up with actions her family's company was doing to invest in STL (It's well documented on NextSTL) to prepare for this game changer for the city and region. In this town I don't believe anything until I see it but given the source and information I received, I am ecstatic to see this come to fruition.

That would be incredible but I share your reluctancy to believe the rumor.

Obviously, CORTEX seems the most likely destination. Crescent building plus a couple ground up buildings next door.

If not CORTEX, then probably downtown like Railway Exchange or ATT building. Perhaps BPV with a new building. Preferably an existing building, though. I'd rather see existing buildings filled up first before new ones are built.