Charlottetown’s Startup Zone CEO on the Future of the Incubator
CHARLOTTETOWN, P.E.I. – Since its launch in June of last year, Startup Zone has established itself as the first incubator of its kind on PEI.
The space on Queen Street in Charlottetown is meant to be a place where the entrepreneurial community in the area can gather and continue to grow. Startup Zone’s CEO Christina MacLeod chatted with us about what the incubator has done so far and where it’s going in the future.
What’s your background? How did you end up at Startup Zone?
My recent job was chief of staff to Sean Casey, who’s the Charlottetown MP. So with that job, it was really important for me to know all the different stakeholders and business leaders in Charlottetown and across P.E.I. That was a real asset coming in here. I’ve worked in two different startups in the past as well so that gave me a little bit of insight into the ups and downs of getting one up and running. I was brought in to kind of build the community and the ecosystem here.
Do you have any personal goals for the next couple years?
I’m actually about to go on maternity leave. I’m eight months pregnant so I will be off for a year so we’re just hiring the interim CEO but when I come back, I’m hoping the momentum is kept up during the time that I’m off and it’ll be great to see us expand.
How have things been going since the launch of Startup Zone?
Great. We launched officially on June 23 of 2016 and we’ve had over 100 advancement sessions and we’ve had 27 resident companies. We’ve had six that have moved on and we currently have 21 companies within the space. We’re super busy but it’s been great and we’re full. It’s exciting to see how everything is shaping up.
Do you have any particular goals for the incubator going forward?
The board has made a strategic plan to diversify the industries that we serve as well as our founders and then really focus on getting our companies and founders to travel outside the region and to experience larger markets as well and then bring those lessons back to P.E.I.
One thing we do need is more space, which is a great problem to have. We have a lot of interest for our services here so it would be good to be able to service and then expand our support for newcomers to Canada who also want to be entrepreneurs. We have that in our proposal, to support not so much independent programming but also support for translation for our current programming so that we’re really integrating all businesses together rather than having separate programming.
Why do you believe there is potential for growth in Charlottetown?
There’s a lot of energy around Charlottetown and all of P.E.I. with our industries, both traditional and emerging industries. We have a lot of IT sector, which has been great, bioscience is strong, gaming has been really unique. One thing a lot of people don’t realize is that we have the second largest hub for electronic arts or EA Gaming in Canada. Building on that support has been great and there’s just a lot of people who are really wanting to make their own mark here and a lot of great organizations supporting it. We’ve been very happy to partner with so many great ones.
Are there any success stories in particular that have come out of Startup Zone so far?
We have a couple very different sector ones. We have one, Forestry.io, which is the first Atlantic Canadian company to be accepted to Tech Stars and they were in New York City for three months over the summer.
We have Maroun’s Authentic Cuisine, which just won Food Excel, which is the first food accelerator on PEI.
We’ve been really appreciative of the support from all the other incubators and people within the startup community in Atlantic Canada to help us get up and running.