Joshua Baer is sitting at a small lounge table in Capital Factory’s huge new events space on the first floor of the Omni Building. Around him, workers are cleaning up the last remnants of construction materials and spraying windex on the big panes of glass that separate this new space from the nearby hotel bar and lobby.
Light is pouring into a space that has been under wraps for months.
“Everything going on in here will be really visible,” Baer said. “We’ll be projecting things onto the glass and folks will be able to see what’s going on in there.”
The new space is prominent on the ground floor of the Omni, and it will be the most visible feature yet at Capital Factory, an already well-known accelerator and co-working space that regularly attracts top VCs, executives, politicians and celebrities for tours, discussions and pitch sessions. And it comes just as Capital Factory has changed how it invests in startups by now providing larger, direct investments of $100,000 to $250,000. (We’ll get into that in a minute.)
Capital Factory’s new high-tech lounge and events area has a room-scale stage for demonstrating virtual and augmented reality projects to a crowd of about 250. It also has five or six 10×10 VR stations, and an entry-way space with a garage door to provide an initial splash for big events and room for check-in lines and swag stations. The new space also has a walk-in fridge, a nice long bar and a mystery piece of art that will house a few beer taps. And there’s more mystery art along the way.
But it’s mostly under warps until Friday when Capital Factory hosts its grand opening party, which will include a transportation-focused hackathon.
Overall, Capital Factory is opening 10,000-square-feet of new space that includes the large events area, several office spaces for VR startups and a few meeting rooms and classrooms for smaller events. That brings Capital Factory’s footprint to 60,000 square feet. Last year, they hosted 837 events, which includes dozens of small meet ups as well as big parties, panel discussions and pitch events.
“Most places, if you had something like this, you’d have to charge a lot of money for it,” Baer said as he showed me features of the primary events space. “And we got a really great deal with the building and our structure allows us to effectively give this away for free if we want to, which is most of the time for community stuff. If some big company wants to come rent it, they can. That’d be great. We don’t mind money. But our priority is, just like upstairs, to make awesome stuff happen here.”
Capital Factory initially secured its space on the 16th and 5th floors in 2012 at a cost of roughly $1.5…