Santa Monica coworking space CROSS CAMPUS just opened up their first expansion pack in Pasadena, at 87 & 85 Raymond Ave.
87 Raymond is second-floor 5500 square foot open-floored coworking space; Cross Campus also has dedicated office spaces on the 8th floor of 85 Raymond, with plans to build into 20,000+ square feet by adding a few more floors in the coming months with concepts that draw from the area’s unique business community.
The Pasadena space takes the best learnings from Santa Monica and builds upon its success, and includes a gorgeous kitchen bar for more casual network when CC’s denizens aren’t digging deep into their laptops or desktops.
Founders Ronen Olshansky and Dan Dato met in 2011, when Olshansky was running educational entrepreneur entity Studyhall, and Dato was running accelerator upStart.LA.
Since merging their entities into Cross Campus, formal education morphed into events, and the workspaces have helped draw members who are additive to their communities.
Cross Campus helps foster this community with members-only events, office hours mentorships, active engagement by their community managers, and new members dinners.
Cross Campus Santa Monica originally opened in a space now occupied by DogVacay. Their current, 13,000 square foot Santa Monica space opened in 2014 at 929 Colorado, and has hosted everything from hackathons, meetups, private parties, and variety shows to President Obama, who dropped by to speak to LA’s tech community in October 2014.
The Santa Monica space was an old manufacturing building from the 1940’s, previously inhabited by an architecture firm; its working windowed garage door allows for the open floor plan to feel even more open in warmer months.
Being located right next to a trunk line as part of Santa Monica CityNet’s high-speed fiber network doesn’t hurt either. The city’s super-fast speeds are matched with a constantly-monitored mesh network to guarantee optimal run times, tested out in the space’s early days 200-person hackathons.
Says Dato, “Each space is built to energize a community, draw people together to shine a light on what’s there, for more creative collisions; the Santa Monica community revolves around media, entertainment, and gaming, whereas Pasadena focuses a lot more on programming, robotics, biotech, aerospace, and engineering.
Cross Campus has been working closely with Pasadena Mayor Bill Bogaard’s team to work closely with the community, and our Pasadena Community Manager is Dougie Campbell, who has built tons of love & respect in LA’s arts & science world with his Mindshare events.
“Both locations speak generationally to millennials, who are more entrepreneurial / self-employed, and require flexible, collaborative work spaces that can scale to accommodate more employees as needed. Having the options of open workspaces and dedicated offices plus conference rooms meet these needs of entrepreneurs as their businesses grow.”
Cross Campus is part of the worldwide Startup Federation, a group of entrepreneurial centers which also includes DC1776 and Chicago 1871, Moscow’s Digital October, and Betahaus in Berlin.
For rental information and to tour the facilities, drop by either location of Cross Campus (link).
