How WeWork and Patriot Boot Camp are assimilating veterans into the Austin tech ecosystem

by Kelly O'Halloran
July 5, 2017

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After graduating 600 entrepreneurs who went off to raise more than $60 million in capital, Patriot Boot Camp’s COO Josh Anderson wanted to do something more.

The three-day boot camp provides military members, veterans, and their spouses with essentials to build a business — sort of like a mini accelerator. Despite its success, Anderson felt there needed to be a next step.

“We are extremely proud of our program’s performance to-date,” said Anderson. “But we believed we could be making even bigger impacts, in more places, as more of a continuum of services and resources.”

To extend the support to veteran innovators, he and Patriot Boot Camp CEO Charlotte Creech joined forces with WeWork to offer a Veterans in Residence program, beginning with locations in Denver and Austin.  

At WeWork Domain, veteran founders can take advantage of a free workspace, access to WeWork’s global mentorship and community, education programs, one-on-one support, and most importantly, said Creech, integrating into the larger Austin tech community.

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“The vision behind Veterans in Residence program was really to help continue the community building in local areas across the country with the one purpose to re-engage these incredible founders and alumni that Patriot Boot Camp already has in its network,” said Creech.

That community portion is key, as Anderson said many veteran organizations tend to ignore.

“This is an area I’m particularly passionate about,” said Anderson, who served in the Marine Corps from 2002 to 2007. “It’s one of my complaints about veteran services organizations. Not only are there a lot of them — like 45,000 in the U.S. —  but there’s so many that they can’t all possibly be serving the veteran community in a meaningful way.”

Anderson said he has found the groups that deliver the most value are those that assimilate veterans into our local economies.

“These organizations are not designed to insulate veterans among veterans, rather they help to retrain and reintegrate veterans to become leaders in their own rights — not just as a veteran but as citizens and as members of the business community,” said Anderson.

It was this approach that he and Creech took with the WeWork partnership.

“We see Veterans in Residence as a community within a community within a community,” said Anderson. “It’s a small community of veterans that come together who have a shared experienced and a shared sense of purpose as entrepreneurs and they exist inside the local community of WeWork which is part of the global WeWork community.”

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Sitting members of the Veterans in Residence program in Austin include KC Chhipwadia of  Athlete Foundry; Justin Gilfus of Ads for the Road; Zuby Onwuta of Think and Zoom; Joshua Lawton of Heath Hat; Naji Kelley of BLNDED; Cassondra Taylor of Taylored 2 Code; Marilyn Barak of Kid Vitality; and Danny Harrington, who is working on a soon-to-be-named drone/data company.

Anderson said he’s noticed organic collaboration within the Austin and Denver cohorts — something that’s pleasantly surprised him.

“We expected that the veterans would come together and we would provide them with resources, access, introductions and mentorship, but what we found so far is that the veterans are doing an extraordinary job in supporting one another,” said Anderson. “The first layer of support that we’re bringing is just each other.”

The accelerator program can support up to 10 entrepreneurs and has a rolling application process without a definitive time cap. While the time in the program is not fixed, Anderson said that by the end of three to six months, participating entrepreneurs should gain some traction beyond the program.

 

Images provided by Patriot Boot Camp.

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