Venture Café is a nonprofit organization that hosts community events and programs that support early-stage entrepreneurs.[1]
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As of May 2020, there are 11 independently managed Venture Cafés, located in Boston, St. Louis, Missouri; Miami; Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Providence, Rhode Island; Tokyo, Japan; Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Warsaw, Poland; Bilbao, Spain; and Sydney, Australia.[2] As of 2019, there were plans to open Venture Cafés in some 40 more cities.[3]
The flagship event of Venture Café is the Thursday Gathering, a weekly meeting for new and experienced entrepreneurs to exchange ideas and support. The event usually includes several free educational sessions to teach entrepreneurs to how to start and run a business. Participants can also hold informal discussions of creative and speculative ideas and look for collaborators, co-founders, mentors, or investors.[4]
The Venture Café was conceived as a restaurant in the Cambridge Innovation Center in Boston, Massachusetts.[5] The idea failed to attract investment, so the founders changed it to a gathering space for the entrepreneurial community, based on the book Venture Café by Teresa Esser.[4] Venture Café Kendall launched in 2009.[citation needed]
In 2014, Venture Café expanded to the Cortex Innovation Community in St. Louis, Missouri, to bring together the emerging startup community.[6] The success of the St. Louis location prompted the launch of Venture Cafés in other cities and ultimately the creation of Venture Café Global Institute, a public benefit corporation based in St. Louis and Boston.[7]
In 2018, as part of St. Louis Cortex District's new 4220 Duncan building anchored by Microsoft, Venture Cafe launched Innovation Hall in St. Louis based upon Boston's District Hall.[8]
In 2018, St. Louis launched EdHub[9] to support and bring together innovators to increase youth access to education.[10] EdHub STL is inspired by the Forward Through Ferguson report, which calls for an innovation education hub to address the region's most entrenched educational issues.[11]
Venture Café Foundation in Boston runs the Roxbury Innovation Center.[9] Like EdHub, it brings together innovators in education including students, parents, administration, and teachers to help solve inequities in education and introduce youth to entrepreneurship and STEAM activities.[citation needed]
In September 2021, Venture Café St. Louis cancelled its events and made no public statements.[12]
On September 13, 2021, Venture Café St. Louis board chair Whitney Masching released a statement stating, "Seven years later, it is time to close this chapter. Effective immediately, the VCSTL programming you know is on pause — but this isn’t the end."[13]