VenturePad is Marin’s premier cowork community and business incubator, opened in March. Located at 1020 B Street in downtown San Rafael, VenturePad fills a need in Marin County for affordable, accessible and professional coworking space and entrepreneur support services for start-ups, solopreneurs, creatives, freelancers & telecommuters to help them reach their professional & personal goals. Our impact oriented, values-driven community supports you with affordable shared office space, training & expert mentoring.
Get out of the home office when you need to. Upgrade from the coffee shop. Don't get into a sublet or office lease by yourself, come share our office space, join our coworking community and work around others in a workspace with an open desk or private desk, and meeting rooms. Be a part of something bigger with a mission and a vision that aligns with your values!
Why VenturePad?
• Professional upgrade from the home office. Get away from distractions, interruptions and the entertainment temptations. Reduce the entrepreneur isolation and loneliness.
• Time to move beyond the café. Feeling like a space parasite at your local cafe? Work with a comfortable table & chair optimized for productive work and professional meetings. Get away from the din of food service and constant people traffic.
• Have business meetings in a professional setting with conference rooms, private office settings with supper fast Wi Fi, big screens, ergonomic chairs, wonderful natural and task lighting.
• Wake up with purpose and have a place to go working side by side with driven, smart peers and advisors who will inspire you, help you become more effective and reach your goals faster.
• Work in a buzzing, friendly downtown neighborhood filled with the best of San Rafael’s restaurants, shops, business and amenities. VenturePad is a short walk to the San Rafael transit center and the new SMART train station, and under 5 minutes to I-101. Parking is plentiful. Walking and biking are do-able and encouraged!
that enables your business to gain traction and grow.
Founded in 2011 in Marin County to help promising entrepreneurs from the North Bay and surrounding areas to launch and scale businesses with a significant disruptive impact. We work in a variety of market segments including - clean tech, energy, mobile apps, farm-to-table, medical/health, consumer products & services, wine industry, and transportation. We provide a strong network of educators, mentors and providers to help you:
clarify your value proposition
deeply understand your customers
craft thoughtful financial models
plan powerful marketing strategies
seamlessly integrate sustainability into your planning
Our team prepares your team to gain the traction you seek. We work with all industries because we specialize in the business of doing business.
At Meridian University the term creative enterprise is used to embrace pioneering actions, or next practices, that enable enterprises of many forms to blend financial viability with transformative innovation.
Creative enterprise takes place in domains of action within which transformative change can be catalyzed to more effectively address critical needs of our time. Needs such as ecological responsibility, community building, right livelihood, personal empowerment, and business ethics.
These emphases inform and infuse every course in the Meridian MBA curriculum, so understanding what we mean by each reveals the education we deliver.
Transformative Innovation delivers solutions fundamentally superior to those currently available to meet the deepest needs of individuals or society. Such innovations are fueled by visionary shifts in thinking, new business models, cooperative alliances, entrepreneurial insight and persistence. We aim to cultivate entrepreneurs and executives capable of imagining transformative innovations then making them happen.
Meridian’s second core area of emphasis is Business and Social Entrepreneurship. This supports our MBAs in launching or running a viable business, non-profit, or hybrid organization that results in positive social outcomes. These outcomes can spring from business innovation in a range of areas including policy and governance, organizational structure, and product or service evolution. Positive outcomes can also be derived via social creativity, such as building unique coalitions that blend efforts of private business, citizens, government, education, NGO’s, and other organizations.
The third area of emphasis within the Creative Enterprise MBA is Applied Wisdom and Sustainability. A meaningful understanding of sustainability and green principles of conducting business are now requirements for any creative enterprise. At Meridian we pay close attention to deepening the process of integrating this foundation into all of our thinking.
The Creative Enterprise MBA integrates perspectives from the major wisdom and spiritual traditions, neuroscience, and deep ecology to explore possibilities for how wisdom can be applied in social entrepreneurship and executive action. The program promotes no particular school of wisdom, but present a banquet of offerings from which you choose what empowers you most, grounding your actions in a context of being connected to a larger universe.
Diverse Learning Formats Meridian MBA students spend half of their class time in sessions at Meridian’s San Francisco Center, located within the Hub SoMa inside the San Francisco Chronicle building. The Hub is an international network of workspaces and communication platforms for engaged social entrepreneurs. Class sessions at our San Francisco Center foster student interaction with social entrepreneurs acting at the “intersection of money and meaning”.
MBA students spend the other half of their class time at Meridian’s scenic campus in the hilltops of Marin County, 25 miles north of San Francisco, providing a more contemplative view.
Our MBA program utilizes Learning Communities and is offered in two learning formats: monthly weekends or hybrid online. The blended online format substitutes internet based learning for weekend sessions. Both formats include immersion learning during two weeklong sessions spent in residence each academic year.
How do we foster innovation and sustainable economic opportunities in our region? How do we re-think education to prepare people for a quickly changing economy? What can you do to find your path or build your path? Start with a sense of place, add some personal exploration, churn in some hands-on skills, mix in some entrepreneurship principles and productivity practices, toss in some social media skills, add a healthy dose of sustainability perspective, mix with community, and voila!
