Many people forget that big companies like the notorious Nike Inc. and the mighty Microsoft Inc. were once small businesses that employed a handful of people and a mind full of dreams, just like all of the Orange County Business Accelerator’s clients today.
According to Wikipedia, it was more than 40 years ago that Nike founder Phil Knight was selling his sneakers out of a Plymouth Valiant at track meets in the Pacific Northwest under the name Blue Ribbon Sports. Just 10 years later, the Nike name was chosen and the publicly traded empire was born. And we know the rest of that story.
In 1975, Bill Gates and childhood friend Paul Allen started Microsoft with the basic idea of generating an interpreter for a microcomputer that had been featured in a 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. Three years later, DOS (Disk Operating System) was born, and was utilized as the operating system for IBM’s personal computer. That solidified Microsoft’s strength in the market, and its future in electronics and programming.
Entrepreneurs like Knight, Gates and Allen thrived in times when the economy was at a standstill. When the economy was tightening its straps, the young innovators of the day were busting loose.
Taking on challenges
In the past 10 years, Fortune 500 firms have shed hundreds of thousands of jobs, facilitating a spontaneous growth of small-business innovators who have been handed the ball in a time of great stress in the private business sector.
We have great clients at the Accelerator who have stepped up to the plate to accept this challenge.
From cancer research equipment to cell phone applications, aquaculture to silicon chip next-generation technology, clients at the Accelerator are filling the voids left by large corporations and are committed to the long haul.
Employees from early-stage innovators walk through the Accelerator’s doors day in and day out, working toward entrepreneurial success. They are developing businesses like CymoGen Dx, a cancer research firm that is working on equipment that could detect numerous forms of cancer earlier than current technology; and Continental Organics, a firm focused on aquaponics — a system of agriculture where a symbiotic environment exists between fruit or vegetables and fish.
The Accelerator’s newest clients, Frugaldoo (a mobile software developer) and Array Optronix (an optoelectronics firm), have already begun to realize the competitive advantage offered at the Accelerator and have wasted no time in getting acquainted with the services provided by our strategic partners and our numerous educational speaker series.
Real jobs, close to home
Since opening its doors 58 weeks ago, the Accelerator, an investment by the Orange County IDA, has attracted 14 early-stage innovators that have yielded 40 emerging technologies job opportunities, with the possibility that number could increase to between 350 and 500 — creating real jobs, real close to home, right here in Orange County.
The Accelerator has become a magnet for driven visionaries, a place where entrepreneurs come to realize their dreams. Wayne Gretzky once said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
The same can be said about our current clients. They’ve come to the intersection of capital, talent “» and innovation with aspirations that one day their nimble emerging technology — their small business — will become big business.
