A Vision Realized
The original vision of building a business incubator or accelerator in the former HP campus in Loveland CO came full circle in 2021 - nearly 10 years after it was originally conceived. The Warehouse Business Accelerator’s project to build out a 48,000 sf Innovation Hub inside the Forge Campus (as the campus is now called) is well underway. Demolition and Phase 1 of construction started in spring of 2021, with space for up to 9 companies set to be complete by September 2021.
When it was built in 1962, the Loveland campus of Hewlett Packard was the company’s very first location outside of California. The buildings accommodated full-scale manufacturing of electronics - raw materials in one end and finished equipment out the other. Some of the most advanced calculators in the world were designed and produced in this facility. The campus was bustling with activity. Close to 3500 people were employed at the facility at its height.
Fast forward to the early 2000’s and the property sat nearly empty. HP no longer owned the 800,000 sf campus; it had been sold to a private real estate holding company. In 2012, a group of C-suite business leaders in the community convened by the Loveland Business Partnership began to float the idea to use a part of the 800,000 sf campus to build a business incubator. The hope was that adding a spark of innovation would help to revitalize the campus and bring a renewed energy to the area’s economic opportunity.
A location was identified and lines were taped out on wide open manufacturing floor in Building B. Budgets were drafted and startup funding was solicited. But the project ultimately did not materialize. The math didn’t work out. There was not a path to financial sustainability - that is, there was not a path to being able to operate without ongoing public sector support over the long term.
The Warehouse Business Accelerator nonprofit was founded by Jay Dokter and Dan Kamrath after the “HP Incubator” idea did not move forward. They believed strongly that the need for support for scale up phase companies was still there, even if the original vision of the space had not worked out. The Warehouse operated as a virtual accelerator on a smaller scale from 2013 on.
Fast forward again to the end 2020 and the former HP Campus was purchased by new owners, a group of committed Northern Colorado entrepreneurs lead by Jay Dokter and Dan Kamrath. One of the their first acts upon acquiring the property was to donate a 10 year lease of 48,000 square feet of the campus to the Warehouse Business Accelerator to establish the Warehouse Innovation Hub. The donated lease allows the Warehouse nonprofit to sublease it’s space to the members, which in turn allows the organization to operate sustainably on the revenues.