By Michael Schaffer — October 22, 2015
We’ve made some great friends, benefited from new business opportunities and can’t wait to see what our second year brings!
It’s been one full year since Echo Factory relocated from our longtime home in the Inland Empire to Old Town Pasadena. Since opening our doors last September, much has happened—Echo Factory has grown, we’ve made a lot of new friends, worked with many great companies, and have become involved in the local innovation community. In fact, we like working in Pasadena so much, many of us have moved here.
Here are some of the highlights:
Community Involvement
Whether its running a 5k with the Dog Haus Run Club or hosting a stop on the Tech Sparks Tech Crawl, the Echo Factory social calendar has been filled with opportunities to meet new people, network with local businesses and share ideas.
Throughout this first year we found out for certain what we long suspected—Pasadena’s success as a city is the product of many hard working people dedicated to seeing this community grow and thrive. The friends we’ve made and the businesses we’ve come to know make up just the type of environment we were hoping for.
Great Location
We’re thrilled with our location in the heart of old town. If you’ve gotta work, it don’t get much better than this. One year in and many of us here at Echo Factory are nursing some pretty serious falafel addictions thanks to Father Nature on Colorado. Our holiday gift exchange featured, hands down, the most interesting items to date courtesy of Gold Bug over on Union, and we love being in a building with super cool neighbors like Ableton Music.
Throughout the year, we’ve enjoyed collaborating with organizations like Innovate Pasadena and Cross Campus, benefiting from the various social gatherings they host and sponsor.
In particular, we love being involved with the Innovate Pasadena Friday Morning Meet Ups. As co-organizers and regular attendants of these events, we have made new friends and discovered some great local businesses.
With 2000 members and growing, the Friday Morning Meet Ups provide an opportunity to talk shop with peers and get to know some of Pasadena’s up and coming tech stars. The meet-ups have an average attendance rate of 100+ and feature structured presentations followed by time for informal idea sharing and conversation. We encourage anyone interested in learning more to drop in and check it out.
Collaboration
Thanks to our involvement with these groups, we’ve forged relationships with member-companies that have helped us improved our own business operations. One such company is Central Desktop. Their cloud-based project management platform is designed to help companies just like ours stay organized and on deadline. We are now using this program to manage and streamline our processes and couldn’t be happier with the result. We encourage anyone looking for a project management system to take a look.
Home Sweet Home
While we’ve still got a few commuters making the trek in from various points East, over the past year, many of us here at Echo have decided to make Pasadena home.
Aside from the obvious and significant quality of life improvement that comes with skipping the twice-daily freeway torture session, we all love being able to walk and bike wherever we need to go. We love the cultural diversity, nightlife, nearby access to the Angeles National Forest and close proximity to downtown LA.
One year later, we are so happy we chose Pasadena. Our business has grown, our network has expanded and we are ready for whatever lies ahead. We couldn’t do it alone, and we thank all of the businesses, residents and community-minded organizations that make Pasadena such a great place to work, live and play. Here’s to many more years of collaboration, community and opportunity.