Co-Founder and Executive Director, Danbury Innovation Center

My name is Mike Ulchny. I'm a graduate of Western, and I have a Bachelor of Arts in computer science from Western, which is kind of an unusual degree. I'm basically a geek that can write. And I run the Danbury Innovation Center. It's a hacker space and coworking space located in Main Street Danbury. It's a nonprofit corporation and it's more of a co-op. The hacker space movement started in Germany. It's basically, it's a co-op, a shared space. And usually they're nonprofits or just clubs or organizations where people where people kick in and share the cost of renting a space. A lot of the equipment is donated. Ours has over a million dollars being put into it at this point. We have a coworking area where people that normally work from home want to get out of their house, so they can come down and work at our space and there's a lot of, it's downtown Danbury, so there's a lot of restaurants and a lot of places they can go to eat and parks and things like that. And we have a, we crossed it with a makers space, or a hacker space, and we have tools and equipment people can use to prototype products or artists can use it to build things. So we have a $17,000 industrial laser. We have nine 3D printers. We have Bridgeport milling machines, CNCs, and people can come in and learn how to use the equipment and basically build a company or make artwork. So I'm the exec director, one of the founders. I basically, I call myself the enabler for members. My job is to procure equipment, raise money, handle the staffing, run the place day to day. I do that in partnership with another Western alum, John Gatril. We started this January 2012. So we started it, we were very fortunate, the city of Danbury gave us a building, 3500 square feet for a dollar per year. And the city of Danbury spent $500,000 renovating the place. So my first job was building the community. My second job, as we progressed, was to grow the membership, acquire the equipment, teach classes, work with community. We're also very different than most maker spaces in that my role that is also of an entrepreneur in residence. I've had several startups with some successful exits and so I've been around the block. So I've built companies. My last gig before this was I had a startup in California where we raised quite a bit of money to do photo object recognition. So I've gone through bootstrapping a company, raising VC money, and we're trying to build that community here in the state. So my job is to work with startups. I work with about 40 per year and help them with everything from ideas to prototypes to execution to raising money.