There is a new iHub in the Coachella Valley.
It's in Palm Desert and its goal is to create organic entrepreneurship in "business sectors that pay well above the average wage in the valley," Joe Wallace, CEO of the iHub, told Desert Magazine.
"Our average wage is very much defined by the hospitality industry, which is just not a high-paying industry - anywhere," he said.
The iHub in Palm Springs was launched a decade ago and has helped 90 companies launch, said Wallace, who was himself an entrepreneur.
For about five years, the city of Palm Desert has been in discussions about opening a location there, Wallace said.
"We were ready to open the Tuesday after everything was shut down for COVID-19," he said. "Now we are ready to open again."
The city invested about $1.5 million in the facility for the new iHub, said Wallace.
"Even though we are just opening it, it has already successfully attracted California State University's Palm Desert campus as a partner," said Wallace. The university will offer entrepreneurship and cybersecurity programs in the iHub.
"Both of these are training for people that will earn not a living wage but a thriving wage," he said.
The affiliation with the Cal State Palm Desert campus will give the iHub access to CENIC, a high-capacity, high speed fiber computer network.
"Entrepreneurs or even people telecommuting from their homes, if they don't have the speed and need to come down to use our ultra-fast bandwith for a couple of hours, they'll be able to," Wallace said.
The link to CENIC gives the Palm Desert iHub a unique capacity, said Jan Harnik, former mayor and current mayor pro-tem of Palm Desert.
"We realize that when we're trying to develop careers for our community members in medicine or gaming - anything where they need really high speed fiber -this is the place to do it because we were provided with that fiber," she told Desert Magazine.
The Palm Desert iHub will actually have two purposes: creating new businesses while also helping to educate members of the community to fill the jobs created by those businesses, Harnik said.
For startup companies, the Coachella Valley offers lower costs and a better quality of life than big cities like San Francisco, Harnik said.
"We have a lot of telecommuters now," she said. "We saw a huge influx during COVID when people realized they could work from home. Hopefully, the more telecommuters we have, we can draw more of those businesses down here as well. If we have a large group of highly skilled people, it will attracted businesses."
The Coachella Valley offers very short commutes said Wallace, who once lived in the San Francisco Bay area.
"I hated taking two hours to drive 11 miles," he said. "I can run 11 miles in less than two hours. Our traffic patterns in the Coachella Valley allow you to have more of your life than you would have in Orange County, Los Angeles County and certainly more than the Bay area."
