BY TAYLOR BALDRY
PHOTOS BY MARIE KETRING  

For the fifth installment of Co-Files, we headed to the St. Paul CoCo space located in historic Lowertown, on the top two floors of a converted warehouse building. Below you will find examples of cross-sector collaboration and coworking, through a random sampling of CoCo-workers on an equally random day. 

Pollen: Can you give me two truths and a lie about yourself?

• My favorite children’s book is The Giving Tree.
• I am a wilderness first responder.
• I was a hand model.

Pollen: You’re a wilderness first responder?

Yep, it’s like a step below EMT training. If we were out in the wilderness and your fractured your pelvis, I could stabilize you. Or give you CPR. Or give you an epi shot if you were having an allergic reaction to peanut butter.

Pollen: Can you tell me a little bit about your new role as the community manager at RE-AMP?

Absolutely. So RE-AMP is a network of 160 nonprofits and foundations and we work together under a systems thinking network approach toward our shared goal of reducing carbon emissions in the Midwest by 80 percent by 2050. It’s an audacious goal and the idea is that if we can work together, and be in communication, then we can scale our work in a way that will have a bigger impact toward our goal than if we were all working in our individual selves. So the network is really exciting. Our membership is very diverse. We do work with people who do work on energy and transportation policy but we also work with faith groups, youth groups, and a number of other different stakeholders. So my job, I’m really excited about my job, is to sort of help facilitate relationship-building and communication between all of our members, both online and in person, using this systems thinking approach.

Pollen: What are you most passionate about in this role?

For my work as a writer, I’m very narrative-driven and I think helping people connect over their work is sort of like finding the narrative threads within this conversation about the energy landscape in the Midwest. So I’m really passionate about trying doing the investigative work necessary to figure out who should know who. I’ve been lucky in my life to have that—you know people who work unofficially as network weavers in everyday life and experience the benefit of being connected to somebody who will help elevate my efforts in some way. So I’m excited to turn that around and give that gift to people in our network.

Pollen: Does Re-Amp house entirely out of CoCo?

That’s an interesting question because this is the first time that the network has had a core staff. Leadership has traditionally been distributed and people have been housed in member organization locations. So the core staff is completely housed at CoCo St. Paul. There are five of us. The rest of RE-AMP exists across eight states.

Pollen: What do you like about working from CoCo?

I love CoCo. I’ve worked from CoCo for two and a half years. What I love most about CoCo has to do with that history. I love watching the CoCo community grow and develop and the spirit of co-working to become known and embraced by CoCo members. I love being here because the community feels very supportive and it feels like all boats rise. When we help each other out, we all do better.

Pollen: Can you tell me two truths and a lie and I’ll try to guess what they are?

I can think of two truths, I can’t think of a good lie. 

• I’ve been on a TV show.
• I used to play semi-pro basketball.
• I have a pig. 

Pollen: I‘m going to go with the middle one, the basketball.

That’s the one.

Pollen: What TV show were you on?

“Bad Dog.” I was actually on the show because of the pig. We have a miniature pig. My wife set up a YouTube channel for him and she had a video that went viral. It was shown on the Colbert Report and mentioned on the series finale of “30 Rock.” We had all these videos where he destroyed a bunch of stuff in our house, and then this TV show “Bad Dog” on the Animal Planet wanted to do a clip.

Pollen: What’s the pig’s name?

Hamlet.

Pollen: Can you tell me more about your role and your company?

We do analytics for documents, hence the name. What that means is we take things that typically a marketer would use, somebody who’s trying to sell in a business to business type of situation, using things like a white paper or case study or slideshow presentation. Traditionally they’ve done this by sending files between people, and what we do is we convert the files into an online viewer. So in addition to being able to communicate easily, you can get feedback for how people are using it. Did they read the whole document? Did they just read the first page and bounce? Things like that. We also let you put little web forms in between the pages if you want to so you can request information as people click along. It’s called gated forms. It’s useful if you’re trying to do lead capture. It’s where you’re sending out a thing, maybe posting on your website, and you want people to enter their email address before they get the content. We like to do this in a way that’s seamless with the content reading experience. 

Pollen: What drove you to found this company?

I always wanted to do a startup, ever since high school. It’s just been kind of finding an opportunity that works with my willingness to take risk and just one that works in terms of an idea that could be useful. A lot of the stuff that you’re seeing these days centers on social media and things that don’t have a direct business model in the sense of, “Oh, we’re going to get a billion users and then we’ll show some ads or something.” Those type of problems don’t really interest me. I want to make something that is useful that you would actually sell to somebody that they would pay you to get value out of it. Those type of ideas and opportunities are a little bit less common these days. This was exciting because when Evan had the idea, it was something that could clearly provide value to sales and marketing people, and would be something you would charge directly for rather than trying to make your customers your product.

Pollen: Why do you work from CoCo?

There’s a few reasons. From this location specifically because it’s rather central. We started at CoCo partly because when we won Startup Weekend we got some free co-working space. But generally we didn’t want to waste a lot of time. Also we were bootstrapped when we first started out. We couldn’t afford a full office space. We also like the fact that you don’t have to worry about a lot of things.You can focus more on the company stuff and come here and they have the tables and the internet connection and the coffee and all that stuff. I work out of here five days a week, and I do that because I just need to get out of the house. I’ll occasionally work from home, but if the fridge is five steps away that’s just going to be a bad situation and stuff. So I come here just to get out of the house and focus a little bit better. I also love the buildings. Lowertown is gorgeous with all the brick. That’s another big aspect. Plus, if it was just the three of us and I’m the only one working at the office two of those days I don’t see another soul. So it’s kind of nice just to have someone to say hi to on the way getting a drink.

Pollen: Can you give me two truths and a lie?

• I fell out of a tree and broke my arm when I was six.
• I was once blown off of the side of a mountain while hiking in a rainstorm.
• I once climbed a waterfall.

Pollen: These are all really good. I feel like you’ve done this before. I’m going to go with the waterfall, only because you sound pretty confident about the first two. 

No. You’re right, I have done this before because we do it at LeadPages when anyone new starts at the company. The lie was falling out a tree and breaking my arm. I was blown off the side of a mountain at Glacier National Park. But luckily I fell feet first and not head first and I just dug my heels in. But it was just this wind that came right up and under my feet. Swept me off my feet literally. It was really scary.

Pollen: Can you tell me about your role as a community champion?

I help build and maintain the community at LeadPages. The building part is about recruitment — finding people who are going to be a great fit and entrepreneurial in their spirit. The maintaining part is more of an HR function. I’m an HR generalist for the company as well.

Pollen: Could you tell me more about LeadPages?

LeadPages is a landing page builder with built-in data analytics and split testing. Any company that has a “contact us” page really needs to pay attention to where they’re getting their leads and we help, especially small business and entrepreneurs, increase their leads and their conversions. We have statisticians and everything is documented so people know where to invest more money.

Pollen: What’s your favorite part of working at LeadPages? 

It’s the culture. On our job postings at the very end we say, “No politics, no BS, and no jerks.” That is true to form. I’m really lucky to work with an amazing team and at a place where I’m challenged and empowered to go further than I ever thought possible.

Pollen: Is there anything I should ask that I didn’t?

We’re hiring. Our website is www.leadpages.net. Right at the very top is a link to all of our job openings.

Pollen: Can you give me two truths and a lie about yourself?

• I like design.
• I like to argue.
• I am a designer.

Pollen: I’ll say the second one, you like to argue, is your lie.

No. Definitely not.

Pollen: You’re not a designer?

That is correct.

Pollen: Tell me a little bit about what you do?

I’m an adaptive IT consultant. At this point I have a one-man consulting shop and I basically help organizations with IT transformation projects to help them shift from impeding to driving business innovation. I generally do evaluations and I do coaching. I will work with teams that want to or are trying to change how they operate IT.

Pollen: How does the design-thinking influence your work?

When I say I like design but I’m not a designer… My father was an architect. My wife is a graphic designer. I’ve spent my whole life around design. I grew up looking at books of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings and that sort of thing. But I’m not an artist. I’m not good at drawing. I’m not a visual person when it comes to actually doing. But I definitely have that sensibility in terms of problem solving and what I actually tell clients is what IT transformation is fundamentally about is shifting from analysis and implementation to design. Because when companies come to IT and say we need you to drive business innovation, there isn’t a product you’re going to go out and buy to do that. It’s a design problem. Nobody is talking about, “How do we use design thinking to redesign how IT operates?” That’s my quixotic quest at this point.

Pollen: Why do you like working from CoCo?

What I find is of all of the places I work, my productivity is by far the highest here. I just find my mind tends to be much clearer when I’m here than when I’m at home or in the coffee shop or at a client site.

Pollen: Why do you think that is?

I think it’s a combination of the physical space, the people and the kinds of people who are here. It’s interesting because there’s a lot of discussion these days about open office plans and whether they’re good or whether they’re the worst thing humanity has ever invented. Technically speaking CoCo is an open office plan, but it doesn’t have any of the problems. I think part of the reason is because we’re not all part of the same company, we respect each other’s space. Nobody will just stand up and have a loud meeting with four other people in the middle of the open space downstairs. They’ll go get a meeting space. I think there’s this combination of separateness and people here doing creative things, doing engaged things, and it’s just kind of in the air. It’s a nice combination of energy and quiet.