Why 1,000 Founders Came to a Brooklyn Campus Where Companies Build, Test and Grow

Founders and senior executives from Shopify, Dyson, Bombas and more spent three days at Industry City, surrounded by the companies already building what comes next.

Once a year, some of the country’s most interesting founders, CEOs and brands come together for Beanstalk, an invite-only gathering designed to feel less like a conference and more like a temporary community.

In September, for the second year in a row, that community came to Industry City, the 35-acre Brooklyn innovation campus in Sunset Park.

More than 1,000 founders and senior executives spent three days across the campus. Shopify, Dyson, Bombas, Unilever, Airbnb and Take-Two Interactive were among the companies represented.

They fit right in.

Inside Brooklyn’s Innovation Campus

Across Industry City’s 16 buildings, more than 700 companies are already at work in robotics, AI, healthcare, technology, design, manufacturing, media, food and e-commerce. Some are established names. Others are emerging companies building what comes next. And some are the companies the big guys are buying.

PillPack, the online pharmacy that changed how people manage medications by sorting prescriptions into personalized packets and delivering them directly to customers, built its Brooklyn operation here before Amazon acquired it in 2018.

?What If!, an innovation consultancy that helps major companies develop and test new products and ideas, moved from Manhattan to Industry City to create a living laboratory, where teams could develop, prototype and test concepts with people working across the campus. Accenture acquired ?What If! in 2019.

How Highline Found Its Robots Next Door

And then there’s Highline Commerce.

Highline provides the logistics and fulfillment infrastructure for more than 200 emerging brands. It came to Industry City from Chelsea with 27,000 square feet and has since grown to 60,000. But room to grow was only part of the draw. Highline’s customers regularly come in to work alongside Highline. At Industry City, they can also work from the campus’s coworking space and conference center, and meet, eat or grab a drink, which makes the campus itself part of what Highline can offer them.

Then Highline found something it wasn’t necessarily looking for.

Just steps away, Ultra Robotics was building AI-powered humanoid robots that pick up, scan and label orders. Ultra needed a real working warehouse to put its robots to work. Highline had one nearby.

So they started working together.

Today, Ultra’s robots fill up to 30 percent of Highline’s orders.

An Ecosystem That Doesn’t Pack Up

It’s a small example of what happens when more than 700 companies that may look wildly different on paper, but share the same instinct to build, experiment and grow, work on one campus and actually know what their neighbors are doing. That kind of exposure can be as valuable as anything that brought them here in the first place.

Beanstalk is built around much the same idea. Rather than funneling people into ballrooms and keynote sessions, it creates hundreds of smaller conversations across the campus: founders meeting founders, CEOs meeting operators, and companies that might never otherwise cross paths finding reasons to talk.

The campus gave them plenty of places to do it: meeting and event spaces, a conference center, coworking, courtyards, restaurants, bars and production facilities.

But unlike a traditional conference venue, Industry City didn’t go quiet when Beanstalk packed up.

What Beanstalk brought together for three days happens at Industry City every day.

Looking for space to build, test and grow? Talk to our leasing team.