Poligon

Last night, the class I am teaching visited Poligon, the first co-working space for entrepreneurs in Slovenia.  Poligon is located in the old tobacco factory west of downtown, a huge complex that in the early 1900’s employed 90% of the working women in Ljubljana (when Slovenia was still part of Austria-Hungary).  Now, it houses mostly government offices, including the visa office we visited when we first arrived here in 2011.

In just over two years, Poligon has developed a community of about ninety entrepreneurs and helped them create Kickstarter campaigns that collectively have raised over two million dollars.  For the cyclist and photographer fanatics out there, two of the popular product lines that have come out of Poligon are rollable bike fenders by Musguard and pinhole cameras by Ondu.  Pretty impressive for an operation started on a budget of less than $1000 and no public funding.