GCUC Podcast with CO+HOOTS Founder Jenny Poon

CO+HOOTS celebrated 10 motivating years of business, and Jenny Poon, Founder and CEO, just purchased her own building. On this episode of the GCUC Podcast, we explore how Jenny’s parents continue to fuel her love for creating equitable entrepreneurial ecosystems with their own inspiring story of perseverance and persistence. Jenny gets real with her own emotional weather forecast and what business is really all about.

Find out what’s in Jenny’s recipe for scaling on the city level with these juicy sound bites:

I figured out what I was meant to do in life. I was a teacher, a kinkos girl. Bringing it all together with technology, finding tools, improving businesses, coming from an entrepreneurial family, being a person of color – merging all those things. Those are all the things that are involved with building cities, as well as small businesses. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

Cities are so involved in the success of small businesses and the success of people in general. If you can encourage your city to have the right recipe of things put together there then small business can be really, really successful. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

Community building, placemaking, connecting all the things I have been doing for a long time. Bringing all those things together to really address entrepreneurship and small businesses in cities. How to actually unlock some of the government funding/resources that are available to small businesses and make it accessible. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

When I think of “don’t waste a crisis” I think of Jenny. The work that she’s doing with the government and trying to help others is so important. I absolutely love it. Other people in the coworking world could learn from what she’s been working on because it is something that could be proliferated and help many cities. –Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

I think back to my parents being refugees, coming here, not knowing the language, not having the money. But being able to start a business. It took a lot of work, a lot of pain, a lot of failures. In the last 5 years is when they finally hit their stride. They have everything figured out, they know their patterns and their rhythm, but it took 40 years to get there. If we want more people to be successful, we need to figure out how to get them there faster. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

My parents are minority in many senses but minority in the fact that they survived it. Business is all about when are you going to give up and they haven’t given up. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

1970s was around the time that women were finally allowed to have their own bank account for business. Even today going out and signing for a building I have to get my husband to co-sign because that’s the way the country works. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

It’s such a testament that you have become such an amazing entrepreneur. You’re one of the only women I know in coworking who’s gone out and bought her own building. It pisses me off that your husband had to sign for it, as well. It’s bullshit. You built this thing and I just absolutely commend you on what you’re doing. –Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

We want everybody in the entire world to be able to take monumental risks because imagine the kind of ideas and solutions that would come out if they have the ability to really chase something they’re passionate about. If you’re passionate about it, you’ll be successful. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

My work is around how we can lower the risk of entrepreneurship and small businesses especially for people of color. How we can connect funding aspects and elements and educate people on the resources that exist out there. Government programs, while they mean well, aren’t marketed well and they don’t know how to reach the people that really need those funds. There’s just not a mindset to dig in deep to understand how to create equitable solutions for our country. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

We know what the recipe is for it and most cities have all these pieces for connecting all of it. We took the general mantra of a coworking space – “we’re all connected” and applied it to the city level. –Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

Our end goal is to help more cities distribute and create better communities and more equitable entrepreneurial ecosystems. -Jenny Poon, Founder & CEO at CO+HOOTS

Click HERE to listen to the full podcast with Liz Elam and Jenny Poon. It’s juicy!