Ventura County has already produced a generational technology company, and it happened because the City of Ventura tried something almost no city was trying. In December 2008, with the economy in freefall, the City announced a high tech incubator on the third floor of 505 Poli Street, the five story building directly behind City Hall. The Ventura Ventures Technology Center opened to tenants in early 2009: seventy six workstations renting for a couple hundred dollars a month, with conference rooms, internet, and free parking included. The City went further than desks. It put $3 million into the venture fund DFJ Frontier, reportedly the first time an American municipality had invested in a venture capital fund, and startups had to be based in Ventura to qualify for its checks.
Among the roughly ten startups working out of the incubator in its first year was a quiet one, still in stealth mode, called The Trade Desk. Jeff Green and Dave Pickles founded it in Ventura in 2009 to change how advertising is bought. The company outgrew the incubator floor, leased three thousand square feet upstairs in the same city owned building in 2011, and kept climbing: a $20 million round in 2014 that the Pacific Coast Business Times called “likely the biggest funding round ever for a Ventura-based tech company,” a Nasdaq IPO in September 2016, and entry into the S&P 500 in 2025, with $2.9 billion in revenue that fiscal year. The Trade Desk is still headquartered in downtown Ventura.
It was not the only company to come out of the building. The City’s own history credits the incubator with graduating MomentFeed, Connexity, and GiddyUp, and GiddyUp still operates from Ventura today.
The program itself did not last. The City ended its venture capital relationship in early 2014, then handed daily management of the incubator to a private operator that December. The operator resigned two years later. By 2017 the upper floors of 505 Poli sat vacant, the remaining tenants had been consolidated onto a single floor, and the City Council was openly debating what to do with the building. A city report from that year still pointed to The Trade Desk as “an excellent example of the potential success and ROI of an incubator program,” but the incubator era ended without ceremony: a quiet wind down, and no city backed program left to catch the next founder with a big idea.
The rebuilding is now underway from many directions. Regional organizations, universities, and community groups carry much of the load, and the directory below maps all of them. Startup Ventura exists to rebuild the accelerator itself: a 501(c)(3) nonprofit bringing structured, no cost accelerator programming back to the county, with the City of Ventura investing $49,500 through its Economic Development department to help launch it. The next Trade Desk should not have to leave to be built.