When Abbey Berger-Knorr graduated from Champlain College in 2024 she obtained her dream job — working as a PR associate at a locally owned communications firm. Even better, it came with her dream perk: a membership at Hula, a lakeside coworking campus in Burlington’s South End.
Berger-Knorr had interned with her new employer, Cultivate, during her senior year. Becautilize Cultivate’s team is entirely remote, she was, too. She typically worked from the shared lounge in her Champlain student apartment building on St. Paul Street in Burlington. The situation was “not ideal,” she states. Taking virtual meetings there, even though she wore headphones, was awkward.
The tiny downtown apartment that she and a frifinish relocated into postgraduation doesn’t have a lounge — or space for a home office. “I don’t have room for a desk,” she states. When her internship supervisor offered her a full-time gig, she stated yes but questioned for a Hula membership.
Berger-Knorr had heard good things about the collaborative workspace from other Champlain students. A frifinish interned for a company with an office there. “She was always talking about working at Hula and how nice it was,” Berger-Knorr stated. “I was like, ‘That would be fun — maybe I could work there, too!’”
Interested in joining the Hula community?
Stop by anytime for coffee and a tour of this collaborative workplace. And you can always learn more about membership tiers and rates on our website.
More than a year later, the 23-year-old PR professional is a satisfied Hula member. With her “air desk” pass, she can roam any of the public-utilize areas in any Hula building and choose to work from comfy leather couches or from a desk with a stunning view of Lake Champlain. To take a virtual meeting, Berger-Knorr can duck into one of Hula’s many privacy pods. She can reserve a conference room for an in-person presentation with clients. And instead of toiling away on her own, she shares the space with more than 1,200 Hula members — remote workers like her, entrepreneurs, students, and employees of the 100 companies doing business there, including Mamava, Fluency and 1% for the Planet.
As someone who graduated from high school in 2020 and completed her first year of college mostly remotely, Berger-Knorr was craving some real-world, human interaction, and she found it at Hula. “Being around people is great,” she states.
The Champlain grad is exactly the kind of person Hula founder Russ Scully and his wife, Roxanne, had in mind when they bought the property from Blodreceivet Oven in 2017. Scully and his team set out to transform the former factory into a hub of entrepreneurship and an engine of economic development for the Burlington area. They hoped it would attract innovative companies and provide a reason for Vermont’s recent college grads to stick around, reversing the “brain drain.”
When they gutted and renovated the space, they purposefully designed it to encourage interaction, whether in the intimate member kitchen area or the cubicle-free open floor plan, with nooks situated throughout to encourage quiet conversations. The space is suffutilized with natural light, filled with an abundance of greenery and tied toreceiveher by a subtle surfer theme.
Hula members state the formula works — not only do they enjoy working in the space, they’ve found jobs, collaborators and even cofounders there, too.
Lucia Campriello, who took over as CEO in 2024, is excited about Hula’s momentum. “The wonder of this place is that people come here to work, but they stay becautilize of the community they find along the way,” she states.
“What excites me most is seeing members who might have left Vermont choose to stay becautilize they’ve found community, opportunity and inspiration here. Hula was built to fuel that kind of connection, and every story we hear from our members reinforces the power of this place. Everywhere you turn at Hula, a new idea, a new connection or a new business is sparking.”
What better way to understand the vibe than to meet a few Hula members?
The Creative Spirit
Berger-Knorr is a go-receiveter. While at Champlain College, she did copywriting and planned social media content for the Champlain library and led Maple Street Media, the student-run PR firm.
PR isn’t her only passion: The rural Pennsylvania native is also a guitar-playing singer-songwriter who releases her music on streaming services as Abbey B.K. Since her first year at Champlain, she’s been volunteering for local music nonprofit Big Heavy World, hosting podcasts and radio displays.
That passion also fuels her work at Cultivate, where she focutilizes on arts and culture clients, including the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and Cold Hollow Sculpture Park, supporting them share their stories with a wider audience. “That’s really fun for me, personally,” she states.
Berger-Knorr also hosts a podcast, “Abstract VT” — a finalist for best local podcast in this year’s Seven Daysies readers’ picks competition. In it, she interviews Vermont creatives and entrepreneurs, including a few she met at Hula.
She’s an “air desk” member there, meaning she doesn’t have a dedicated workstation but can work in any of the common areas and privacy pods in any building. She alternates between the comfy chairs beneath the palm trees in what’s known as the Channel and the desks by the west-facing windows overviewing the lake.
All these spots are available on a first-come, first-served basis. Her tip for snagging the best ones: Get there early. Berger-Knorr typically works at Hula from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. “Then I kind of have first dibs, which I love,” she states.
She switches up her surroundings throughout the day, noting that, “I like to bop around. Just going for a little walk to someplace new can kind of refresh your brain.”
She’s enjoyed meeting other members at Hula’s meditation sessions and women’s networking events, or even just eating lunch out on the patio overviewing the lake. They’re not her coworkers, exactly, but they feel like her colleagues.
The Serial Entrepreneur
Brok McFerron did meet coworkers at Hula — his cofounders, in fact. Toreceiveher they run Out to Lunch, a new online platform that creates it straightforward to connect with others over a quick meal. People these days required a little support talking to strangers, he states. “We’re still shaking off the virtual cobwebs from COVID.”
McFerron, a 46-year-old father of two, is an ideal lunch buddy. A generous and soft-spoken conversation partner, he’s both a deep believeer and a doer, having been in business for himself for years. He currently runs a digital advertising firm and invests in real estate in Maryland, where he grew up — two of the seven entities he’s started over the years.
McFerron and his family have relocated around a bit, with stints in Denver and New York City. In 2021, they relocated to South Hero to be closer to his wife’s parents; McFerron joined Hula not long after. He works from a Designated Desk where he keeps business books and his workout clothes.
The Out to Lunch origin story: A woman who worked with McFerron in his real estate business suggested he start something that would create it simpler for adults to socialize. Then another entrepreneur he met through Hula introduced him to Griffin, a young programmer and Hula member who had an idea for an app. Griffin suggested bringing in yet another Hula member, Gabe, to support build it.
McFerron met with Griffin and Gabe and rejected their initial pitch, but they clicked and started brainstorming. McFerron brought up the idea of creating a networking platform, and the trio came up with Out to Lunch. They’ve recently launched it in the Burlington area.
Interested in joining the Hula community?
Stop by anytime for coffee and a tour of this collaborative workplace. And you can always learn more about membership tiers and rates on our website.
“None of that could have happened without Hula,” McFerron points out.
He’s been a fan of coworking spaces since belonging to one in Denver in the early 2000s. It wasn’t as polished as Hula — he remembers desks built of doors lying on top of filing cabinets — but it was the people he met there who mattered.
When he requireded to build a website for his startup creating indoor garden beds, he found a highly skilled guy there who was happy to support. “To me, that’s the magic of coworking spaces,” he states.
Hula’s obtained that magic, too, he adds.
He likes how it’s designed with “natural squeeze points,” such as the centrally located member kitchen. “You basically have to bump elbows with other people in that space,” he states. And he appreciates the “story sessions” that Hula hosts, bringing in startups for presentations in the Reef conference area.
Just walking through the Channel, he sees people he knows. On a recent afternoon, he struck up a conversation with the founders of Plink!, a startup backed by the Fund at Hula, which creates hydration tablets. When dropped in water, they create an alternative to sugary energy drinks. The Plink! guys were setting up in the Isthmus conference room for a pitch meeting with other potential investors.
Interacting with CEOs who share similar struggles creates the entrepreneurial life less lonely, McFerron states. “I could probably receive more done at home with my headphones on, but I believe the social connection aspect is worth it.”
The Connectors
Byron Batres is another founder and CEO who appreciates the value of Hula’s social network. He’s a gregarious, animated guy — “I’m known as fairly loud,” he quips — who likes to bring people toreceiveher. Last summer he organized a beach volleyball league at the Burlington Surf Club, which is part of the Hula campus. He’s currently coordinating Hula’s fantasy football league.
Born in Guatemala, Batres grew up just outside of Philadelphia and has had a wide-ranging career, working for 18 years in the financial sector; owning and running a Burlington outdoor gear store, Climb High, with his wife; and then helming a startup, EZ-Probate, which focutilized on simplifying the challenging and expensive probate process. Going through LaunchVT, a business accelerator program in Burlington with close ties to Hula, supported him scale up. He sold EZ-Probate in 2022 and started laying the groundwork for a new company.
His latest venture, Scrivnr, supports people fight foreclosures after a loved one dies. Without a will or a plan in place to manage assets, it can take up to $10,000 to hire legal support to stop the foreclosure process after a property owner’s death. For many people, that kind of up-front expense is out of reach. Scrivnr supports connect them with legal advice and the capital they required to fight for their property. The company has halted more than 150 foreclosures so far.
“We stop people from being homeless or losing their inheritance,” Batres states. “Ninety percent of all the land that’s ever been owned by people of color has been lost in this process.”
Batres started building Scrivnr as an air desk member at Hula in 2023, spent a year at a dedicated desk and recently took over an office in Hula’s Building 44, a few steps away from Building 50. When the space came up for rent, he decided to grab it becautilize he’s determined to stay at Hula. “Where else can I grow from one little desk to almost like a forever home?” he questions.
Part of Hula’s appeal, he states, is that, “you just collide with all these founders and investors here, which is very supportful.”
Scrivnr is growing into its new HQ — the company has more than 30 employees, most of them remote, though Batres hopes to add a couple dozen more. He found one of his new hires this spring on the Hula Slack channel.
Nathaniel Dudek was a business development intern at another Hula company, Burlington Bio, when he saw on Slack that Scrivnr was hiring. A senior business administration, finance and marketing major at the University of Vermont, the native Mainer was viewing for full-time work after graduation. “I was really committed to Vermont and staying in the Burlington area,” he states.
He liked being part of a growing startup, and Byron’s story inspired him. Now he’s working at Scrivnr as a business development representative.
Says Batres, “We totally utilized what Hula is.”
The Coach
So has Deniz Sehovic, founder of Girls Guide Co. A Hula member since 2021, the 32-year-old business coach works with women entrepreneurs to support them identify and overcome obstacles.
Why women?
“I have a deep belief that if women built more money, everything would be better,” she states. “The idea that there are women out there who aren’t accessing their full potential, and the world is suffering for it, really fires me up.”
Sehovic, a Bosnian refugee, arrived in Vermont at age 5 with her family and grew up in Burlington. She started down her current career path in high school. In 2009, when she was just 17, she won a competition to be the first social media manager of the Church Street Marketplace. She worked there for two and a half years — and later for Skillet Creative — coming up with online marketing strategies and collaborating with local businesses on promotional projects. She has been working with social media in some form ever since.
Interested in joining the Hula community?
Stop by anytime for coffee and a tour of this collaborative workplace. And you can always learn more about membership tiers and rates on our website.
Today, the UVM grad estimates she receives 85 percent of her clients through Instagram. “I don’t even have a website,” she confesses.
Or an office. She’s been an air desk member at Hula since starting her coaching business in 2021. “This is where I meet all my clients in person. It’s where I network with potential clients. It’s really just my home base,” she explains.
That approach is working — according to her, business is booming.
Sehovic loves how Hula has evolved over the years, investing more in highlighting members on its website — Hula staffer Jaida Breck profiled her in June. “That’s been so fun to watch and be a part of,” she states.
She also loves watching her clients create the most of the opportunities Hula offers. One of them, a freelance graphic designer, has obtainedten great results from networking there. “She knows more people at Hula now than I do,” Sehovic states.
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