What Can You Find at Hula? A Community, a Job, a Cofounder.

When Abbey Berger-Knorr graduated from Champlain College in 2024 she got 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. Because 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 says. Taking virtual meetings there, even though she wore headphones, was awkward.

The small downtown apartment that she and a friend moved into postgraduation doesn’t have a lounge — or space for a home office. “I don’t have room for a desk,” she says. When her internship supervisor offered her a full-time gig, she said yes but asked for a Hula membership. 

Berger-Knorr had heard good things about the collaborative workspace from other Champlain students. A friend interned for a company with an office there. “She was always talking about working at Hula and how nice it was,” Berger-Knorr said. “I was like, ‘That would be fun — maybe I could work there, too!’”

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-use 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 says.

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 Blodgett 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 suffused with natural light, filled with an abundance of greenery and tied together by a subtle surfer theme. 

Hula members say 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 because of the community they find along the way,” she says.

“What excites me most is seeing members who might have left Vermont choose to stay because 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?

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The Creative Spirit

Berger-Knorr is a go-getter. 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 shows. 

That passion also fuels her work at Cultivate, where she focuses on arts and culture clients, including the Vermont Symphony Orchestra and Cold Hollow Sculpture Park, helping them share their stories with a wider audience. “That’s really fun for me, personally,” she says. 

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 overlooking 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 says.

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 overlooking the lake. They’re not her coworkers, exactly, but they feel like her colleagues.

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The Serial Entrepreneur

Brok McFerron did meet coworkers at Hula — his cofounders, in fact. Together they run Out to Lunch, a new online platform that makes it easy to connect with others over a quick meal. People these days need a little help talking to strangers, he says. “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 thinker 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 moved 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 make it easier 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 help 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. 

“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 made of doors lying on top of filing cabinets — but it was the people he met there who mattered.

When he needed to build a website for his startup making indoor garden beds, he found a highly skilled guy there who was happy to help. “To me, that’s the magic of coworking spaces,” he says.

Hula’s got 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 says. 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 makes 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 makes the entrepreneurial life less lonely, McFerron says. “I could probably get more done at home with my headphones on, but I think the social connection aspect is worth it.”

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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 together. 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 focused on simplifying the challenging and expensive probate process. Going through LaunchVT, a business accelerator program in Burlington with close ties to Hula, helped him scale up. He sold EZ-Probate in 2022 and started laying the groundwork for a new company.

His latest venture, Scrivnr, helps 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 help 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 helps connect them with legal advice and the capital they need 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 says. “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 because he’s determined to stay at Hula. “Where else can I grow from one little desk to almost like a forever home?” he asks. 

Part of Hula’s appeal, he says, is that, “you just collide with all these founders and investors here, which is very helpful.”

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 looking for full-time work after graduation. “I was really committed to Vermont and staying in the Burlington area,” he says. 

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.”

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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 help them identify and overcome obstacles. 

Why women?

“I have a deep belief that if women made more money, everything would be better,” she says. “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. 

Today, the UVM grad estimates she gets 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 says. 

She also loves watching her clients make the most of the opportunities Hula offers. One of them, a freelance graphic designer, has gotten great results from networking there. “She knows more people at Hula now than I do,” Sehovic says.