So some of you have been wondering and asking what is up with DC. I was down there a bunch last summer but haven’t posted on our plans for a while. We backed out of a location last September just before signing lease. So you might be wondering what’s up.
We’re committed to DC as our next region. 2015 saw some stunning opportunities for Clover in Boston (of which HFI is one) and fundraising took longer than I expected last year, and so we slowed down on DC a bit. But we didn’t back away from our plan, just slowed down.
We hired Sean on as an area manager and he’s been commuting up from DC since this past July. Sean is now a fully integrated and critical part of the Clover team and we’re expecting he will bring Clover good-ness to DC in high fidelity. We’ve been scouting sites and are hoping to get a lease signed in the next 3-6 weeks. Then we’ll start learning what it takes to get a truck down there leading up to our launch.
I’ll be in DC Monday with Sean walking the streets. The other week we got the tour from our Real Estate guy down there. This time I want to walk neighborhoods on my own (with Sean). We’re focused on Chinatown, downtown, and 14th St. We want to find 2 great sites to kick everything off. Small is ok.
The picture is of Kayla, our server at Maketto. She was asking questions, we said we were from Boston. She used to live in Boston and jumped up and down when I said we were from Clover. So we know we have at least 1 fan in DC already. (And the feeling is mutual, Erik is doing amazing stuff at Maketto.)
