Skip to main content
Essay contest: win a free community membership and three months of support.Enter the contest

About Zoseco Incorporated

About

The longer story

Space Command and Tough Guy Tuesday

Zoseco began as the brainchild of a group of Air Force officers whose day job, in the early 2010s, was keeping the Global Positioning System running for the whole world. Once a week or so they met at a local brewery to trade books, attempt essays, and think out loud together. Because they served in what was then called Space Command, they cheerfully named the ritual Tough Guy Tuesday.

Four friends, one idea

Every good founding story needs a full cast, and this one had it: the bold one, the loyal one, the curious one, and the ambitious one. Four different temperaments kept circling the same question: what would it take to give community a home?

A third space

The answer they kept sketching was a third space, part cafe, part brewery, part workshop, where people could make things side by side. The name Zoseco was coined over one of those rounds, short for Zo's Co, a friendly jab at the friend most taken with the idea. It stuck.

The idea comes home

In 2014 the idea traveled home to Valparaiso, Indiana, and became a nonprofit. Its first form was a coworking space, a welcoming first step toward the bigger vision. The mission then is the mission now: to develop safe, productive, and enjoyable communities dedicated to collaborative and sustainable advancement.

A room with good people in it

For over a decade, Zoseco ran the first coworking space in Northwest Indiana from a top floor office in downtown Valparaiso, full of natural light. (Sunlight helps. Basements do not.) People came in, worked on what mattered to them, and did it alongside others doing the same. The space changed over the years; the impulse behind it never did.

The most important community

Zoseco believes the most important safe, productive, and enjoyable community is the family: parents and children building a life together. So the work turned toward helping families launch businesses they own and operate themselves, from Valparaiso or from anywhere the work takes them, in a way that keeps the family side by side through every stage of life.

Independent by conviction

Zoseco is an Indiana nonprofit with one firm conviction: a family business should stand on its own two feet, sustained by the people it serves rather than by government subsidies. What gets built that way lasts, for the best possible reason: people genuinely want it.

What the work builds in people

People who have built things at Zoseco and its seeded and acquired project, Provito Company, walked away with real skills, finished work, and the quiet confidence that comes from making something people actually wanted. Some later took roles at Meta, Protiviti, BMO Harris, and Ulta Beauty. The deeper point is that the work develops the person, and that part travels everywhere.

Get in Touch

Have a question or ready to get started? Reach out and we’ll get back to you.

Contact Information

Address5 Washington St, Ste 300, Valparaiso, IN 46383

Tell us about your community