Last fall, Joe Maruschak was among the skeptics concerning RAIN, the state-backed Regional Accelerator and Innovation Network that wants to help create startups and jobs in the southern Willamette Valley.
Back then, he and others at the Fertilab Thinkubator business incubator he co-founded in Eugene “were shadow boxing a ghost,” he said. They wondered, “What is RAIN doing? An incubator? An accelerator?”
They just knew RAIN was making it hard to raise funds for Fertilab because potential donors inevitably would ask, “What about RAIN?”…