A seasoned venture capital company has moved in as a tenant of a business incubator that’s just getting established in the East Village.

Emerging Growth Group LLC, an investment group specializing in start-up technology companies, has moved from 6000 Grand Ave. to the CEO Center, 107 E. Fifth St. With the move, Gregg Barcus, who organized the fund four years ago, has left his position as president, effective March 31.      Replacing Barcus as president of Emerging Growth is Jim Goodman, who last year founded the CEO Center and is president and CEO of CustomerEase Inc., a Des Moines marketing and consulting company.      “I think (Emerging Growth) will help add to the credibility of what we’re trying to do here,” Goodman said. “I was trying to get them to locate (at the CEO Center), and now I’m just taking a bigger role with the management of Emerging Growth Group.”     The CEO Center and Emerging Growth will remain separate entities, though clients of Emerging Growth can obtain incubator space from the CEO Center, Goodman said.      The 12,000-square-foot center, which has 23 incubator spaces, has commitments for about eight of the spaces and is negotiating with another five or six companies, Goodman said. The tenants will include both start-up companies as well as entities that can serve those businesses, such as an accounting firm and an attorney.      As the new president of Emerging Growth, “what I think I’m bringing to the table is the marketing side,” Goodman said. “Is (the business) feasible; is the market potential equal to what the business plan says it will be? We really look at the cost of marketing and cost of sales as a component of the business plan.”      Emerging Growth, which currently has a portfolio of nine companies, had already gotten out of the business of providing physical incubator space, Barcus said, so it will not bring any tenant companies with it as part of the move.      “There was one company that we still had in-house; we’re making arrangements with that company to find some additional space,” Barcus said. “That particular company was ready to move, anyway. We had been moving tenants out over the last several months.”      Prior to founding Emerging Growth, Barcus was president of Iowa Seed Capital Corp., a state-funded private non-profit seed and venture capital fund that invested more than $6.7 million in 32 early-stage companies. He was also a board member and chairman of two private venture capital funds, the Iowa Business Development Financial Corp. and the Iowa Capital Corp.      Barcus last week said he had been considering leaving Emerging Growth for a different line of work, and that “an opportunity with an established local company has presented itself.” It will be several weeks before he can disclose that organization and his new position, he said.      Barcus said he remains a “significant equity holder” in Emerging Growth and will assist in the transition.      “We’ve touched a lot of companies in a lot of ways in our role as investor plus just the companies we have worked with within our facility,” he said. Additionally, “there are a lot of companies that we’re moving forward with. Some of those transition issues are still being determined as we speak.”