Above Video: Come join me on my “walk through” videos (see others) to meet Boulder’s tech community.
I took the day off from work yesterday, and did some sight seeing of the Rockies (thanks to long term friend Kit who was one of the organizers of the Thin Air Summit) and had an opportunity to meet the large tech community at the “Tea House” in Boulder. I quickly learned that the tech scene is active, there’s many startups, events, and a VC community (including this incubator program called TechStars) that helps spur this eco system forward. What makes it attractive? The opportunity to be exposed to the great outdoors, the clean (yet expensive) Boulder area, great food, and healthy lifestyle.
Being in Silicon Valley, we’re so centrist in our thinking and don’t get enough exposure to the other tech communities around the country and globe (although I’m trying hard to meet each community) as a result we haven’t heard that much about Colorado’s tech corridor.
I observed that the entrepreneurial spirit runs high in Colorado, many folks want to strike it out on their own (I wonder if this is tied back to the silver rush and early settlers) vs many in Silicon Valley may prefer to join startups and exit rather than building their own sole-propertiership. The environment was warm and people shared –even with risk of sharing competitive information.
Despite the warmth of this community that’s nestled between the Rocky mountains and the great plains, they’re very insular and don’t share their story to the rest of the world. I’ve visited countries where they actually have government sponsored outreach programs just to tell their story in order to attract buyers, partners, and employees –Colorado could really benefit by not only focusing inward, but being a bit more extroverted and sharing their story with others.
Well, if anyone in Colorado was hoping to keep their ecosystem a secret –too late now, I just told my community.
Above, I interviewed Kit Seeborg and was joined by Jason and James both of Room 214, a local pure play social media agency.
The list of startups we were throwing out were just a small sample, I crowdsourced the list through Twitter, if you know of other startups, tweet the name and tag it #costartup. See the growing list of tech startups in Colorado in this twitter search result.
If you attended the Tweetup yesterday, leave a comment with your handle.
