Our first day in Boulder, we visited the Chamber of Commerce, which is involved in economic development and plays a role in the startup community. The Chamber of Commerce understands that they have to change or evolve if they want to engage the startup community and find new ways to deliver their services (e.g. the internet). We spoke with John, who is from Michigan (YAY!) He explained the Innovation Blueprint, which is how the COC is evolving their thinking and finding new ways to enhance and grow. The COC serves the business community through: member services, advocacy, and economic development. Their struggle is with finding room to keeping businesses IN Boulder! There has been a pushback from residents to stop the growth because Boulder has a very unique small community of nice, collaborative, and friendly individuals. We learned a lot of interesting history about Boulder, for example: Boulder started as a Boulder community, and about 150 years ago, Boulder had a choice between a prison or a university. Of course they chose the university (the University of Colorado Boulder)! This has been the foundation of innovation for the economy.
The next day, we got to visit Jason Mendelson at the Foundry Group. (Jason is also from Michigan!) When asked why he chose Colorado vs. Michigan, he said that “people care more about the startup community than anything else they are doing.” Boulder has successfully created a tight-knit community that attracts people and brings them in. I loved Jason’s mentality on what an entrepreneur is; he says that “being an entrepreneur doesn’t mean that you have to have a startup, it just means that you take risks and are not scared of failure. For this reason, it is difficult for people to adopt the entrepreneurial mindset in Michigan; because there is such a high pressure to not fail and must always do good.
Just down the hall, we got to visit with Dave Cohen at Techstars. Techstars is a very competitive accelerator program with a 1% acceptance rate. Each business is given seed money to get them through the next 3 months and grow their business at an exponential rate. For Dave, it was a no brainer to stay in Boulder; he had a long-term view to help the startup community.
One of my other favorite stops was at Unreasonable Institute with Daniel Epstein. I only say this because he is bringing people from around the world to solve social problems. He has several programs running to achieve this. He said that “if you want to solve problems at scale and drive innovation then you need profit!” Also, he said that to be an entrepreneur you need to design solutions to problems. You just have to figure out what problems you want to solve! I loved that, because he is instilling Boulder’s distinguishing factor of PASSION! You MUST have passion to survive as an entrepreneur!
Beautiful Boulder
