Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

AN OUTSIDER’S VIEW OF BOULDER

Although you’ve heard my story of how Boulder evolved as a startup community, I thought it would be useful to have an outsider’s view of the Boulder startup community. I asked Mark Solon, a general partner at Highway 12 Ventures, a Boise, Idaho–based VC firm to weigh in. Many of Highway 12 Ventures’ investments are in Boulder, and Mark has been an active mentor for TechStars since the beginning. Following is his perspective of what’s going on in Boulder today.

Since 2000, my partner, Phil Reed, and I have been focused on investing in the most promising startup companies in the Intermountain West. We’ve invested in terrific companies in Salt Lake City, Tucson, Missoula, Boise, Portland, Seattle, Denver, Albuquerque, Phoenix, and Boise—and spent time in a handful of other cities in the region trying to capitalize on the supply-demand imbalance of good ideas versus capital in all of these terrific startup towns that get largely overlooked by the vast majority of venture capitalists.

All of these communities have both advantages and disadvantages for startups to thrive—and each have fostered important and lasting companies that grew from their respective startup ecosystems. None, however, has come close to producing anywhere near the volume of successful startups, especially on a per-capita basis, as Boulder. For the last decade, Boulder has produced successful startups at an astonishing rate. Why is that?

Many will point to TechStars as the primary ...