3 reasons Boulder is a tech star

It’s no secret that Boulder is one of my favorite places in the country.  In addition to being beautiful and having a brilliant creative and entrepreneurial culture, its people embody much of what research on productive workplaces highlight as effective practices.  Yeah, that’s kind of dull and org-geeky, but Boulder is more than just the happiest, healthiest city in the United States–it’s also a great place to work.

I was thinking of this as I absent-mindedly perused the paper this morning.  The Denver Post’s Andy Vuong has a story in today’s edition called “Colorado startups becoming tech stars”:

Colorado’s high-tech community is turning heads — from as far away as Brazil — as it cranks out startups like real-time search engine OneRiot and mentoring programs like TechStars.

“I had a meeting with a venture capitalist in São Paulo and he pops open his laptop and asked me about the startup community in Denver/Boulder,” said David Drach, the Denver-based managing director for Microsoft’s Emerging Business Team. “Because they’re like, ‘We want to model our entrepreneurial community after this.’ ”

In addition to TechStars and the Founder Institute — a training program coming to Denver in May — Colorado has a high concentration of startups in Microsoft’s tech incubator, BizSpark.

The state ranks fifth nationally with 200 participants in BizSpark, which nurtures thousands of Internet startups by providing free or discounted products and services for three years.

There are loads of great people doing interesting things in the Boulder area (and in Denver as well, though I am particularly interested in what’s working in Boulder).  Here are three reasons I think the Boulder startup community works:

1. Shared values and vision. What I see among the people I know in Boulder is a “work hard, play hard” ethic that shows up in the companies they create.  People there work hard and have fun doing it.  Startups there are about big things:  big ideas, big change, big new ways of doing things.  The 400 people who show up at each Boulder-Denver New Tech meetup have this in common (and the event is always overbooked).
2. Shared leadership and support. This is a community that takes care of his own.  I’m sure there’s competition in town, but what one sees more often is cooperation.  People pull together to do great things and build great things.  People help each other.  There’s an ethic of community first here, and it shows.  That doesn’t mean someone won’t tell you your idea is full of shit, but after they tell you that, they’ll pitch in to help you make it better.  That happens a lot.
3. Courage and tolerance for failure. Innovation is often about what happens after failing a lot.  Big dreams take big risks.  Boulder is more adventurous than safe.  Some of the most inspiring stories I have heard from Boulder are about failures that founders handled with grace and resilience.  These are the people who come back.  Contrast this with large corporations.  Although we–and I have often been a part of “we”–talk a big game about innovation and a tolerance for failure, I truly only see it in places where ideas are placed before politics.  Boulder is one such place.

I could go on with my love letter to Boulder (especially my love for “Boulder Business Casual”, which consists of jeans, hiking boots, and a fleece), but that isn’t exactly the point.  The point is that Boulder has created a community that can be created elsewhere.  It isn’t the only place where this kind of magic can happen, but it’s where it’s happening now.

Boulder is a very special place.

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