“What’s holding Denver’s start-up scene from growing like Austin or Miami?”
The question came in spite of 12,000 people attending Denver's annual Start-up Week.
We could not help but smile somewhat when we came across this article in The Denver Gazette.
After all, the Mile High City earlier in September had just hosted its annual Denver Start-up Week attended by approximately 12,000 technology professionals within downtown. About 12,000 participants! That’s a lot of involvement considering 1,000 people attended Launch Tennessee’s “3686” event a few weeks ago.
Yet, the headline read: “What’s holding Denver’s start-up scene from growing like Austin or Miami?” Predictably, some of the answers apply to any city but others might be unique to Denver.
The article quotes Denver Start-up Week Co-Founder Erik Mitisek as saying that recent headlines have cast doubt on the state of the Denver metro start-up community. So, on the last day of the yearly tech conference, organizers put together a session titled “Colorado: Peaked or still climbing?” to discuss how Denver went from being considered a rising start-up hub in the 2010s to Austin and Miami getting more attention as the next star destinations to launch a tech company.
Among the concerns cited in the article were these:
- Techstars, a Boulder institution co-founded in 2006 by current Colorado Governor Jared Polis along with Venture Capitalists David Cohen, Brad Feld, and David Brown, announced in February it would move its headquarters to New York City.
- Numerous local tech companies had layoffs.
- About a third of downtown Denver office buildings sit empty.
- Attracting top talent into the area is a struggle with Denver’s high cost of living.
“In Colorado, everyone’s really nice,” Venture Capitalist Nicole Glaros said. “They want you to succeed, but they don’t give you the feedback on why they’re not going to buy your product and why they’re not going to fund you.” That culture needs to change, she added.
The article ended with what frequently is cited: absence of investment capital and risk taking.
“But for that to change,” Amol Deshpande of Divergent Investments said, “somebody has to step up and write checks and take risks.”
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