Startup Communities, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER TWOTHE BOULDER STARTUP COMMUNITY

In November 1995, I left Boston and moved to Boulder. I'd gone to college at MIT and had lived in Boston for 12 years. However, Boston wasn't my home; I'd grown up in Dallas, and my wife, Amy Batchelor, had grown up in Alaska. When I sold my first company at age 28, I promised Amy that we'd leave Boston by the time I was 30. Two months before I turned 30, Amy told me she was moving to Boulder, and I was welcome to join her if I wanted to.

We'd both been to Boulder and loved Colorado. Neither of us wanted to live in the Bay Area, which was a logical choice given the work I do, but we wanted either ocean or mountains wherever we lived. Because we were both attracted to the western United States and the Rocky Mountains, we figured we'd give Boulder a try, and if it didn't work out, we'd just keep heading west.

After six months, we loved Boulder and never looked back. When we moved here, we knew only one person, and he and his wife moved away a few months later. However, within a year we had already found a community of friends and entrepreneurs and were quickly learning our way around town. Twenty‐four years later, I can't imagine a better place to live.

BOULDER AS A LABORATORY

Boulder is a small city. In 2012, there were less than 100,000 actual residents, and by 2020, this number had only grown to 107,000. The extended metro area, which includes the neighboring towns of Superior, Broomfield, Lafayette, Longmont, and Lyons, was only ...