Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City

BEFORE THE INTERNET (1970–1994)

I moved to Boulder in 1995. This, however, was not the beginning of the rise of the startup community in Boulder; the seeds were planted a long time ago and there was a significant amount of entrepreneurial success in and around Boulder between 1970 and 1994. I’ve asked Kyle Lefkoff, a Boulder resident and venture capitalist since the mid-1970s, to describe what he saw happen during this time frame.

It was not by accident that a university town nestled at the base of the Flatirons would emerge as the densest cluster of technology startups in the world—it was the result of a generation of entrepreneurs drawn to the region first by business necessity, who stayed by choice. Were it not for the foundational success stories in data-storage, pharmaceuticals, and natural-foods brands, Boulder’s thriving ecosystem would not exist today. But the success of these anchor tenants presaged the growth and success of today’s Boulder startup community.

The data storage landscape was shaped first by IBM’s decision to locate its tape-drive division in Boulder in the 1960s, and then, by the success of its first spin off, StorageTek, in 1975. Led by its visionary founders, Jesse Aweida and Juan Rodriguez, StorageTek was Boulder’s first big VC-backed high-tech success story, and it spawned a storage and networking industry that grew to dozens of companies by the early 1990s, including billion-dollar success stories such as McData, Exabyte, and Connor Peripherals. ...