Today a group of us launched Founded Colorado.
Eleni Angelides is the Executive Director. She spent nearly eight years in Governor Polis’s office, most recently as Legislative Director, where she ran the Governor’s agenda at the Capitol. She worked on housing, land use, tax policy, RTD reform, and the allocation of more than a billion dollars in COVID recovery funds.
Founded Colorado is an advocate for Colorado’s innovative companies - the ones “founded here, growing here, and working with lawmakers and regulators to keep Colorado a place where great companies start and stay.” If your company is based in Colorado, we are your home team.
This started with SB 24-205, Colorado’s first AI law. The legislature passed it in May 2024. Governor Polis signed it “with reservations,” and within a month he, the Attorney General, and the bill’s sponsor were promising to revise it. SB 24-205 was ill-fated, poorly drafted, and idiotic. It went straight to broad restrictions on how companies use AI without first figuring out what harm it was trying to prevent or how anyone would measure it.
Over the next two years, a bunch of Colorado companies, consumer advocates, the tech industry, schools, hospitals, small businesses, and lawmakers worked through a process to improve the law. The result was SB 26-189, which gives Coloradans the right to know when AI is shaping decisions about them and gives companies clear, workable rules. It passed with broad bipartisan support.
During this process, several of us realized that there wasn’t a policy or advocacy group in Colorado focused only on companies based in Colorado. Plenty of organizations show up at the Capitol. None of them were there specifically, and only, for the companies that started here, or moved their headquarters here, and want to keep building their companies here.
Rather than whining about it, we created Founded Colorado. The founding board is Chris Erickson (Board President) and Adam Burrows from Range Ventures, Bryan Leach (Ibotta), Bijal Shah (Guild), Kent Thiry (formerly DaVita), Eleni Angelides (our Executive Director), and me.
Our mission is straightforward. We make sure Colorado companies are at the table when policy is shaped. We bring real operating experience to proposed laws and to the rules that put them into practice, so they protect Coloradans and work for the Colorado companies that have to comply. We want to be the place lawmakers and partners call when they want a straight answer about how a new idea will play out. Our constituency is all companies based in Colorado.
If you are a founder or leader of a Colorado-based company and want to join, email me or reach out through Founded Colorado.
Come join the home team.