Foundercon is heading back to where it all began: Boulder, Colorado.

I’ll be there the whole time, along with over 1,000 of my Techstars friends.

The Techstars team is working hard to make this Foundercon extremely valuable to everyone who attends, regardless of whether you are a founder, mentor, partner, or community leader.

And, if you’ve never been to Boulder in September, it’s magical.

If you are interested, reach out or sign up.

As a proud early Gen Xer, I was in ninth grade when Back in Black came out. It was my favorite song for at least a week, and it’s still in my top 10 (something by Rush likely displaced it.) As a teenager, I knew everything about AC/DC (at least everything you could know before the Internet existed.) I wandered around that week proudly telling everyone who would listen that the song was a brilliant tribute to Bon Scott.

Amy and I arrived in Boulder on Friday and will stay for a month before heading to Aspen for the summer. As I emerge from hibernation, I feel the song’s energy. So far, I went to the Nuggets game Friday night, had brunch with friends on Saturday at Tangerine, took a long nap Saturday afternoon to try to reset my system, ran on the Boulder Creek Path on Sunday morning, and had dinner with Amy, my brother, and his wife at Barchetta last night.

Boulder Startup Week (the oldest Startup Week in the world) begins this morning. I’m about to head out to the opening event at Rosetta Hall, about three minutes from my condo, since we live downtown now.

Even though there is enormous craziness in the world right now, I’m bringing my full self to the summer. I hope to see you in person, online, or via email.

Now that I’m out of hibernation for a while and back in Boulder for a month, I’m doing a bunch of public events.

My approach, in general, is fireside chats or AMAs, so that’ll be the rhythm rather than me getting up in front of a crowd and blathering about something for 30 to 45 minutes. While my new book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship, is part of the content (and a giveaway that I’ll be signing at some of the events), I’m planning on staying around, talking to whomever is there, and just enjoying a month of the Boulder and Denver startup communities.

The following is what is currently scheduled. I expect there will be a few more things.

5/12 @ 8am: 2025 Boulder Startup Week: Welcome Breakfast and Kickoff to Boulder Startup Week: There will be lots of socializing as Boulder Startup Week gets started. Join me for breakfast and a short talk on the roof of Rosetta Hall. The rumor is that the weather is going to be awesome.

5/13 @ 3pm: 2025 Boulder Startup Week: Startup Communities – The Next Generation: My partner Jaclyn Hester and I will have a fireside chat about the evolution of a startup community. We’ll talk about the importance of existing leaders (e.g. me) to hand off the torch to the next generation (e.g. Jaclyn), why the development of the startup community is not a straight line up and to the right, and how to incorporate concepts from my upcoming book Give First: The Power of Mentorship into your daily activities in the startup community.

5/16 @ 10am: 2025 Boulder Startup Week: Building and Managing Your Board: I’ve been on a zillion boards. This panel includes several people with whom I’ve been on great boards (Tim Miller, Todd Vernon), along with Walter Knapp (my partner Seth is on his board). I’m also been on a lot of mediocre boards and several crappy ones, so I’ll bring those experiences to the discussion also.

5/28 @ 11am – 6pm: Random Day at Composition Shop: I’ll spend the day at Greeley Sachs’ new bookstore in Longmont doing a Random Day (where I have 15-minute meetings with anyone who wants to meet). Look for a separate post with an online calendar to reserve spots soon.

5/29 @ 2pm: 2025 Conscious Entrepreneur Summit: I’ll share my perspective on mentorship, community, and how Give First applies not just to business but also to the way we live and lead.

6/5 @ 5pm: Techstars Workforce Development Demo Day featuring a Book Launch with Brad Feld: I used to go to every Techstars Demo Day. I think this might be the first one I’m going to post-COVID, and I’m excited to experience its energy.

Boulder has been our home for 25 years and we love it. Amy and I support numerous local non-profit initiatives through our Anchor Point Foundation. The following video captured my attention this morning and resulted in a bathroom-sized donation to Growing Up Boulder.

Bella and Mads – well done! You can call us Brad and Amy (not Mr. and Mrs.). This is a gift is in y’alls name. Vanessa Schatz – brilliant!

Happy Monday morning. Do something nice for your local community today. And, if you are a Boulder local, consider donating to Growing Up Boulder.

My partner Chris Moody came up with a great idea he’s calling #BoulderStrongTableMesa. This is in response to the mass murder that happened at the King Soopers in Table Mesa on Monday, March 22nd.

What if the Boulder community doubled down on #BoulderStrong to show support for the small businesses located in the Table Mesa Shopping Center directly impacted by this tragedy? After an extremely challenging year trying to keep their businesses running through a global pandemic, the small shops and restaurants of the Table Mesa Shopping Center are now facing the near impossible task of trying to return to business-as-usual. I visited a few of these shops this week and have heard stories of employees hearing gunshots and being forced to shelter-in-place. The parking lots adjacent to King Soopers are occupied by police vehicles and mourners visiting the site. “Trying to hang in there, was a response I heard from one store owner when I asked how things were going. He looked exhausted.  

Moody’s proposal is simple.

1. Put on a mask and go shop at the Table Mesa Shopping Center this weekend (April 10-11).
2. While you’re shopping/eating, let the employees know you are thinking of them and that you appreciate the service they offer our community.
3. Consider leaving a bigger-than-normal tip! 

His post has a comprehensive list of all the stores in the shopping center. Help everyone who works there get some energy from the community. And – spread the word.

A mass shooting happened at a King Soopers on Table Mesa in Boulder Monday afternoon.

Amy and I are safe. So are our friends and family. But 10 people in Boulder, including one police officer, are dead.

The King Soopers was the one that Amy and I shopped at from 1996 – 2014 when we lived in Eldorado Canyon. I’ve been there hundreds of times. It was at the six-mile mark of my ten-mile run to town. Many friends live within minutes of it, including my brother and his family, my partner Chris Moody and his family, Amy’s current assistant Rebecca and her family, and Amy’s prior long-time assistant Naomi and her family.

Amy’s nephew Jason had gotten his groceries there fifteen minutes earlier. A friend of a board member worked there and snuck out the back. So did a neighbor of my brothers.

Whenever something tragic happens, the quick rationalization is “Well, at least that won’t happen here.” Boulder has always felt incredibly safe to me. I won’t even read a popular crime/thriller novelist whose books are set in Boulder because I don’t want anything to damage my calm.

My calm is very damaged right now. I was going to head out for a long run at the end of the day but couldn’t leave the house. I just sat with Amy, while she doom scrolled through Twitter and texted with friends and family. I ate something but don’t remember what it was. Upon reflection, that sounds a little like a shock response to me.

Last night, an endless set of IMs and emails rolled in checking on us. That calmed my nerves a little, to be loved, but I kept realizing how fragile and arbitrary things are. The phrase “the victims are in our thoughts and prayers” is nice, but it seems so inadequate. We find ourselves in 2021, still in a pandemic, with extraordinary heath, financial, and emotional stress everywhere, and then this.

Boulder has been a special place for me and Amy since we moved here in 1995. Evil showed up in our town yesterday.

Amy and I just underwrote one-year memberships to the Boulder Chamber of Commerce for 62 Black-owned businesses in Boulder.

Last summer, Aaron Clark started putting together a list of Black-owned Businesses in Boulder. The current list is at 62.

A few weeks ago, John Tayer at the Boulder Chamber mentioned an initiative he was working on with Aaron to get discounted memberships to all 62 companies. The Boulder Chamber is a long-standing and important part of the Boulder business community, and John has been a great leader for many years.

In an attempt to eliminate any friction associated with a decision for these 62 businesses to join the Boulder Chamber, Amy and I decided to underwrite their memberships for a year. I hope that all 62 will join, and the overall Boulder business community will engage deeply with and support these business owners.

I appreciate Aaron and John’s leadership enormously. I’ve gotten to know and work with Aaron on several initiatives over the past nine months, including participating in an equity learning initiative led by his firm Equity Solutions, supporting Justice Reskill, and experiencing a lot of equity activity Aaron has lead for Energize Colorado.

John recently did one of his Chamber Chats with Aaron. It’s a great overview of some of the work Aaron is doing, along with a discussion of Black History Month.

If you’d like an intro to Aaron or John, just email me.

Today, I’m helping amplify a $50,000 fundraiser for Sophie’s Neighborhood as part of World Pediatric Bone & Joint Day. Amy and I just contributed $25,000 so we are effectively matching any contributions dollar for dollar up to $50,000.

Whenever I feel exogenous stress from the world, it helps me lower it by doing something to support someone in need. The #Calwood fires just outside of Boulder that broke out on Saturday added to a pile from 2020 that is beyond anything I’ve experienced in my life.

Boulder is a magnificent city, but there are plenty of challenges for people everywhere. If you’ve eaten at Blackbelly, Santo, Jax Fish House, Dandelion, or Triana (remember Triana?), you probably know Chef Hosea Rosenberg. And you might know his wonderful wife Lauren and their delightful child Sophie.

Sophie has a rare disease called Multicentric carpotarsal osteolysis syndrome (MCTO). It is a skeletal disorder characterized by aggressive osteolysis associated with progressive nephropathy. Basically, serious stuff that is not well understood.

The Rosenberg’s have gone extremely deep on the science of the disease and are supporting a substantial amount of research, including:

• Cell line development to study the mutation and get a readout on what is going wrong in the gene that is mutated
• Screen existing drug libraries against the mutation to see if there is an already approved compound or small molecule (or drug undergoing clinical trials) that exists for drug repurposing 
• Examine proteomic differences caused by the mutation and identify a target protein for the treatment
• Development of iPS cells specific to Sophie’s variant to try and correct the error using gene-editing technology
• Study of the molecular mechanisms underlying the disease with a genetically modified MCTO mouse model
• Database with natural history disease tracking genotypes with disease phenotypes

It’s difficult to get sponsored research for diseases like this, so the Rosenbergs have been raising money to fund this activity.

There’s an extensive webpage if you want to learn more about Sophie’s Neighborhood, MCTO, research ongoing, and close friends supporting this like the indefatigable and remarkable Dr. Larry Gold.

Sophie is still in the “miracle window,” – the time in which her diagnosis is known, but symptoms are not yet very severe. But it is slipping away with each passing day. Funding is essential to continue the work to get closer to discovering or repurposing an effective and life-changing therapeutic.

If you are a Boulderite, have enjoyed any of Chef Hosea’s food at Blackbelly or Santo (or any of the other restaurants he’s worked at in the past), or just want to help try to figure out the cure for this rare disease, please join the fundraiser today and contribute to helping find a cure for MCTO.

A creative group of Boulder entrepreneurs, led by Vikas Reddy and Kyle Judah and inspired by San Franciso entrepreneurs/investors Frank Barbieri and Ryan Sarver have created and put into action a program that supports both frontline health workers and local independent restaurants.

They’ve created a program called Feed the Frontlines Boulder that lets the community donate meals from local restaurants to health workers on the frontlines. Health workers get a nourishing meal, and local restaurants get badly needed business to keep running and keep staff employed.

Feed the Frontlines Boulder was conceived and implemented in a week. We have one month of meals paid for through an initial contribution of $200,000 from me and Amy Batchelor, Dan and Cindy Caruso, John Goldsmith, and an anonymous donor.

We are now looking to raise another $200,000 for month two of Feed the Frontlines Boulder.

100% of the money goes to local restaurants. The first restaurants participating are Salt, Big Red F Restaurant Group, Kitchen Next Door, Japango, Blackbelly/Santo, and Community Kitchen Table. The food services partner at the hospital, BCH Food Services, has generously offered their trained staff and facilities to help receive, distribute, and store the meals delivered by the restaurants.

I’m blown away by the generosity and execution around this. I love that we are doing something to take care of our frontline hospital workers at BCH who are putting in an incredible effort around the Covid crisis that I expect to be extremely intense in April. And, I’m psyched that we are buying meals from local Boulder restaurants.

Following are three links in case you want to contribute in some way:

1. Contribute financially to the Feed the Frontlines Boulder Fund
2. Are a restaurant in Boulder County and want to participate
3. Want to Feed the Frontlines in your city

We depend on our frontline hospital workers right now. And, we all want to see our local restaurants survive this crisis, especially the short-term shut down of their businesses. If you have the resources or the interest, please help any way you can.

Amy and I recently joined a campaign created by Dave and Suzanne Hoover to fund a $100,000 match for the Impact on Education Foundation for Boulder Valley Schools Critical Needs Fund.

School closures due to COVID-19 have a direct impact on BVSD students and families. This fund supports BVSD food services to ensure families receive nutritious meals. It also provides school supplies to assist with at-home learning.

On Monday, I talked about our matching gifts to Boulder Community Health Covid-19 Relief Fund and the Covid-19 Response Fund Boulder County. Both funds have happily completed their match, but are continuing to raise additional money. They are both Covid-19 Relief Funds to consider if you want to support immediate and high-impact activity in Boulder.

Amy and I are continuing to work with specific organizations and volunteer teams in Boulder County on creative and immediate matching campaigns. We have at least one more coming next week, but if you have financial resources, please support anything that appeals to you.

If you are looking for specific organizations to fund, the following are some that Amy and I are long time supporters of that have an immediate impact in Boulder County, organized by the category they address.

Seniors: Meals on Wheels and Via Transportation Services

Kids: Community Food Share, EFAA Emergency Family Assistance, Donors Choose, and Attention Homes 

Domestic Violence / Child Abuse: Blue Sky Bridge and Safehouse Shelter

Hospice / Critical Illness: There With Care and TRU Hospice

If you want to see all the organizations Amy and I support, take a look at our Anchor Point Foundation site. But the ones listed above are the ones we think have an immediate impact.

If you have any others to suggest, or know of active campaigns in Boulder County highly relevant to the Covid-19 crisis, please put them in the comments.

Every day counts right now in the Covid fight, so if you have resources and the inclination to give, please do.

As the world shifts underneath us around Covid-19, Amy and I have focused our immediate philanthropic efforts on our local community in Boulder County.

If you have the ability to contribute anything philanthropically, helping locally will make a huge difference right now. While many of us are hunkered down at home, we’ve got numerous frontline providers at hospitals and in the community out in public helping us all get through this.

Amy and I made two matching gifts in Boulder County. Note that we are focusing on “Boulder County”, not just “the City of Boulder” right now as many of the people who serve us in the city of Boulder live in the surrounding towns that make up Boulder County.

The first gift is to BCH for the Boulder Community Health Foundation COVID-19 Response Fund. They have identified two priorities.

1. BCH People: Assist BCH staff who are facing unanticipated financial challenges (e.g., needing child care due to the closing of schools, financial hardship from a spouse/partner being out of work, etc.). BCH will provide the assistance they need by significantly expanding the depth and breadth of support provided by the BCH Employee Assistance Fund.
2. Remove any barriers to providing the best treatment for COVID–19. Support BCH’s significant investment in their testing capability, expanding telehealth access, and planning for an increase in cases, including supply management, space capacity, and flex training for our staff and physicians.

The other gift is to the Community Foundation Serving Boulder County for the Community Foundation COVID-19 Response Fund Boulder County. This fund will ensure essential services for community members who find themselves at the intersection of being most vulnerable to the virus and most impacted by inequity. It will focus on continuing access to care, food, hygiene, shelter, housing, and other services for the most vulnerable.

If you have any financial giving capacity of any amount, please consider a gift to either the Boulder Community Health Foundation COVID-19 Response Fund or the Community Foundation COVID-19 Response Fund Boulder County. Your support today will make a difference right now.

My partners at Foundry Group have decided to bring the Helium Network to Boulder. We’ve ordered 50 hotspots and, with your help, will set up a LongFi network throughout Boulder.

If you are asking, “What’s Helium?” here’s a fun video to get you started along with a deeper explanation of the technology.

https://youtu.be/Vx9YyS7-d3g

As an LP in USV, we are small indirect investors. But, as a way to engage with a particular blockchain-based application/technology that we think has meaningful real-world potential, we thought we’d help enable a network in Boulder and see how it works.

We are looking for about 40 locations throughout Boulder (not just downtown) to set up hotspots. All you have to do is connect the Helium hotspot to the Internet. We’ll handle the rest.

If this is interesting to you, please fill out the Boulder Helium Hotspot Application. We are only choosing 40 locations, and we are going to spread them out as best as we can, so if you aren’t chosen, and you still want to be part of this, you can always buy a Helium Hotspot directly.

The level of histrionics yesterday about the weather on the front range that is coming has been epic. I’ve lived here since 1995 and the amount of fear, anxiety, discussion, preparation, and public commentary is higher than I can ever recall (and yes – I’m now contributing to it.)

As I sit here at my computer looking out my window in Longmont, it’s cloudy and raising episodically (hard a few minutes ago, but it has now stopped.) The clouds are dark and heavy to the east, low and snowy to the west, and light to the south. It’s just weird and made me think of what the eye of a hurricane must feel like.

Everything in Boulder is closing in advance of the storm. I had two meetings in person today – one canceled and I went ahead and canceled the other one just for flexibility. I expect DIA is going to be a total mess although the status is pretty normal right now.

I wonder what this would have been like 30 years ago, pre-commercial Internet and World Wide Web. How much of this is excitement amplified by immediate transmittal of information of an extremely wide variety of accuracy?

Or maybe a snowpocalypse is really coming. I guess we’ll know in a couple of hours (it’s now predicted to start around noon.)

I’ve been in San Diego with Amy for a while but we are returning to Boulder in a week. San Diego has been great, but I miss my dogs, my friends, and the Colorado vibe.

When people ask me about the Colorado vibe, I often talk about GiveFirst. Soon there will be a book (by me) on this, but for now there’s an increasing amount of content on the web building up to explain it. This article in the Colorado Sun – How Techstars’ “GiveFirst” mantra became a road map for the startup community in Colorado and beyond – was excellent and had numerous short examples of how GiveFirst works and influences a startup community.

Next up is a fun article by my co-author of Startup Communities Way (my new Startup Communities book – coming up mid-year 2019) Ian Hathaway. A few days ago he cranked out a post titled Colorado is for Founders. I love that phrase and he led off the post with this great tweet from Phil Weiser.

Excited to work with our new Governor and my client to be, @jaredpolis. pic.twitter.com/5jOv1K0gDL

— Phil Weiser (@pweiser) December 5, 2018

He goes on to explain Jared and Phil’s huge accomplishments and impacts around startups and the startup community. The punch line in the post is:

“By many measures, Colorado is the most entrepreneurial state in the country, a fact that I discovered in 2013 when studying high-technology business formation around the United States. I was struck by just how many places across the state had a high proportion of startup activity occurring—a finding that has been extended to looking across other types of high-growth entrepreneurship as well. Something special is happening there, and it has been for many years.”

I’ll end with the Holiday Gift Guide from Techstars. If you want to give someone you know the gift of something from a Techstars company this holiday season, here are the choices all in one place.

Happy Friday Colorado. See you in a week.

Google Boulder recently did a phenomenal thing. They recently gave a gift of over $2 million to CU Boulder, which included free office space for NCWIT for the next six years (valued at $1.3 million.) As of a few weeks ago, NCWIT now has a great long-term home in an older Google office on 26th Street in Boulder off of the CU Campus.

The head of Google Boulder (I think his official title in Googlespeak is “Engineering Site Director”) is Scott Green. I’ve known Scott since shortly after I moved to Boulder in 1995. He was an early employee at Email Publishing (which became MessageMedia), my very first Boulder-based angel investment. After MessageMedia, he spent some time working at Return Path (where I’ve been an investors since 2000) early in its life before moving to @Last (which we were not investors in, but were fans of since some of our friends, including Brian Makare (the co-founder of Email Publishing) and Mark Solon (then of Highway 12, now at Techstars) were investors.) While Scott and I don’t spend a lot of time together, we’ve both been part of the evolution of the Boulder startup community going back to the late 1990s.

In 2006, Google bought @Last (makers of SketchUp). That was the beginning of Google’s presence in Boulder, which is now around 1,000 people on a new, very nice, and well-integrated campus in the middle of town. Scott and the Google team have always been great corporate citizens of the startup community, offering up their larger event space on a regular basis, participating in, and sponsoring, many of the local startup events over the years, and generally just being a constructive and healthy part of the mix. Google’s continued expanded presence in Boulder is a positive reflection on the overall startup community and their new campus is a really nice addition to our little city in the mountains.

NCWIT (National Center for Women & Information Technology) has long been a hidden gem of Boulder. I got involved shortly after it was founded in 2004 and became the board chair in 2005 (which I served as until I resigned all my non-profit board positions at the end of last year.) I’m still deeply involved and it is a major initiative of the Anchor Point Foundation (the foundation that Amy and I run.)

Physical office space at CU Boulder has always been a struggle for NCWIT. When the organization was small, it fit nicely in a corner of the CU Roser ATLAS Center on the second floor. Amy and I were appreciative of this and sponsored the bathrooms on this floor of ATLAS. As NCWIT grew, they crammed into a small space, then overflowed it, expanded a little, but then lost it in a mysterious space shuffle that I’ve never really understood. Eventually, NCWIT moved over to some old space in the engineering building, but the space was poorly configured, had no cell signal, and wasn’t secure.

At the beginning of 2017, Lucy Sanders (NCWIT CEO) and I started looking for other space in Boulder. We tried to get different space on CU’s campus but were unsuccessful. We had a few near misses with commercial space, but either the economics didn’t work out or the space wasn’t right. Last summer, Google Boulder engaged as their new campus was opening up. A few weeks ago, NCWIT moved into their new, long-term home.

I’m incredibly appreciative for what Google Boulder has done here for NCWIT. It makes me extremely happy to see a #GiveFirst approach from Google in our startup community, along with the extensive support for NCWIT. It’s always nice to be part of an organization that is on the receiving end of this kind of generosity, especially one as deserving as NCWIT.

Scott, Google, and the rest of your team at Google Boulder – THANK YOU!

It’s awesome how Startup Week and Weekend have grown from an experiment here in Boulder into a global set of events that are now housed under the Techstars umbrella.

I’m not doing my usual crazy schedule of running around to panels and events as I’ll be out of town for most of the week but wanted to highlight a few events I’m especially excited about.

Amy and I supported the Pledge 1% Colorado Nonprofit Pitch contest last year with a $10,000 grant through our Anchor Point Foundation and are happily doing it again this year. This and other Social Impact Track events are working to engage the broader startup community and expand Startup Week beyond just high-tech startups.

You can view the schedule and RSVP for the Social Impact Track events and P1% Nonprofit pitch contest 5/15 here and here. And, if you’re so inclined, you can promote with a click to tweet as well!

If you are around Boulder next week or want to see the Boulder community at it’s finest, check out the BSW schedule and join in on the fun.

JumpCloud, one of the fastest growing companies in Colorado, is looking for awesome Developers, QA engineers, DevOps admins, and Customer Success Engineers. Over the next year, they are planning to hire 50 people for the engineering team and about 70 across the entire company.

JumpCloud is focused on delivering cloud-based directory services via a SaaS model. They are trying to solve some very difficult problems around identity, authentication, security, and cloud scaling.

JumpCloud’s mission deeply resonates with me because they are disrupting a two decade old monopoly in directory services and giving IT organizations freedom of choice with their IT solutions. It’s an exciting space and we (Foundry Group, OpenView, and Techstars Ventures) are betting that the JumpCloud team has the winning approach.

Since 1994, I’ve worked with the CEO, Rajat Bhargava, on eight companies and I’m psyched about the company and culture that the team is building there.

If you are up for a new challenge leveraging modern technology platforms at a well-funded startup in Boulder, drop the JumpCloud team a note or feel free to email me and I’ll connect you up with them.

Bobby Schnabel has returned to CU Boulder as the College of Engineering and Applied Science faculty director for entrepreneurial leadership, external chair of computer science, and campus thought-leader on computing.

I first met and worked with Bobby in the mid-2000s at the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), where he was a co-founder and on the board with me. Bobby is awesome and I’m really psyched he’s back in Boulder at CU.

While you may not know Bobby, this is a huge add for CU Boulder and the Boulder Startup Community. Bobby has a long history with CU Boulder. He was on the computer science faculty of the University of Colorado Boulder from 1977-2007, and Vice Provost for Academic and Campus Technology and Chief Information Officer from 1998-2007, and founding director of the Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society (ATLAS) 1997-2007.

In 2007 when he left CU Boulder to become the Dean of the School of Informatics and Computer at Indiana University I was bummed for CU Boulder (but happy for Bobby and Indiana University.) When he joined the Association for Computer Machinery as CEO in 2015, I had the sense in the back of my mind that he might make his way back to Boulder at some point.

Bobby is returning to CU Boulder to strengthen the partnership between the incredible tech business and startup community we have in the Boulder area and in Colorado, and the tech-programs at CU Boulder.

Welcome back, Bobby! And, if you are in the Boulder Startup Community and want to connect with Bobby at some point, just give me a shout.

On October 19th, Engage Boulder is hosting a breakfast with me from 7:30am to 9:30am to discuss the past, present, and future of Boulder. I’ve lived and worked here since 1995 so I’ve seen, and be involved in, a lot of the evolution of our city over this period of time. I’m hoping to have a thoughtful and open conversation about a lot of the issues that are coming up around our local election. If you are interested, please join us.

Recently, the Daily Camera did an excellent series of profiles on the fourteen candidates running for the five open Boulder City Council positions. I recently endorsed five specific people: Jan Burton, Eric Budd, Jill Grano, Mark McIntyre, and Bill Rigler. Following are excellent profiles from interviews with each of them that I encourage you to read to get to know them, and their viewpoints, better.

Jan Burton: Bring smarter budgeting of time and money to Boulder

Eric Budd: Tech-savvy new urbanist wants younger voices in Boulder politics

Jill Adler Grano: Real estate pro pushes new ideas for Boulder zoning

Mark McIntyre: Boulder is changing, should continue to innovate

Bill Rigler: Lone renter on Boulder ballot says better public process within reach

Our local election, like our recent national election, has had some extreme animus creep into it. It’s not my nature to engage with what I view as irrational and ad-hominem hostility, especially when I view it as disingenuous. So, I was happy to see the Editorial by Dave Krieger, for the Daily Camera editorial board, call some of this out in a measured way. It’s worth a read, but listed are a few of the key statements.

“We came away convinced that Boulder will be in capable hands no matter which five of the 14 are elected. We think some of the fear-mongering that has already appeared in the campaign verges on the ridiculous.”

“We think today’s Boulder is a vibrant, bustling small city known nationally for the cutting-edge research of its university, federal labs and high-tech sector, but struggling to maintain its historically funky feel due to soaring property values and creeping gentrification. So we endorse forward-looking candidates seeking innovative ways to keep Boulder from becoming a gated community of wealthy white folks. We think this is what “progressive” means in the 21st century.”

“We do not share the view that Boulder is going to hell in a handbasket. There is no question it has undergone a growth spurt since the last recession, in part based on pent-up demand from that slowdown. It could have done a better job encouraging creative design of new buildings that better fit their surroundings. We have high hopes that a new planning director, in concert with a new council, may improve this process.”

“Colorado’s growth appears to be slowing, which may allow everyone to take a breath and lower the civic temperature. Boulder has too much going for it to engage in a divisive war choosing among a strong slate of City Council candidates.”

If you are game to have a calm and constructive conversation around this, please join me for breakfast on 10/19.

Amy and I have always believed in this value and importance of voting. If there was any doubt about how this can impact our society, that doubt was obliterated in the 2016 election.

Boulder has an odd-year election cycle so our local elections are happening between October 16, 2017 (ballots get mailed) and November 7, 2017 (the last day to vote). Historically, less than half of the registered voters in town have voted in our local elections. A group of us, led by Engage Boulder hope that meaningfully increases (both the registered voters and the ones who choose to vote) this year.

Having lived and worked here for almost 22 years (longer than I’ve lived anywhere else by a wide margin), I now feel like I understand the strengths and weaknesses of Boulder. I get the difference of opinions about the long-term view of the city. I think we are living in an amazing place, but we have a lot of work to do to both keep it amazing and have it continue to evolve in a healthy, productive, and successful way.

As a result, I believe that our city council election is critically important. In the past, I’ve voted but I have not been public about my endorsements, nor have I put much energy into helping the candidates I endorse get elected. This election feels different for me, partly because I’m now thinking a lot about the long-term health of Boulder, but also because I feel like the low voter turnout in past elections shows that the broader population is not necessarily being represented.

I’ve decided to endorse Jan Burton, Eric Budd, Jill Grano, Mark McIntyre, and Bill Rigler.

These are the same endorsements being made by Open Boulder, Better Boulder, and Engage Boulder, three organizations that I support along with a number of other community leaders.

We have chosen to endorse these five candidates because of their commitments to bring visionary and practical strategies to:

• Create more housing and transportation for all Boulder residents;
• Make our streets and paths safer;
• Meet Boulder’s carbon reduction goals;
• Keep Boulder open for entrepreneurs and the ecosystem that encourages them;
• Make Boulder attractive for creative people, in the arts, research, and elsewhere;
• Maintain a balance of conservation and recreation access on our open space.

While I don’t necessarily agree with every position of each of these candidates, I strongly believe they are all smart, thoughtful, willing to engage, and capable of thinking long-term about what is good for our city and community.

Voting in Boulder is easy. If you haven’t registered to vote, please register now. And, Engage Boulder is having voter-oriented events several times a week between now and the election – get involved!