So let me start with the easy part. Colorado is going to be in good hands regardless of who wins the Democratic primary on June 30th. Whoever wins is highly likely to be our next governor, and they’ll be a smart, decent, and hardworking person in the job. I’ve spent real time with both Phil and Michael over many years. I’d be glad to have either one as governor of Colorado.

That said, I’m supporting Phil.

Not because Michael isn’t excellent. He is. It’s because of what I’ve learned about Phil from working alongside him for the past 25 years.

I met Phil in 1999, when he founded the Silicon Flatirons Center at CU Boulder. (The name is terrible, and I’ve teased him about it for over two decades.) That’s where I first saw how he works. Over the years we collaborated on Startup Colorado, Governor Bill Ritter’s Innovation Council, and a long list of other projects. But the part that stuck with me was never really about any of the work we did together. It was watching how Phil shows up and engages with people around complex issues.

He listens. He acknowledges when he’s wrong, and he changes his mind when he gets new and compelling data. He can get people who see things very differently to work on something together.

He asks “how can I help,” and then he does the actual work. That’s rare. My experience is that a lot of people in government say “how can I help” as a throwaway line. Phil means it, and he’s been doing it in Colorado for a long time.

Phil has never done this for just one kind of Coloradan. As a law school dean, he put young lawyers into rural district attorney offices that couldn’t fill the jobs. He helped start CareerWise, which builds apprenticeships and real careers for kids who aren’t going to college. He fought to get broadband to the parts of the state people on the Front Range often forget about, except when driving west on I-70. For the last seven years, as our Attorney General, he’s been the people’s lawyer - going after the scams that prey on seniors, the companies that cheat working families, and the opioid epidemic that hit small Colorado towns the hardest.

The next four years are going to be challenging ones for Colorado. People across the whole state - in Denver, on the Eastern Plains, and on the Western Slope - are worried about the cost of living, whether their kids can afford to stay here, and whether the next generation gets the same opportunities they did. I want a governor who has spent his whole career working for the Coloradans who usually get overlooked, not just the ones who were always going to be fine. That’s Phil.

Michael is one of the most thoughtful people in American public life. If he wins, I’ll support him, cheer him on, and help him in any way I can. I just think Phil is the right fit for this particular moment.

Because Foundry is a registered investment advisor, I’m only allowed to give “a nominal amount” to Phil’s campaign. So I’m doing the thing I’m allowed to do, which is use my voice. My partner Seth wrote a terrific post laying out more of the specifics, especially around policy. Go read his post. Then go look at philforcolorado.com.

Ballots are out now. The primary is June 30th. Please vote.

On Saturday, May 31st, from 3:30 to 5:00 PM in downtown Denver, I’ll have a public conversation with Phil Weiser about various topics, including technology and innovation in Colorado. We will also talk about what (and how) we’ve learned from each other over the years and how we’ve worked constructively through disagreements, conflicts, and mistakes.

Phil’s blog post Startup Community Leadership discusses many of the things he’s done to positively impact the Colorado startup community. My journey with Phil started in 1999 when he co-founded a new center at CU Boulder: the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship. While unfortunately named (I hate the name Silicon X for anything, and over the years, I’ve teased Phil many times about this), this began a collaboration between us that resulted in organizations like Startup Colorado and BEN Colorado. It also resulted in the New Technology Meetup, the Entrepreneurial Law Clinic, the Entrepreneurs Unplugged Series, and CU Boulder’s New Venture Challenge.

If you’ve read my book Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, you know about the incredible impact that Phil and Brad Bernthal had on engaging CU Boulder with the Boulder Startup Community, starting around 2007. It meaningfully impacted how I thought about how the culture across a University could be changed around entrepreneurship and engagement with a local startup community. I attribute much of the early leadership here to Phil and Brad, who worked as incredible thought partners early on the new approach to developing startup communities I codified in that book, and it has now had a global impact.

Given the other public conversations Phil and I have had, including one with Jamie Dimon at CU Boulder as part of Entrepreneurs Unplugged, I expect we will cover a wide range of topics. It’s a chance to get to know another side of Phil and better understand how we’ve learned from each other over the past 25 years on technology, entrepreneurship, startup community development, government involvement with technology and innovation, leadership, and mentorship.

Anyone who attends will receive a copy of my newest book, Give First: The Power of Mentorship, which I will happily sign if they wish.

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.

Step back and think about it a little. A surprising number of entrepreneurs have legal backgrounds. A legal education is a great grounding in systems thinking, which can be applied to many businesses, especially as their scale up dramatically. And, in a world that needs less lawyers and more entrepreneurs, repurposing some of the brightest non-technical graduate students to be entrepreneurs is a neat idea. See – that’s not so strange.

Phil Weiser, the Dean of the CU Law School, is a good friend. Phil also totally groks entrepreneurship and is aggressively applying it to the vision, the curriculum, and the operations of CU Law. Following are some thoughts of his that recently appeared in an article in the ABA Journal titled Five initiatives that legal education needs.

Just like every other corner of the profession, legal education is grappling with a New Normal that was barely appreciated as recently as four or five years ago.

Even as law schools welcomed incoming classes this year, the mood has changed. And it’s no secret why.

Applications are down nationally for the third year in a row. And larger law firms aresignificantly cutting back on their entry-level hiring. The American Bar Association is also starting to focus on changes to legal education, recently releasing a draft report (PDF) from the Task Force on the Future of Legal Education.

Change is happening, and that’s a good thing.

The upside of today’s New Normal is that law schools have the opportunity to develop a new generation of lawyers who are more purposeful than ever before about how to develop and navigate their careers. These graduates will be legal entrepreneurs. By that, I mean lawyers—whether working in government, nonprofits, law firms, consulting firms, or businesses—who take ownership of their career paths and develop the tool kit necessary to add value and succeed wherever they work. Developing legal entrepreneurs, however, requires a commitment to innovation and experimentation that until recently has not been traditionally associated with legal academia.

To underscore the range of emerging innovations needed in legal academia, consider the following five initiatives now taking place in legal education:

1. Build an entrepreneurial mindset. Training law students to develop an entrepreneurial mindset is foundational for the New Normal. The reality is that large law firms are employing fewer and fewer law graduates, and the early interview week model is not what it once was. As such, law schools need to reorient their students’ thinking about their careers. An entrepreneurial mindset is a must in the New Normal, and law students need to heed LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman’s teachings in The Start-up of You. How law schools will transmit those lessons to a notoriously risk-averse group remains to beseen. But the age of law school as a risk-free option for people who expect a job to be handed to them at the end is over.

2. Challenge employers on entry-level hiring. Challenging employers to think differently about entry-level hiring and summer jobs is a critical to adjusting to the New Normal. The marketplace for legal talent is incredibly traditional, and the resistance of employers to experiment is a formidable challenge to creating new opportunities for recent law school graduates. Most law students would welcome the chance to work at any number of successful law firms or in-house organizations in a temporary capacity over the summer or even upon graduation—even at lower rates than traditional summer associate or associate positions—because such jobs can offer valuable opportunities to build marketable skills and develop important networks, connections, and references. And such opportunities present firms with the chance to use the talents of these students or recent graduates. But a big impediment to developing such an opportunity is that firms often believe that they cannot provide them if they are not prepared to offer a long-term job when the student graduates. A number of law schools are taking this issue head on, such as the Cardozo New Resident Associate Mentor Program and, in Colorado, where both law schools (the University of Colorado and the University of Denver) are collaborating on a Legal Residency program that encourages law firms or other employers to hire a recent graduate for 12 to 18 months, offer a quality experience, and provide apprenticeship outside of the traditional associate track.

3. Compress law school education and couple with experience. Law schools can couple a 2.5 year degree with a quality experience. The opportunity to graduate in 2.5 years, which can be achieved through accelerated schedules that permit saving a semester, is increasingly appealing as tuition costs has risen greatly over the past decade. Law schools encouraging such paths can work with partners like Cisco’s general counsel Mark Chandler, who is welcoming paid interns for seven months at Cisco from June 1st after their second year until the following January, enabling students to graduate not only with less debt, but with more experience.

4. Provide multidisciplinary training. Law schools increasingly are providing their students with multidisciplinary training, including but not limited to key business skills. The New Normal means that “thinking like a lawyer” is not enough; we need lawyers who can “think like clients.” For lawyers to understand their clients, they need to learn their businesses. This concept applies to those working in the public sector as well as the private sector; lawyers with domain knowledge of the fields they are practicing in are simply more likely to succeed than those without such knowledge. This means more nontraditional courses, more interdisciplinary courses, and more “boot camp”-type experiences.

5. Engage with the community. Law schools need to engage with their communities, get to know their success stories, and reverse-engineer them. The reality is that law firm hiring is not coming back, and a core challenge for law schools is to develop nontraditional opportunities—such as ones in business development, compliance, human resources, and public policy—for law school graduates with the right skill sets. The challenge is that developing such partnerships and opportunities is a long game. But the forces that shaped today’s New Normal were a long time coming; the actions that will enable law schools to adapt will take time as well.

Experimentation, innovation, and the New Normal. In 2008, most law school deans were living in the Old Normal. Today, all law school deans know that they are in a New Normal. The reality is that the shaping of today’s environment took place over a long period of time, even if we did realize it while it was happening. As such, developing a new model will not happen overnight. But momentum is building. The broad outlines of the New Normal—the need for a more entrepreneurial mindset, more community engagement, more multidisciplinary training, and new (and nontraditional) employment pathways—are now taking shape through experiments all over the country. The exciting part of this emerging paradigm is that it is still very much a work in progress, and law schools have the opportunity to develop creative partnerships and innovations to support our students in a changing and challenging environment.