There was a pretty decent-sized crowd of several dozen or so people sitting in a downtown Denver skyscraper this week to hear about the different programs run by Colorado’s economic development office to support startups.
The group was there for Colorado Startup Week, an annual opportunity for the state’s entrepreneurs to mingle and talk shop.
Up until this year, the conference was called Denver Startup Week.
“It was important for us to include not just the Denver metro and the Front Range, but really tell the entire narrative of innovation, entrepreneurship, and founders across the entire state of Colorado,” said Erik Mitisek, a co-founder of the 15-year-old event.
Judging by a show of hands, most of the people in attendance at the session about government programs started their own company. The businesses ran the gamut from high tech to dog treats, and everything in between.
Scott Bessin founded Blind Vine with a friend in Boulder.
“We're a wine tasting company,” Bessin said. “You can buy a wine kit from us and play a game. It's a mobile app game that kind of plays like a trivia game and teaches you about wine and brings people together and it's a lot of fun.”
A longtime software engineer, he’s working on the business full-time now after getting laid off from his job at a supply chain software company a couple of months ago. He’s at the conference for networking and to learn.
“A lot of times at conferences like this, you get a lot of energy, get one idea from every session,” he said.
Not everybody in attendance is from Colorado. Theresa Smith came all the way from Reston, Virginia. She runs a company called Sphere of Influence that does AI consulting for the government.
“We are originally from the Colorado, New Mexico area, but moved to the Washington, D.C., area just for more experiences, more contacts, that kind of thing,” she said. “I'm kind of interested in what the startup vibe is in Colorado … I'm also trying to figure out what our plan is to really participate in the startup market here in Colorado and what we could do here.”
She said the scene is more vibrant than she was expecting.
“I think it's really interesting. Honestly, I think there's a lot more going on here than I would've first thought,” Smith said.
Conference organizers anticipate between 8,000 and 10,000 attendees showing up this year. That’s roughly half what it was during the peak year in 2020, according to Mitisek.
But the crowd has been growing a little bigger every year since the pandemic all but shut the conference down in 2020, when the event was forced to go remote.
“We feel like we're trending in the right direction to build something that's back to the scale that we once were,” Mitisek said. “Each year, we've been kind of chipping back to some of those all-time highs.”
