It was so awesome visiting Colorado Startup Week this year!

Artificial Intelligence

Colorado has an amazing AI community, with Colorado AI Builders and Let’s Vibe offering ongoing events. I missed the Crusoe session, but would love to learn more about what they are up to as well.

I loved Charles Holloway’s talk, Build Your Own Harness for Fun and Profit. Harness engineering is at the frontier where agent self-improvement is actually happening. Authority, observability, durable execution look like good places to focus on.

Slide titled "Now it can improve itself" with three cards: the prompt, search over system prompts instead of writing one; the harness, generate and score variants of the harness code itself; and the weights, fold what just happened back into the model
From Build Your Own Harness for Fun and Profit by Charles Holloway

Startups

The entrepreneurial ecosystem is growing and changing too. My former colleague Lindsey Rohde and Micah Mador from Colorado Startups provide a starting and scaling place for entrepreneurs building the next generation of companies. Tommy Knoll and Joseph Logan are kicking off a new initiative, the Colorado Innovation Institute, to help position the state as the most attractive place in the world to innovate.

Tech Leadership

Jason Cole leads the Denver chapter of CTO Lunches, and the Colorado Startup Week edition brought over 100 tech leaders to the upper floor of Wynkoop Brewing for free food, drinks, and good conversation. My friends at Initial Capacity were there to support, and Technical Integrity generously sponsored yet another vital piece of the local tech scene.

McKinsey chart titled "The CTO position is unusually broad and complex", placing chief information, digital, design, innovation, and technology officers on a grid of business, product, and technology against internal and external focus, with the chief technology officer spanning the widest area
From McKinsey's Why you need a CTO, via CTO Lunches

Climate

Not officially part of Colorado Startup Week, but Colorado Cleantech celebrated its 18th birthday on a Denver rooftop and used the night to launch its Dealroom, a platform for finding the companies, investors, and organizations working in cleantech across the state. I met some great folks doing inspiring things like metering building externalities with lasers and creating new pluggable solar startups.

Food Recovery, Circularity, and Community Resilience

My favorite event of the week was this panel, with State Representative Lisa Feret, Jamie Gott from the City of Westminster, Ally Byzewski from Recycle Colorado, and John Akinboyewa, founder of The HungreeApp. Katie Kruger of Avison Young moderated.

Event banner for Food Recovery, Circularity, and Community Resilience: Building Colorado's Future Together, with headshots of five speakers

Lisa helped pass HB25-1166 and HB25-1059, which extend liability protections for food donors and encourage schools to set up share tables, composting, and donation programs. She explained that a law is only step one, and it takes a step two after the policy for real action or impact. Lisa tries to normalize bringing plastic containers to gatherings to help avoid wasting food, and emphasized bringing people into the decision-making process, not just telling them what to do.

Jamie Gott is working to make sure all apartment complexes in Westminster have space for a recycling bin, to increase equity. She works hard to avoid interrupting existing partnerships in the community, and instead uses the “carrot method” to incent businesses to help reduce waste, while educating stakeholders to get past the stigma around liability and risk that comes with food recovery. John from The HungreeApp added that borrowing butter or salt from a neighbor is a cliché, not a new idea, but still a real coordination challenge.

Thanks to all the organizers, speakers, and sponsors who made Colorado Startup Week happen!