Boulder Startup Week 2025

The Variety Show ranks among the best ways to engage with Colorado’s Front Range entrepreneurial community. Now in its third year, Variety Show stitches together the startup scene, CU Boulder, innovators from the Federal Labs, as well as technologists from incumbent technology companies.

The Startup Variety Show puts the spotlight on the most creative minds in the area. Variety Show sessions regularly feature the following:

Entrepreneurs who highlight promising startups from Colorado’s Front Range
Compelling technology-oriented research from CU Boulder and the Federal Labs
New projects from incumbent technology companies with offices in the Front Range
Investors discussing their fund’s thesis and/or trends in investing
Potpourri (tech and the arts, legal or policy issues, or other community items of interest)
Food, drink, and opportunity to meet other people involved in the innovation and entrepreneurship community.
EXTERNAL REGISTRATION REQUIRED:
https://web.cvent.com/event/bee95a34-bf3d-4b9c-8b88-c47444e6b0e5/regProcessStep1

While I was Co-Founder and COO of Atomos Space, I juggled executing on the company's vision with meeting the obligations of all stakeholders. As founders, we charge ahead with what we think is best. When it comes to issuing shares in your company, however, the IRS, SEC, and the State of Colorado have much to say on what you can and cannot do. The Securities Act of 1933, the Uniformed Securities Act, IRC 409(a), IRC 83(b), SEC 701…The variety and complexity of equity compensation can be convoluted and time consuming.

In my new role as VP of Finance and Investments with The Millstone Evans Group, I want to help founders, start-ups, and employees learn from my experience (and mistakes) so that they can make better, faster decisions and get back to building. In this overview of equity compensation, I talk through the basics of corporate governance, the nuances of a Stock Incentive Plan, and the implications of the three most common types of grants given to employees.

As a founder or early employee at a SaaS startup, design decisions can make or break your product adoption and growth trajectory. Yet most startups struggle with when to invest in design, who to hire, and how to evolve their design practice as they scale. Drawing from experience leading research and design at Fuego UX, this session unpacks practical frameworks for implementing effective design processes at each stage of your startup journey.

We'll walk through the essential design milestones that align with your funding rounds and business goals - from DIY design in the earliest days to building sophisticated design systems as you scale. You'll learn when to hire your first designer, how to leverage fractional design talent, and when to build an in-house team. We'll explore practical methods for sharing and testing designs with real users, documenting feedback, and transforming insights into actionable product improvements.

For founders without design backgrounds, you'll gain actionable strategies to develop your design intuition and vocabulary, helping you make informed decisions even before you can afford dedicated design talent. For technical teams, we'll cover collaboration models that integrate design thinking throughout your development process.

By the end of this session, you'll walk away with:

A stage-appropriate design roadmap aligned with your current growth phase
* Hiring guidelines for design talent based on your product maturity
* Simple but effective user testing methods that won't break your budget
* Strategies to evolve your design system as your product grows
* Frameworks for cross-functional collaboration around design

Bring your specific design challenges for the Q&A portion, where we'll tackle real examples from the audience.

97% of your ideal buyers aren’t ready to talk to sales—but they are forming opinions and making early decisions.

They’re learning about their problems, looking for fresh ideas, and identifying who seems credible and helpful. If your team isn’t visible during this early research, you miss the chance to shape their thinking and earn their trust before they narrow their options.

Being seen at this stage is not just about creating marketing noise. It’s about making sure the right voices are sharing the right messages with the right people.

Buyers want to hear from people who understand their world—and they’re more likely to trust peers who speak their language. That’s why aligning your team’s voices with the roles of your target buyers matters.

Imagine a finance expert from your team speaking directly to CFOs. Or an ops lead sharing firsthand lessons with operations teams. These role-to-role conversations earn trust before the shortlist is built.

It’s more than content. It’s connection. And it can be the difference between being considered and being ignored.

This session shows how to:

* Take conversations you’re already having and turn them into buyer-centric content
* Use AI to turn them into LinkedIn posts, blogs, and articles
* Find places to publish where your target audience already hangs out
* Publish content that builds trust across key buyer roles

This will be an interactive session where members of the audience will get a chance to share what’s working for you. So come ready to learn from your peers and bring your own success stories.

Leave with practical next steps you can start using right away.

Do you have questions around syndicating funds for investment?
Are you curious what it looks like to participate as an investor alongside others as one line on the cap table?
How costly and complex is it really to run a syndication? Is it worth it?Join this session to learn about the ins and outs of syndicating investments and what to expect (as an investor and as a founder.)Natalie Levy, the Managing Partner of She's Independent, will lead this session. She's Independent is an investment group syndicating (group investing) in early-stage businesses from Pre-Seed to Series A.

Are you a startup founder preparing to raise venture capital? Understanding the legal aspects of fundraising can make the difference between a smooth financing round and a costly, time-consuming process. Join us for this practical masterclass that demystifies the essential legal instruments and documents used in early-stage startup fundraising.

Who Should Attend:
Founders planning to raise venture capital
Startup team members involved in fundraising decisions and process

What You'll Learn:
Deep dive into SAFEs: Understanding how they work, when to use them, and their key components including valuation caps and discount rates
Convertible Notes vs. SAFEs: Clear comparison to help you choose the right instrument for your startup
Term Sheet fundamentals: Navigate the critical elements of term sheets, including valuation terms, economic provisions, and control/governance matters
Common pitfalls: Learn about the most frequent fundraising mistakes and how to avoid them

Key Takeaways:
Practical understanding of fundraising instruments and when to use them
Ability to evaluate and negotiate key terms in investment documents
Confidence in managing legal aspects of your fundraising process
Framework for making informed decisions about your startup's financing strategy

Why This Matters:
As a founder, you need to make crucial decisions about your startup's funding structure that will impact your company's future. This session will equip you with the knowledge to make informed choices, understand investor expectations, and protect your interests while building strong investor relationships.

The session combines theoretical knowledge with practical insights, using real-world examples and industry-standard documents (including NVCA model documents) to provide you with actionable knowledge you can apply immediately in your fundraising journey.

Don't let legal complexity stand in the way of your startup's growth. Gain the essential knowledge you need to navigate early-stage fundraising with confidence from some of the industry's top startup/venture capital lawyers.

Join Rockies Venture Club for Angel Investing 101 to acquire the necessary skills to successfully secure and/or deploy angel investment. Without such training, new investors might spend years and over $250,000 to learn effective investment strategies on their own.

This session is open to both entrepreneurs seeking to learn more about how to secure angel investment and "angel-curious" investors who are in pursuit of the best early stage startup investment deal flow. Rockies Venture Club offers education to both entrepreneurs and investors through the extension of this program, Angel Accelerator, the RVC Pitch Academy, and the RVC HyperAccelerator. In addition to education, RVC Members receive access to 140+ events annually, which include Monthly Investor Forums, Industry Investment Nights, and the Angel Capital Summit.

About the Member Showcase:

This trade fair-style event highlights AI projects from local companies, students, researchers, and community members. It’s a chance to share your work with a diverse audience of technical and non-technical attendees in a casual, welcoming atmosphere.

Cisco Meraki is probably the largest Rails shop you’ve never heard of. Our 2 million line Rails monolith has been under continuous development since 2007. As with any large codebase, ours is not without challenges. In “Derailing Our Application,” we share how our architecture has evolved to decouple 800,000 lines of Ruby code from Rails constructs in order to enable us to scale our team to 1,000 engineers and beyond without losing the benefits of Rails. Join us on the track less traveled! All aboard!

Creative thinking and analytical rigor – they seem like an either/or but really organizations (and individuals) need both to generate inspiring ideas and execute meaningful innovation. Especially at the startup stage where design-centric voices tend to be outnumbered, purposefully practicing creativity can help you build a brand that better resonates with customers and craft a product experience that users love.

As an early non-technical hire at Scythe, and as the first self-proclaimed creative on the team, Billy Otteman jumped from a decade of branding agency experience straight into the deeply analytical engineering environment of the Boulder County-based robotics startup. He quickly learned to navigate the software and hardware spaces while building what has become one of the most engaging and exciting brands in its industry (again, self-proclaimed).

In this talk, Billy will share best practices for fostering a creative culture that leads to more compelling customer communication. He’ll also present strategies for conducting illumination exercises that increase customer empathy and discuss how impactful collaboration between design and engineering teams can make your products stickier. And so you leave inspired, he’ll lead the group in a few creative exercises for you to conduct with your coworkers.

Whether you’re a marketer surrounded by strict rationality looking for a creative spark or an engineer hoping to better communicate with your crazy creative counterparts, you’ll return to your team with effective creativity tactics that you can put to work right away.

Through Donor Advised Funds, companies can accept checks for fundraising and investors and corporations can fund investments in a highly tax efficient way.

Come explore this (charitable) funding strategy with us!

This session will be held in a fireside chat format at the Boulder Chamber. 

Natalie Levy, Managing Partner of She's Independent Investments, will interview Sarah Angello, Cofounder of Get Daffodil.

Audience Q&A will be welcome and encouraged.

My session will focus on how to infuse SaaS products with AI capabilities to stand out in a competitive market. I’ll share practical steps, lessons learned, and real-world examples from my own experience implementing AI – covering everything from small, incremental improvements to game-changing features like AI-based matching. My expertise lies in product strategy, AI integration, and helping SaaS teams discover ways to differentiate themselves through innovation and forward-thinking technology adoption.

The hiring process is often seen as a complex and tedious endeavor, weighed down by outdated systems and rigid workflows that frustrate both recruiters and hiring managers. In this engaging session, we’ll explore how innovative tools, designed to be both fun and functional, can revolutionize the way organizations approach hiring.We’ll delve into common recruitment challenges—such as aligning stakeholders, capturing job requirements, and navigating candidate bottlenecks—and demonstrate how a fresh, intuitive approach can foster collaboration, save time, and improve hiring outcomes. Using real-world examples and data-driven insights, this talk will highlight the transformative power of technology that prioritizes user engagement and simplicity.Whether you're a recruiter, a hiring manager, or a tech leader, this session will leave you inspired to rethink your hiring process and excited about the tools that can help you build better teams.

Brands of all kinds struggle to build trust and demonstrate authority to their customers, but in today’s crowded digital era, this is more important than ever. Effective communication about your products, services, or organization is what sets you apart from your competitors.

The human brain is drawn to CLARITY and away from confusion. Most organizations are confusing their customers, and they don’t even know it, causing them to lose sales, and donations, or be passed up by their competition. In this session, Ian will teach you how to tell your story using the StoryBrand framework, giving you the tools to clarify your message and get your customers, donors, event attendees, or audience to respond.
You will walk away with a plan to effectively communicate about your organization and be able to start applying what you have learned that day.

Autonomous AI agents hold the promise to reshape the way we work, but can we make them work reliably? We've all seen the amazing demos of AI products only to find they fall down in the real world.

In this talk, we will explore reinforcement learning techniques to make agents more reliable of the time, giving us a solid base to build enterprise ready products on.

Google search is dying and so is your SEO marketing. Your customers now turn to ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, and other new AI search engines to discover solutions. Here’s how you train AI search engines to mention your brand, position you against competitors, and sell your product for you.

If you want to stay ahead of the curve and ahead of your competition, you need to see this glimpse of the future where you’ll learn
* Which AIs to optimize for (and which ones are bad investments)
* How the new customer journey in AI looks (and how it’s different from before)
* How to set the right goals of AI optimization (and guide your team in the right direction)
* How to optimize for AI search engines (and what to start doing right now)
* How to train the AI to sell for you (with specific, actionable next steps and tactics)
* Which metrics to measure your optimization efforts (and tell when you’re really winning)

(You’ll also get exclusive access to the slide deck to share with your team and refer back to.)

The presentation will introduce entrepreneurs to various public data tools that can help them better understand their market, enabling more informed, data-driven business decisions.Attendees will learn about various data sources, covering where to find the data, how it is collected, how to interpret the results, and how to efficiently navigate each tool to extract meaningful insights.For example, a tech startup founder might want to track the number of new tech companies in Boulder over time to assess market saturation. This presentation will demonstrate where to access that data.Similarly, a utilities startup could benefit from identifying which Front Range zip codes have the highest utility costs to refine their targeted advertising strategy. The session will showcase how to locate and leverage such insights effectively.By the end of the session, attendees will gain the knowledge and skills needed to effectively leverage public data sources, uncovering opportunities, minimizing risks, and enabling smarter business decisions.