BusinessWeek recognizes Boulder for lofty percentage of high-tech startups

A special report in Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek recently identified Boulder as having the highest concentration of software engineers per capita in the nation and as a destination for new high-tech companies.

The article gave some of the credit to the influx of entrepreneurs in the high-tech realm to Boulder having “the University of Colorado as an anchor and a backyard full of mountains as lifestyle bait.” According to BusinessWeek, Boulder is second only to Silicon Valley in the percentage of workers employed in high tech.

BusinessWeek says in addition to CU, the presence of research labs such as the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the National Institute of Standards & Technology has attracted well-educated people to Boulder. And the openings of Celestial Seasonings and StorageTek in the ’70s promoted the natural foods industry and a healthy tech community. Software, data services and biotech grew over the years as employees of those companies pursued other interests, including entrepreneurship.

The creation of TechStars, a business “boot camp” for startups, in 2006 has provided a training ground for Internet companies to prepare them for seed funding as well to recruit talent from around the country, BusinessWeek reports. Now Boulder is one of the top spots in the nation to create an Internet business, and several of the Internet's biggest names - Google, Microsoft, AOL and Oracle among them - have made acquisitions here.