Robert Reich opens the door to the OneRiot office space dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, projecting a vibe that is relaxed yet industrious. He gives a quick tour of the space – an open floor plan that’s a mashup of a Tribeca loft and caffeinated computer workstations – before he sits down to discuss the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup (BDNT), the gathering he founded in 2006 and what Foundry Group Managing Director Jason Mendelson describes as “the preeminent startup event in Boulder.” BDNT has become the second largest New Tech Meetup in the country, and Reich is launching a sister Meetup at Denver University on February 17th to address the capacity issues posed by a membership of 2700 technologists perpetually competing for 325 meeting seats. It thus seemed like an opportune moment to sit down and discuss the history and future of BDNT, as well as learn a bit more about its founder.
In 2006 Reich and his partners faced a problem uncommon for most startups: Their company, Me.dium (recently renamed OneRiot), had financial backing and promising technology but was lacking a location. Reich, who had spent the last 20 years in New York, was open to leaving. After seriously considering Silicon Valley and Boston, the team “decided Boulder was a great fit. It felt like it had all the raw bones in it to support a company we were expecting to grow to, with revenues potentially in the billions of dollars.” Upon arrival, Reich had an itch to start a New Tech Meetup similar to one he’d been attending in New York, because “we needed to recruit, I wanted to meet the community, I wanted to make some friends and meet people with similar interests.” Boulder was similarly interested in meeting the founders of Me.dium, given that they were funded by out of state investors and “we were a bunch of New Yorkers; no one really knew who we were…interest was piqued.” The first BDNT subsequently attracted fifty-seven participants.
From the beginning, Reich modeled BDNT on the New York meeting: Five companies get five minutes to present their technology and business model, with five minutes of follow up questions and answers. But over the last 36 months Reich has added some touches that define the Meetup as unique to Boulder: “The things that we’ve done that are different … are the demo session at the end, the quizzes and prizes we’ll do periodically, as well as trying to introduce a sense of fun.” The other change from New York was the role Reich defined for himself, that of facilitator instead of presiding personality: “I’ve tried to be off to the side and ask good intelligent questions, but it’s not about me – it’s about the companies, it’s about Boulder, and it’s about the community.” He felt so strongly on the last point that Me.dium didn’t present at the debut meeting, even though it was held at the company’s offices.
When discussing BDNT Reich frequently invokes the concept of community, be it in a statewide sense – “95% of presenting companies have been from Colorado” – or in describing distinct demographics he’s attempted to connect. He’s been particularly interested in bridging the divide between the University and the local technology community, an effort for which he recently received the Entrepreneurial Supporter of the Year award from Silicon Flatirons, which is the Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado. Says Brad Bernthal, Associate Clinical Professor of Law, “Robert resolved the problem of connection… a nerve center has been developed between the University and the technology community, and that is the Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup.” Reich, however, is not resting on his laurels, modestly asserting, “We’re starting to make a little progress for the community and the college. That connection has been made, but it needs to be stronger.”
In beginning the monthly Denver meeting, Reich is thinking in big picture terms about the fundamental needs of a technology ecosystem: “When I look at communities, I tend to look at it philosophically: What makes a community succeed, and what makes a community die? Near ties – or knowing what your neighbors are doing – are really important from a community standpoint. Denver is a much bigger city… so it seems important to me to make that connection.” Reich notes that a third of attendees at any given BDNT will be from outside Boulder, and judging by the planned attendance in Denver (475 and a waitlist, as of this writing) it appears he has once more isolated an underserved need.
Given the explosive growth of the Meetup, it may surprise some that Reich is substantially concerned with keeping it relevant. In managing two meetings a month with up to ten presenting companies and hundreds of attendees, he sees his primary responsibility “to keep it fresh, to keep it interesting, to keep people wanting to come back, and [maintaining] a fun environment that people feel they can participate in.” Reich considers the grey lining of growth to be its impact on the subjective experience of attendees: “There’s enough people there that it actually is a conference, but how much do we want it to feel like a conference or how much do we want it to feel like it’s 400 of our good friends just hanging out and socializing once a month? There’s a balance between the two.”
While centrally concerned with managing the present evolution of the Meetup, Reich has considered the rich possibilities for the future: “What’s interesting about the New Tech is there are New Techs all over the world now, and if there’s a way to connect them so you start to have inter-relationships between these groups… bringing all of that together into one unified group seems very interesting and a way to support the entrepreneurial community on a global scale.” Whether live casting simultaneously from Ann Arbor, New York, Barcelona and Boulder or viewing video of other geographies asynchronously within a given Meetup, Reich sees the opportunity to connect “70,000 or 100,000 people to make all of these communities stronger and stronger and stronger.”
In the meantime, however, there are those in Boulder who appreciate Reich’s accomplishment to date. Reports David Cohen, Executive Director of TechStars, “I brag about the New Tech Meetup all the time. Much of my life revolves around selling Boulder as a place to be for tech startups, and having the second largest New Tech Meetup in the country is a nice piece of data to have in my back pocket. We owe that to Robert.”
