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The Conscious Entrepreneur | Leadership, Self-Awareness & Mindset
EP 121: How Startup Colorado Is Rethinking Access To Capital, Founder Mentorship, and Support for Rural Entrepreneurs
00:24:58
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- [00:00]
A
The experience of building a business in a major city is very different from building one in a rural community. Starting a business in a rural area often means operating with far fewer built in resources, including smaller business communities, limited access to mentorship, thinner infrastructure, tighter labor markets, and far fewer paths to capital. The margin for error is smaller, but the impact of success or failure reaches well beyond the founder. These businesses play an outsized role in the viability of communities. They create jobs, stabilize local economies, and often determine whether a town can attract talent, retain families, and sustain itself over time. While our conversation today is grounded in Colorado, these are the same realities that rural entrepreneurs are navigating in communities across the country. My guest today is Brittany Romano. She's the Executive Director of Startup Colorado. She brings firsthand founder experience and a systems level view of how capital, mentorship and ecosystem support are being rethought to better serve rural founders. This conversation is especially relevant for founders who want a more complete view of entrepreneurship and the role that rural businesses play in keeping communities viable. Let's get into it. You're listening to the Conscious Entrepreneur and I'm Sarah Lockwood. This is the only podcast completely dedicated to the well being of entrepreneurs. It's where we do the inner work to become the leaders our businesses truly need. A thriving, thriving business starts with a thriving you. Let's get into it. Brittany, thank you so much for joining us today to talk about Startup Colorado. I really am excited to hear your point of view about entrepreneurship in rural Colorado.
- [01:49]
B
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:51]
A
Brittany, can you tell me a little bit about why this mission is so important to you?
- [01:56]
B
Sure, absolutely. Really? My entire young career I worked for small businesses and I often worked close to the founder who started those small businesses. And I would say now it was my great fortune that many of those companies that I worked with were in rural America. And you might laugh when I tell you what those locations were, but they were, you know, Fruta Colorado, Sedona, Lake Tahoe, Moab, I mean, like iconic, incredible places that people want to go to and maybe don't always think like, oh, these don't have proximity to resources. These are though they're busy during peak seasons, like throughout the rest of the year. These places, these communities have real challenges. And so regardless of becoming intimately aware of those challenges, I myself always was entrepreneurial and decided I would start my own business. And so I purchased my first company in Crested Butte, Colorado in 2017. And while it was wildly rewarding, it was also tremendously challenging in all the ways that are familiar to startup founders in rural communities. So I quickly realized there was an opportunity to help people like myself. So I ended up starting a yoga studio franchise. And what I realized was yoga studios are often cornerstones in small communities. Like people love to gather there. They're healthy places to go and meet new friends. They're really wonderful businesses to have in your small community. And also running that business was a tremendous amount of effort, time and risk. And a yoga studio, for example, is open from like 6am to 8pm, 364 days a year. And a lot of people think it's this hobby lifestyle company and it's not. It's overwhelming and overwhelmingly difficult. And then I thought maybe I can help other yoga studio owners and other communities if I could centralize their headquarter function or their hq, their operations. And I thought of this great idea. I'd start a franchise. And so then I decided I would only franchise in like the B markets, like smaller communities, folks like myself. And then very quickly was thrown into how many challenges there are across all of rural Colorado in folks trying to start businesses in non urban or non dense markets. So just from my own personal experience, I realized there's a lot of work that can be done. And Startup Colorado was actually one of the first organizations that started to partner me to the resources that I needed. So Startup was a project originally formed out of CU Boulder and it had a powerhouse of steering committee advisors and founders, including Brad Feld and Phil Weiser and Eric Matesik, the brains behind Colorado Startup Week, and a number of iconic names, Dan Caruso, that wanted to support the Boulder Denver startup ecosystem. And so they started this idea. It lived at CU Boulder, it had a tremendous amount of success in the Denver Boulder startup ecosystem. Early days of that ecosystem, of the tech ecosystem. But quickly we realized we need to we could turn our attention and support the rest of the state. So we did that for a couple years, gained a lot of momentum. And then eventually we got this loving boot out of CU Boulder and were asked to stand up as our own, as an independent nonprofit. That was a few years ago now. And so yeah, here we are charging.
- [05:54]
A
I mean it's a great story and I love that you are so personally connected to the experience of rural entrepreneurs and founders. And I'm curious, you know, Startup Colorado is bringing a number of different resources to those entrepreneurs, like funding, educational content, access to capital, helping people be more business ready. What? Tell us a little bit about how you're connecting those founders to resources. Like how does the organization function in.
- [06:26]
B
Our Work is, is, let's say bifurcated between those who are genuinely startups. Like because, and it's we work and we emphasize the startup, the true startup founder. Because startups and small businesses in rural provide the majority of the jobs out in rural communities. So they are truly essential as a part of our economic engine. And so we do a lot of work around ideation. We have a four week, we call it a pre accelerator program that's really about like what is your, who is your ideal customer? How do you get that first meeting? What might growth look like? If this is your customer, this is your product, what kind of capital might you need? We're trying to help these aspiring business owners to be as thoughtful for as long as possible into their business life cycle. Because what we've learned as founders ourselves is it's always those unanticipated growth hurdles that catapult us into that known valley of death. So from there we do a lot of growth, roadmap development, strategic growth. We do lots of partnering founders to mentors and advisors. It's a big, big amount of a big part of what we do still kind of in the ideation, growth, ideation, early stage section of our work. We do a lot of work on pitch practice, pitch coaching, preparing for pitch competitions, helping founders understand like what is due diligence and what do my financials need to represent and all of that so that they can just gain some early traction and early wins. And then if you just zoom over to how we're supporting our growth stage founders and the point that I want to underscore here is that while these companies are may not, may not be labeled as growth or may not be labeled as startup, they are also, nor maybe are they identified as small business. Like maybe they are growth and scaling and they don't really fit into any one of those particular categories. They end up becoming this missing middle where they are the folks out in rural who are increasing the talent and talent proficiencies by adding higher paying jobs or more skilled positions. They're the biggest employers, often out in real interest in terms of volume of employees at the company. But the challenge that they are facing, at least that we're seeing in recent years, is finding capital to grow, like to bust through that next valley of death and get the next customer, maybe that's X out of their region, out of the state, out of the country. And that capital is really hard to find. And so we're doing a lot more work around investment readiness, talking to angels, preparing for venture, like for those Companies that are venture backable have scalable potential. We're doing a lot more of that technical growth support and again that's pitching advisors and so forth.
- [09:44]
A
And that. So that's a really interesting point because I guess as my thoughts turn to rural Colorado and starting a business there, I think about challenges like access to workforce or infrastructure or just even limited access to mentorship or community.
- [10:10]
B
Which is.
- [10:10]
A
More available in, you know, larger cities. But I guess I would like to hear more about, you know, the work you're doing around obtaining capital in these markets. What are the biggest challenges that they're facing and how are you helping founders overcome those challenges?
- [10:27]
B
Yep, absolutely. And I'll just call out like what you just brought up Sarah, was a modern day dilemma between what is traditional economic development like making sure infrastructure needs are in place for people to actually have business transactions versus what we call ecosystem development, which is more or less like that person to person, how are we like remote work and online sales and all those other transactions type, all those other service type businesses that don't require that like in person transaction or warehouse or whatever it is, they still have their own infrastructure needs. But yeah, when we're talking particularly about ecosystem development, we think about it as a continuum of support needs. So if you're able to get through ideation and you gain customer trust, you build traction and you have a trajectory to growth, then the next version of your business journey really has to do about securing the growth capital that you need. And so when we're talking about partnering rural founders to capital providers, I mean the first hurdle is just finding them. There is one venture active venture capital firm serving all of rural Colorado. That means like 99% of venture capital stays in along the i25 corridor. There is a statewide there, there are numerous angel groups on the Front Range and one may be two budding active angel groups. Like right now there's two CDFI banks in the state. I think only one really puts some emphasis on rural. And so CDFI is community development financial institution. It's a non profit lender, has different priorities than your traditional like bank and then just the lack of banks, right? Like there's just far fewer banks that, that are in rural and even fewer that are going, are willing to touch a small business without a tremendous amount of capital or collateral to lean the debt products up against. So what, how are we, how are we addressing this one? We're trying to aggregate and attract more capital providers, period. Like we're in constant dialogue about how much debt capital is flowing to Rural. How many banks are underscoring rural as a mandate? Furthermore, we are working with our capital providers to understand how we're de risking business ventures so that they would look more attractive to the folks who have any debt capital to lend. So that's it. And then I'll say like with that, as we surface those folks and we attract more, we are just establishing that there actually is a capital ecosystem that's easier to get to than ever has been in the past. And that's inclusive of a number of partners, revolving loan funds, other state products that the state of Colorado is intentionally addressing for rural. So that's, that's debt capital and then there's risk capital. And as you know, risk capital behaves entirely differently and has a completely different set of standards. And like I said, there's one venture fund doing an incredible amount of work out in Rural and honestly destigmatizing what rural deal flow looks like and what it means. I know. Howdy partners. They're really incredible partners to Startup Colorado and they're known across the state for just truly advocating for those scaling companies that really have the opportunity to change the rural entrepreneurial ecosystem. So yeah, big high five for Howdy please check them out. And then Startup Colorado, we're always looking to fill in gaps and so one of the gaps that we saw has had to do has to do with early stage capital and the fact that like if you want to start a business, there's really, let's just kind of call it what it is. There's really like one option and it's bootstrapping. Out in rural, you might call bootstrapping also like your friends and family round or like leaning on your close community to help you just get scrambled together enough cash to get an idea off the ground. Once you have some revenue and some customers, maybe then someone at a different institution will talk to you. And so because of the burdens with that Startup Colorado, we are turning our attention to private investors, private capital. And what we're saying is the greatest experiment of 2026 is going to be launching the Rural Angel Investment Network. The acronym is RAIN and we want to see it rain on rural founders. Yes. And so again the idea is to fill gaps and to understand like what are the founder needs, what are the specific vehicle needs. Like private capital tends to be where there can be the most kinds of innovation. And so what we're hoping is to spend a couple years piloting some deals with different types of investment vehicles and ultimately come back to the institutional investors and lenders and say, hey, here's what we saw was working really well. How could we collectively structure, I don't want to say like instruments or products, but like what could we all do with this data to make capital more available?
- [16:31]
A
Wow. Yeah. I mean that is an incredible project to tackle. And I'm curious how the state of Colorado and your nonprofit is learning from other states.
- [16:45]
B
Certainly I will give a major shout out to our partners. At the state of Colorado. We work very closely with the Office of Economic Development and International Trade. And for what it's worth, though, we have challenges in our ecosystem. Colorado pioneers a lot of new methods and ways to support its founders. So we look fairly progressive when it comes to how you again curate an ecosystem. There's a few major complications to that like regulation and some other bills that have caused some problems recently, particularly in the AI industries. But so Colorado is active. The state of Colorado is actively like partnering with states and countries to try to understand. Yeah, it is fairly progressive and impressive. They're worth tuning into. They're also very invested in rural. And every. Most conversations that I've, I've had with oedit, there's always some kind of rural mandate, which is unlike most states. Many states are still decentralized, are centralizing like where if you want to start a business, you have to move to the city. And Colorado is, is further along the trajectory. And we're also unlike any other state where our rural also includes Aspen, Crested Butte, Telluride, Steamboat, Durango, like coveted parts of a Grand Junction. Like it's not all high country, but like our state is beautiful, people want to be out in rural. And that's not always true of states all across the country. So with that said, like we are doing a lot, but we often are the leaders in those conversations. With that said said, we've what if you zoom in particularly to rural. We have actually learned a lot in paying attention to what emerging nations are doing because they tend to have similar problems in terms of like lots of space, not a lot of infrastructure, not a lot of buildings, maybe challenges with broadband, climate related challenges, water infrastructure challenges. So we try to understand these challenges from a systems level. Yeah. To just learn as much as we can. And then with that said, the thing that I, what I've learned in working with rural and working we're statewide, so we're not hyperlocal. What I've learned is that many of our rural communities are experiencing the same problems, but they experience them very differently. And so that. And that's true in New Mexico, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, like, we. We actually do share a lot of similarities, but because of the way our different administrations are politics or just the different focus areas, like, the results are different. So, yeah, we learn a lot. And we're hoping that the methodology or the framework that we're building at Startup Colorado first serves Colorado and it makes the biggest impact here. But we're also hoping it's a frame, that framework that will elevate all of rural in America. That's kind of what we're striving for.
- [20:27]
A
Well, what you've illustrated in the conversation today to me is that, you know, entrepreneurship really is vital to these rural communities in job creation, in community creation, and, you know, letting people live in these places, because without it, right, every, you know, these places are just unpopulated and. And die. Communities will die without the lifeblood of businesses. So the work that you're doing is really, really important and impacts people in meaningful ways.
- [21:05]
B
Thank you. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think some people look at Startup Colorado and we're a nonprofit, and they think that what we're doing is philanthropic. And what I say is like, this is not philanthropy. Rural is not philanthropy. Rural is essential, and it's essential to statewide competitiveness. Like, what would happen if there were no people to live in Crested Butte? There were no folks to operate your lifts and work in your fancy restaurants when you want to go? Like, that would be devastating to the culture and the vitality of not just rural, but our entire state of, like, why we love to live here.
- [21:42]
A
I live in Denver, and I'm sure many people listening to this podcast are living in major metropolitan locations. But I think it's really useful to re remember that not every entrepreneur experience and journey is the same and you know it. There are different challenges that we face and we can support each other. So that's my next question to you, is like, how could someone listening to this podcast contribute and support this, this mission?
- [22:14]
B
And so what I would say is that if you like complex business problems, if you're a systems thinker, if you like thinking of business, business as a means for developing community, for uplifting local populations, like, for the reasons that many of us like, business is problem solving. If you're a problem solver, we have a lot of space for you to come and share your knowledge to help us solve some of these. They're not simple, they're systems, they're complicated. But honestly, they're really fun. They're fun problems. And so I would just encourage most folks to try to understand and get Involved to best. To the best of their ability.
- [22:54]
A
And how would they do that? So how would somebody listening who might be interested in, you know, being an advisor or commute, you know, contributing through mentorship, maybe has a resource that they could bring to bear to your community?
- [23:09]
B
Well, I think for simplicity's sake, I mean, please reach out to Startup Colorado and we will help connect you with the folks. So, for example, we work closely with Bridge Entrepreneurs Network. If you do have a desire to advise or mentor companies, we would direct you to bridge if you have a particular place in mind, like southeastern or southern Colorado, like maybe your family roots are in a particular place. We can also match you to some of the development developers or people thinking about economic development and ecosystem building there. So, yeah, we'd love to be that kind of clearinghouse and support. Support of being a bridge to those who have time and energy to give to those who could, who would be willing recipients of such help.
- [23:53]
A
That's right. And you guys do so much work with pitch competitions and different varieties of accelerator programs and connecting resources. So there's really a lot of ways that community could contribute to what is clearly a very, very important mission. Thank you for taking this on and the role that you play in making Colorado a great state.
- [24:19]
B
Thank you, Sarah. Yeah. And thanks for seeing us as a partner in this. And the more we can build bridges between rural and urban, I think the better off we'll all be.
- [24:31]
A
Absolutely. Well, you are doing great work and as is the rest of your team. So thank you very much and thank you for spending some time with us today.
- [24:40]
B
Absolutely.
- [24:42]
A
Thanks for listening to the conscious entrepreneur. Every episode here is meant to sharpen how you lead and how you live. If something landed for you, please share it. Founder to founder. I'll meet you here next week.