I am in Boulder for the day tomorrow seeing friends and catching a Techstars demo day.

Way back in August, 2008 I headed to Boulder on an invite from Brad Feld to visit with Techstars. That blog post was so long ago that Techstars was still a .org.

It turns out that Boulder had more to offer than mushrooms and skiers.

The vision for Techstars has been the same from day one…build a global ecosystem that helps entrepreneurs build great businesses.

I immediately imagined there would be a big rollup in entrepreneurship schools. I definitely got the direction of this trend early and right. There has not been a way for the public to participate and that is a bummer (I got that part wrong).

With Techstars and Boulder I was hooked. I invested in many Techstars early classes and founders individually and through our Social Leverage funds. I became quick friends with David Cohen (the founder of Techstars) and invested in his first ‘seed fund’ which had turned into one of the great funds of all time (Uber, Twilio, Sendgrid).

I met Dave Tisch in 2009 who ended up putting Techstars New York on the map. We have been great friends from that day.

I stumbled into the GNIP offices one day looking for directions and met Jud Valeski (the founder) which was acquired by Twitter and now one of the biggest companies in Boulder. Jud and I are having lunch tomorrow.

I met Ari Newman the founder of Filtrbox and made a seed investment. Filtrbox was later acquired by Jive Software and went public in 2011. Magic. Excited to see Ari tomorrow who now runs the Techstars fund.

The only bad thing about Boulder is leaving.