Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado is a new partnership between Colorado’s vibrant entrepreneurial community, including entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and attorneys, and The Community Foundation Serving Boulder County. Its purpose is to encourage entrepreneurs to incorporate philanthropy early in the creation of their companies and participate in the long-term health and sustainability of our community.
"Since entrepreneurial success is uncertain, and the vast majority of entrepreneurial endeavors fail, we decided to approach the initiative in a unique fashion," stated Brad Feld, managing director of Foundry Group and a co-founder of Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. "Waiting until an organization is successful before encouraging philanthropic activity is often ineffective, because the entrepreneur is often besieged by requests and, if young, not yet certain how she wants to approach her philanthropy. We decided to take a different approach and create a new program to help all entrepreneurs contribute early in the creation of their companies and support the many things we all love about living in Colorado."
Based on the success of The Community Foundation model, the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado will help build a permanent endowment to provide community grants for arts, civic involvement, education , the environment, and health and human services. Upon a liquidity event, the cash or stock that has been given by the companies will be distributed allowing the appropriate Community Foundations to respond to the community’s greatest needs and opportunities, now and in the future. By expanding the program state-wide, the new program will offer entrepreneurs throughout the region a focused outlet for community giving that serves their respective community and strengthens the culture of giving for the business and its employees.
"We were looking for an innovative way to engage Colorado’s vibrant entrepreneurial community and help support Boulder County and beyond," said Josie Heath, President of The Community Foundation. "The support and interest we’ve received from the participating companies in forming this partnership has been invaluable. They have raised the bar for what businesses can do to increase community resources." "With this new program, we now have the participation of five passionate and enthusiastic start-ups," said Ryan Martens, founder and chief technology officer of Rally Software. "This is a big step toward increasing the link between business and the community, and it paves the path for personal giving by the employees of these companies."
"Colorado has nurtured so many successful startups, and the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado provides an easy way for successful startups to give back to their community," said Tim Enwall, founder and COO of Tendril. "This program provides an entry point for founding entrepreneurs and employees to become philanthropic and it also gives the community the opportunity to share in the success of the startup companies that emerge as successes in their backyard. Tendril is very proud to be a founding member of the initiative as it establishes a significant, lasting endowment for the Community Foundations serving Colorado."
Five companies - Collective Intellect, Me.dium, NewsGator Technologies, Rally Software, and Tendril – are the founding grantors for the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado. The founding trustees are Brad Feld (Foundry Group), Kyle Lefkoff (Boulder Ventures), Tim Connor (Sequel Venture Partners), Ryan Martens (Rally Software), Bill Roberts (Hogan & Hartson), Michael Platt (Cooley Godward Kronish) and J.B. Holston (NewsGator Technologies). In addition, the Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado has formed an alliance with the Entrepreneurs Foundation, an organization formed in 1988 with affiliates in Silicon Valley, Austin, Southern California, New England, Dallas, Portland, Atlanta, Hawaii, and Israel.
About Collective Intellect
Collective Intellect, Inc. specializes in comprehensively tracking, filtering and ranking media content for institutional investors and the Fortune 500. Across blogs, discussion boards, social networking websites and other media channels, Collective Intellect uses a combination of advanced artificial intelligence algorithms and old-fashioned human ingenuity to identify emerging New Media and traditional media content. The company’s patent-pending technology helps analysts and portfolio managers in financial services, as well as corporate enterprises, uncover valuable, relevant nuggets of information that reside in the vast amount of unstructured data available today, including blogs, message boards and chat rooms. Customers include some of the largest trading desks on Wall Street, Fortune 500 consumer goods manufacturers and Fortune 100 pharmaceutical companies. Collective Intellect is headquartered in Boulder, Colorado and is funded by Appian Ventures and other investors. For more information about Collective Intellect visit www.collectiveintellect.com.
About Me.dium
Founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado, Me.dium is a consumer software company revealing the hidden world of people and activity behind the browser. Through Me.dium, users get a view into the Social Exploration Environment, an online environment where people can interact in real time with other people doing similar things online, in the same way one interacts in the real world. For more information about Me.dium visit www.me.dium.com.
About NewsGator
NewsGator Technologies is the world’s leading RSS platform company. Headquartered in Denver, CO, NewsGator develops and markets RSS aggregation solutions for individual end users, enterprises and online content providers. Using NewsGator products and solutions, businesses and consumers can subscribe to news, information, podcasts and other relevant content more efficiently and effectively than with traditional channels. With NewsGator, users have access to RSS information via the Web, Microsoft Outlook, mobile devices and both Windows- and Mac-based desktop clients. All NewsGator products synchronize seamlessly; enabling users to read their RSS feeds anywhere, anytime, with any device. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.
About Rally Software
From small pilot projects to distributed, multi-team programs, Rally’s Agile life cycle management solutions provide organizations with proven, incremental and results oriented path to successful adoption of Agile practices – one of the fastest growing trends in the technology industry. Rally’s world-renown coaches and partners complement its solutions with training and consulting for creating the Agile organization. The company’s customers include thousands of subscribers for leading software vendors, Internet companies and corporate development teams. Based in Boulder, Colorado, the company is privately held and backed by Mobius Venture Capital, Boulder Ventures and Vista Ventures. For more information about Rally visit www.rallydev.com.
About Tendril
Tendril is uniquely positioned to catapult the "Internet of Things" economy to critical mass by assimilating everyday electrical things into the enterprise computing environment. Tendril’s focus is on network operations and deployment: the next big stage of the Wireless Sensor and Control Network industry. Tendril makes software that allows companies to build, deploy and manage these networks into the rest of the real world. With this approach, Tendril can address the macro trends of energy efficiency, security, life expectancy and connectedness that will generate new revenue streams for companies in the industrial and building automation, physical security and home automation industries. For more information about Tendril visit www.tendrilinc.com.
The Community Foundation just celebrated its 15th year. Its assets total $35 million and it has awarded over $20 million in grants, over $5.1 million in 2006. For more information about getting involved with The Community Foundation, please call 303-442-0436 or see www.commfound.org. For more information about Entrepreneurs Foundation of Colorado please visit www.efcolorado.org.
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