Boulder is also an anomaly. It's a liberal city in a staunchly conservative state. It's a cultural oasis where smart, mostly white men and women sit in the sun sipping lattes and reading used books. And it's isolated geographically, separated from neighboring towns by mountains on one side and acres of green space on the other. Ten years ago the land along Route 36 leading to Boulder was given over to grazing; now a few remaining cows chew their cud 100 yards from sprawling cookie-cutter housing developments and glass-and-steel office complexes. "It's becoming another Orange County out there," laments one long-time resident. "But Boulder remains pristine."
To keep it that way, the city passed an ordinance in the early 1970s prohibiting real estate developers from building anything higher than 55 feet. Boulder has also at various times limited and monitored the design and construction of new parking facilities. The lack of decent parking for employees and clients is top among many local entrepreneurs' gripes. As a result, despite the area's astounding growth, local developers have had trouble keeping their buildings full. And that's forced them to use the same tactics that Rudin is using in Manhattan's financial district.
Paul Eklund is part owner of Broadway Suites, a brick office building located on the fringes of a pedestrian-only street called the Pearl Street Mall. As the Internet caught on, small new-media companies flocked to office buildings around the mall. But doing business there became harder as the city's limited-growth policy saw the demand for office space outstrip supply and parking grow scarce.
"If your clients can't park when they come to visit you, they might not come," says Eklund. It wasn't long before many companies began moving to "friendlier" outlying areas. A year ago Broadway Suites was facing a 15% vacancy rate.
Eklund decided to stem the tide with wire, offering his tenants everything from improved telephone services to T1 connections from their desktops. Because US West, the giant telecommunications company and Internet service provider (ISP), is not a favorite of many locals, he installed his own switch in the Broadway Suites building and now runs a T1 line directly from the building into Colorado Internet Coop, a member-owned nonprofit ISP that sells dedicated Internet service in Boulder . He also has a back-up line should the main line malfunction. Today the building is nearly back to full occupancy.
Boulder is loaded with two- and three-person high-tech operations that are a perfect fit for Eklund's building and others like it. Those companies don't require much physical space, but their bandwidth needs are enormous. Take MountainTop Computing, a maker of high-end software tools for building 3-D models of planetary surfaces for use in a wide range of applications. Its president, Jim Terhorst, is a 10-year veteran of Silicon Graphics, where he worked as a software engineer. "I had cut my hair and done the corporate thing for far too long," says Terhorst, who moved to Boulder from Silicon Valley in 1991.
Today Terhorst's blond hair is tied back in a ponytail, and he writes code on his own, communicating with coworkers and customers via the Internet. Terhorst shares his office with the vice-president of business development and MountainTop cofounder, Gary Anderson, who was off fly-fishing on a recent workday. "The people in Boulder have lives beyond their computers," says Terhorst.
While Terhorst chooses to stay close to Pearl Street Mall, other entrepreneurs see it as a launching pad. In 1993 Mark Kreloff, tired of the L.A. grind and anxious to provide a good life for his newborn son, moved his family to Boulder. "When we first talked about Boulder, I thought, 'Isn't that the trendy town where Mork and Mindy lived?" says Kreloff. "But on my first day here I bought a house."
In Boulder, Kreloff launched Inroads Interactive, a company that publishes CD-ROMs. Recruiting a president wasn't a problem: he got a call from Andy Brandt, a long-time friend and software engineer who was consulting in the Raleigh-Durham area but was looking to move. Brandt quickly went to work on the company's first project, Multimedia Dogs, an interactive encyclopedia of canine facts. In a business that has far too many developers and far too little shelf space, Inroads sold a whopping 50,000 units within 18 months--a blockbuster by industry standards. But as the company continues to grow and its demand for space increases, Kreloff can see the day when he might have to move it out of Boulder to a nearby town.
Inroads' president, however, would be happy to stay put. "Boulder is much more community-oriented than Research Triangle," explains Brandt. "It's not only a nice place to live, but the physical place and the people foster small developers." According to Brandt, Research Triangle is overrun with massive office developments that are not conducive to multimedia development. He much prefers the eccentricities of Boulder's commercial space: "You could be looking at an old Victorian house, and you'll find a gaming operation in the basement," says Brandt.
The downside for companies operating in Boulder is the perception on the part of customers that the action is going on elsewhere. "It's a real problem," says David Reifsnyder, CEO of Tesser, one of Boulder's larger ISPs. His executives have worried that a large New York-based client considering the company's Web-design services might pass because Tesser isn't in a well-known new-media center.
"The fact that we're in Boulder might still raise a few eyebrows at large corporations," says Ross Shell, Tesser's director of sales and marketing. Fortunately, there's plenty of business in Colorado, and Tesser had decided to avoid the recognition problem by concentrating on its home market.
To help publicize the city's new-media activity, Bradley Feld, CEO of Boulder-based Intensity Ventures, a firm that helps start and run software companies, has organized the Colorado Internet Kieretsu (kieretsu is the Japanese word for "community" and "collaboration"). The group has 50 members, and Feld hopes to have more than 200 by the end of the year. The kieretsu recently re-cruited public-relations giant Alexander Communication to bombard magazine and newspaper editors around the country with its story. It even has a name for the area: the Wired West.
