Thank you, Boulder.
Thank you, Boulder.
Next Big Sound is moving to New York City June 1st, but not without first saying a very sincere thank you. We literally could not have gotten Next Big Sound off the ground anywhere else in the country besides Boulder, Colorado.
David, Samir and I are from Reno, Florida, and upstate NY, respectively. We had no ties to Boulder, Colorado other than my aunt who happened to move to town a year before we got here. I was the only member of the founding team that had been to the vibrant city nestled under the foothills of the Rockies before the summer of 2009.
We started the company in Chicago, IL right after graduating and were willing to live anywhere, and do almost anything, to get Next Big Sound started. We spent a summer down in Champaign, IL. We set up an office in David’s apartment and I slept there for a month. We tried to raise money in the valley, from the east coast and from wealthy individuals and venture firms throughout Chicagoland. We raised $25,000 that we stretched to last 9 months. That was when we were completely out of money and about to shut the company down. That’s when we got accepted into TechStars. That’s when we packed everything we had into David’s Volkswagon Rabbit and drove 1000 miles overnight to Boulder, Colorado. That’s when our company’s trajectory, and all of our lives, changed completely.
I could list out the people that I remember from the first week – David, Nicole, Jason, Brad, Tom, Micah, Howard, Jud, Eric, Matt, all the TechStars Boulder teams from 2009 – but I would need the rest of the page.
I could list out all the people that I remember from that whole summer but I would need five more pages.
And if I listed every local person we’ve talked to at BDNTs, shared coffee with at Atlas or the Cup, responded promptly to an email I sent, saw us present at various stages of development, wore our t-shirts around town, talked us up at cocktail hours, joined us for beers at the office, danced at our parties, or helped Next Big Sound in some immeasurable way – I’d spend the rest of the week writing names.
Boulder was a special place when we got here. Boulder is even more special 3 years later. Not just for me, my co-founders, and our team, but for thousands of entrepreneurs, developers, designers, investors and companies large and small. I couldn’t recommend a better place to get the company off the ground.
While the realities of our business dictate our move to NYC, we will never disappear. We’ve got three board meetings in Boulder this year, will be here for demo day and we will be back as much as we can. We wanted to rename the corporation Next Big Boulder but our lawyers advised against that.
But in all seriousness, we didn’t want to move on to the next chapter of Next Big Sound without first pausing to thank the city, and all of the people, that helped get us here.
Thank you Boulder, we love you.