Leaders of Colorado tech companies are gathering today in Denver for the Colorado Technology Association’s Apex Conference. The crowd at Apex is mostly the part of Colorado’s tech industry that wears ties instead of t-shirts (yes, actual ties), but startups will take the spotlight later today for the Apex Challenge.
The challenge is a $20,000, winner-take-all pitch contest. Ten startups will square off, including a few that have already won tens of thousands of dollars at other pitch contests and one recent Techstars grad. The audience and a panel featuring VCs will pick the winner. There’s more on the event in this story.
I’ll have coverage of the Apex Challenge later this afternoon, and check back for another story about ESRI founder and CEO Jack Dangermond, who was the conference’s keynote speaker. ESRI makes ArcGIS, the industry-standard platform for geographic information systems, and is the sixth-largest privately held software company in the world, with annual revenue of more than $900 million.
Dangermond achieved that despite not really intending to start an industry-defining tech company. His background is landscape architecture, and in the 1970s he was tired of using the primitive pen-and-paper tools the industry relied on.
Dangermond talked what entrepreneurs should strive for, how he built his company, and what’s next for his industry as companies like Google and small startups have jumped in.
That’s still to come, but here are a few observations from the event.
And the winners are… The CTA gave out the annual Apex awards last night at a posh awards dinner. Top honors went to Ping Identity, which was named tech company of the year.
It is easy to see why. Ping Identity raised a $44 million Series F round this summer, and it’s on the shortlist of Colorado tech companies that could have an IPO in the next year or two.
I caught up with CEO Andre Durand this morning. He confirmed two things. Unsurprisingly, the Ping Identity team kicked back with champagne last night. Also, everyone is happy to have a breather after the big push to close that huge round.
“It’s a lot nicer to be on the other side of it,” Durand said.
Zayo Group co-founder and CEO Dan Caruso took home the lifetime achievement award. Caruso wrote about Zayo’s history in this guest post, but the short version is that in just a few years Zayo has become one of the leading telecom providers in the country by building and acquiring large metropolitan and dark fiber networks. Caruso also was part of the team that helped start Level 3 (NYSE: [[ticker:LVLT]]), which has become one of the world’s largest Tier 1 telecom providers.
SendGrid CEO Jim Franklin was honored as technology community connector of the year; Cloud Elements won startup of the year; and iTriage CEO Peter Hudson was named technology entrepreneur of the year. This Denver Business Journal article has more on the other winners.
Old school represents? With all the buzz about Colorado’s recent wave of startups, it’s easy to forget there’s a class of companies that did groundbreaking work in the 1990s and 2000s but have since been eclipsed by rivals and are trying to launch comebacks.
You’d have to include Photobucket and Quark on the list. Both were at Apex.
Photobucket CEO Tom Munro was a panelist this morning, talking about
