Denver, the Mile High city is home to several early Startups such as Photobucket.com, Mapquest.com, ServiceMagic.com, Associated Content, Britekite, E-Bags, and is one home to several major franchise headquarters such as Smashburger, Qdoba, Camp Bow-Wow. Having just finished the first Denver Startup Week where over 500 local startups were represented during 5 days of Startup activity, there is not a better city in which to get your startup off the ground than here in Denver, Colorado.
Startup Grind Denver is excited to annouce our first event at The St. Cajetan’s Conference Center located on the Auraria Campus on Wednesday, November 7. Startup Grind Denver invites all entrepreneurs, startups, investors and supporters to hear Jim Franklin, CEO of SendGrid, named "One of the Top 16 OnDemand Cloud Computing Private Companies to Watch" because of their innovation, market potential, commercialization, stakeholder value and media buzz, speak about his experiences growing a company in Boulder and most recently in Downtown Denver.
With companies getting national coverage like FullContact.com, which pays their employees $7500 to take a vacation, PingIdentity, iTriage, MapMyFitness, Forkly.com, Roximity.com, Denver is attracting startups from all over, just ask StackOverflow why they selected Denver for their 2nd location. Denver is also becoming a desired location for events such as DrupalCon, DeFrag, and GlueCon. Denver has all 5 major sports teams, a 60 minute drive west will put you on the snow packed slopes of our famous Rocky Mountain or just wait for one of the largest gatherings of zombies in the US during the annual zombie crawl in October. The city of Denver and the surrounding areas are becoming hubs of engagement, collaboration, creativity, and learning for entrepreneurs and startups.
Prior to his tenure with SendGrid, Jim Franklin was the Vice President of Enterprise Performance Management and the General Manager of the Crystal Ball Global Business Unit of Oracle Corporation. The Crystal Ball Global Business Unit was formed in 2007 as part of the acquisition of Hyperion Solutions. At Hyperion, Jim served as VP and General Manager. Jim had held the roles of Decisioneering's CEO, CFO and VP of Sales prior to Decisioneering's acquisition by Hyperion. Mr. Franklin was also the founder of webfamilies.com and the CFO of Vericept Corporation. Jim serves on the board of aWhere, Inc., Denver Software Club and Querio. He has also been a mentor for Techstars and the Founder Institute.
Join us for the inaugural Startup Grind on Wednesday, November 7th from 6pm-8pm at The St. Cajetan’s Conference Center on the Auraria Campus is Denver.