Automatically transcribed, so names and technical terms may be misspelled. The audio is the record.

The Colorado Equals Security podcast is your local source for regional security news, local events, and interviews with key individuals in the region. Now here are your hosts, Robb Reck and Alex Wood. Welcome to Colorado Equals Security. This is the newscast for episode 193 for the week of this— or it's not December, is it? It's January.

I think it's January 11th. Alex, it's a new year and apparently I'm not ready for it yet. I guess not. You want to hold on to 2020 a little longer, I guess, Robb? Well, I mean, considering how 2021 is going, you know, I look fondly back at 2020 as that wonderful year that was.

I don't know. I mean, I'm looking outside right now and it's beautiful. There's a little snow on the ground. It's almost like we're actually in winter for a change. Yeah, I am actually staring at the snow right now too through We're in different houses looking out at different snow, but seeing similar, similar weather.

I watched my kids shovel a little bit this morning, which is always good for me not to be shoveling. As we are recording this, my kids are still sleeping. So maybe someday they'll get up and then go shovel. Well, what people don't know is that it's, it's not exactly early right now when we're recording. No, but I have teenagers.

So early is relative for them. We do have some housekeeping to run through real quick. We have a Slack channel with— man, it's been, it's been incredibly active the first couple weeks of the year so far. You can join the Slack channel by going out to colorado-security.com and clicking on the Slack button in there. While you're there, you can go to the mailing list section and put in your email address and sign up for our mailing list where you will get the show notes delivered to you every week in your email.

It would also be great if you would rate us and subscribe on your favorite podcast application, whether that's through the iTunes Store or Google Play or wherever it may be, or Stitcher or Spotify, and get this delivered every week directly to your podcast player. And also let people know how great the podcast is there. Yeah, you know, we That's one way you can help the show is by rating us out there. There's other ways you can help us. If you want to tell a friend, send a note to someone, hey, there's this great podcast with these guys who are not only handsome, but also incredibly well-informed and wise.

We would love it if you'd help us get those new listeners with that kind of delusions. You could also support us financially through our Patreon campaign. And finally, as you're going to hear a feature interview this week, we have a guest interviewer and we'd love to have you help do guest interviews for us. I'd say it's probably been easier to do guest interviews since the pandemic has started, and we're able to— we're basically just doing recordings remotely, you know, using Zoom or other technologies. Um, it'd be great if you're, uh, if you're up for helping to do that, send us a note and we'll get you set up on how to do that.

Sounds good, Robb. Uh, you know what that means? It's time to jump into the news. Do we have any news this week? What are we gonna talk about?

I, you know, there's probably a couple things to talk about. Um, the first article, um, You know, since it is January and, you know, people like to make resolutions and do those sorts of things, there are a few apps that are built in Colorado that can help you get your new year off to the right start. All right. So first, there's an app called Optimize Fitness, and it's developed out of Fort Collins. It's basically, they have close to 1,000 different exercises that are in their library there that you can use to be done at home or in the gym, customized to where you are, your fitness level, your goals.

It gives you detailed descriptions and tutorials in video form showing you how to get there. It also helps you do planning. So, and it sounds like this app, once again, it's called Optimize Fitness. The app itself is free. There are available purchases in the app.

I assume that, you know, there's, there's really nice trainings you want to pay for, but, um, you know, you can get a feel for it for free. The only really bad news is they only support Apple. They don't have an Android app. So, uh, you gotta, you gotta be on the, uh, the iPhone to make this thing work. Uh, also there is an app called TrainingPeaks.

If you're a little bit more of a serious athlete, uh, maybe you're going to be doing your, your first Ironman this year or, or some other thing like that. Uh, TrainingPeaks out of Boulder, uh, caters to athletes, um, that are a little bit more high level and it's created by coaches from around the world. So you can use this to, uh, to really step up your training regimen. Um, make sure you're training the right way and track your progress on, uh, dashboards that you customize and things like that. Uh, 3rd app recommended here is, uh, from Louisville-based Gaia.

Um, it's called Yoga Studio Mind and Body. And obviously this is a whole bunch of different yoga classes. Um, they have a lot of different varieties, including hip-hop yoga. Alex, I know that that would be right up your alley for sure. And there's all kinds of levels from intermediate or beginner to intermediate and all the way to full-fledged yogis.

And you can get different focuses, options of 5 to 60 minutes. Lots of good stuff. I think that sounds like a great app for you, Robb. You know, doing a little yoga, you might be able to stretch and touch your knees. You know, I do think that that would be a really smart idea for me, which is of course why I'll never do it because smart ideas, yeah, not so good for me.

All right, and then the last app is called Makina, and this is actually a shopping app, but it encourages you to get healthy savings. So if you make smart purchases for healthy sort of things, go to stores that offer healthy products and things like that, then you can save based on those healthy products that you get. Collect rewards and things like that. So that's a pretty good thing too for those that are trying to be more healthy in this day and age. Yeah, and it was also, I think, sustainable as well, right?

There's some goals around, you know, things are, you know, good for the environment and all and so forth. For sure. All right, uh, let's go ahead and move over to our next story. We've got, um, from the Colorado Sun. This is a follow-up to something we've talked about several times.

Uh, I think it was 2 weeks ago maybe we had the— had an article that we did not talk about, um, that Colorado has hit had hit like a 63% spike in unemployment. And I didn't talk about it actually exactly because of what The Sun says here. Um, I don't— I didn't think it was true. And it looks like this article is following up to say, uh, that the 63% spike in unemployment claims is really due to fraud, the kind of fraud that people are seeing at work. Yeah, and I, you know, this has also been a discussion that's been going on on the Slack channel and and other places talking about how we as security professionals are seeing a lot of these reports of fraud, you know, in our businesses.

And it really is— it's crazy the amount of fraud that is, or at least attempted fraud, that is going on there. I know both of us have been a victim of that fraud. So sad to see, but good information here on, you know, what's been going on and things that you should do if you also are a victim of fraud. Yeah, good stuff. All right, go ahead.

Uh, next, after, uh, doing well in 2020, uh, Amp Robotics, which I think we have, uh, talked about a couple times on the show, um, got a $55 million Series B, uh, to continue building their business. Amp is a robotics company, an AI robotics company that builds recycling machines. Yeah, I do think we talked about it before, but it's been a while. And to be honest, I didn't remember it real well. I read through this thing, amazed yet again at how cool the technology is.

Basically, they have built these robots that can look at waste as it kind of flows past you and determine which of these things can be recycled, all the way down to things as small as a bottle cap, identifying how to handle those things. So I mean, obviously, considering the fact that recycling is really expensive and not that effective, this is a pretty cool thing. Yeah, definitely. And a couple of things that they mentioned, first, that like many businesses at the beginning of the pandemic, they saw a little bit of a downturn, but then when recycling companies realized that the way that they— excuse me, the way that they had been doing recycling was not really great for social distancing, it was hard for people to continue to do that, they realized that maybe they needed more automation, and so business picked up again. As part of that, they signed a contract for 24 of their machines with Waste Management, which is pretty cool.

Yeah. They talk about the fact that this is a really old industry, and coming to this really old industry with a new set of technologies has its own challenges in building credibility. So this fundraise, this $55 million fundraise, is really a great way for them to add some level of credibility that they're going to be around for the long haul. Yeah. Congrats to them.

All right. So next, there's an article that's a look back on 2020 and specifically how public Colorado companies did with their stocks in 2020. And the answer is really good. Yeah, and I think it's funny, Robb, the headline here is blockchain and marijuana play lead in Colorado stock index. So, you know, 2 of my favorite things there.

If only you could put marijuana on the blockchain. Oh, I, you know, I'm sure that you can, you know, production to track it and things like that. Anyway, so yeah, so there's an index that that tracks Colorado companies. And year over year, those companies had a 25% increase, which was better than the Dow Jones and the S&P 500, not quite as good as NASDAQ, but still pretty good. Some of the companies that were on there, Riot Blockchain, which we have talked about, I'm still not sure exactly what it is that they do, but But they had a very— a 1,400% gain on their stock over the year.

They went from $1.12 to basically $17, $16.99. It's pretty good, pretty good year for a stock, huh? Yeah, that is pretty good. Um, and then, uh, one of the things that I thought were interesting were the, uh, were the bad things that they shoved all the way down at the bottom of the article. Um, you know, some of the other companies that are on this list for the Colorado companies in the index were oil and gas companies, and not as great a year for oil and gas companies.

Extraction Oil and Gas, for example, their shares ended down 98.7% last year. Yeah, there was a whole bunch of— Sundance Energy was down 90%, High Point Resources down 89%. Not a good year to be in oil and gas. It's just interesting that Not only, you know, the pandemic came at the same time as that. If you remember, I mean, it seems like forever ago now, but about the same time as the pandemic, there was that like trade war for oil where Russia and the Middle East kind of got into a battle driving down prices, which really hurt the companies here in Colorado.

A lot of stuff happened last year, but they never really bounced back like the rest of the economy did. Exactly. All right. So, Obviously, good to see that, that the Colorado stock market has been doing pretty well. But now this has got me wondering, what would an index fund of companies talked about on our show look like?

And how would that perform versus these other indexes? Maybe we have some, some venture capitalists out there or some, some financial services people that can put together a Colorado Equal Security Index for us. Yeah, if there's someone out there who wants to spend the time to figure it out, I would, I would absolutely love to talk about your research on this show because I'm Super curious. All right, we're moving ahead though. We have a, a press release with the interesting title, Go West, Young Woman.

Um, this is a press release, and I might— the group who put it out, I, I didn't know anything about this. It's, it's from merchantmaverick.com, um, a report that they issued around the best states for women-led startups. Um, why did it make it into this podcast? Because they do talk quite a bit about Colorado, and we did really well on this report. Yeah, Robb, we did so well that we were number 1 for women-led startups.

Pretty cool.

The way that they figured it out was they had a methodology looking at things like, you know, how many employer— or excuse me, women-led firms, how many employees at those women-led firms, how many self-employed women had their own businesses, things like that. Um, and, uh, you know, based on all those metrics, we're at the top. Yeah, interesting. They also pull out a number, um, which is that 1.7% of all women in Western— these Western states that are in the report own their own business. 1.7% of all women.

Uh, that's above the national average, which is 1.4%. What they don't show in the article anywhere is what, what percentage of men or all people own their own business, because I, I just don't know what the— how that would look. But interesting to know that Colorado and the western states are significantly above basically the east and the south. Um, I love to see it. Of course, we have— we know several women who own their own businesses here locally.

You know, a shout out to Janelle for, for doing that as well. Uh, and I love to see that success. Yeah, uh, cool stuff. And I am I'm glad we are a women-owned business-friendly state. Pretty cool.

Yeah. All right. Next, we have an article from the very exciting Government Technology blog or magazine, but the reason that it's exciting is they interviewed Debbi Blaeth, CISO for the state of Colorado. Yeah, specifically this, the headline here is What's Next or Where Next for Government Cybersecurity in Colorado? And it is just talking about Debbi's plans.

You know, we've had Debbi on the show a couple of times and I think it's awesome for her to get this really national coverage. Yeah, it was a good interview with her. I enjoyed it. One of the things that I specifically liked that I guess I had never really thought about before was that, you know, she was talking about how they're, you know, early in 2021, they're starting the budgeting process for 2023. Um, which is a lot different than in, uh, in the private sector.

Yeah, yeah. How do you— how in the world do you, do you really know what you're going to want to spend that money on that far in the future? That said, fortunately for Debbi, things don't change in security ever. So, so if she just focuses on vulnerability management, patching, and, uh, I don't know, a couple other things, I think she's probably gonna do pretty well. Yeah, and it sounded like from, uh, uh, from the article, that's what she's doing.

Identity management also. So good stuff. Congrats to Debbi for the, for the article and some good information in there. All right, jumping over to our next article, we have yet another fantastic blog from the Red Canary folks. This blog is focused on hunting for the— basically it's a tactic that attackers use to get system access on a system to be able to use those to escalate and move within an organization.

Yeah, so I think many people, most people know the system account in Windows has a whole lot of privilege. So if an attacker can get access to the system account, then you can do a lot of different things. And so this is talking about the ways that, you know, an attacker can potentially do that using, you know, Meterpreter or Cobalt Strike or other things like that. And then of course ways that you can potentially detect that so that you can see if someone is trying to do that on one of your systems. Yeah, I love the strategizing back and forth, you know, where— how are they going to try and get around us?

Okay, let's look for that now. And then I'm sure that the attacker is doing the exact same thing. Yeah, exactly. Another great technical blog by Red Canary. If that's stuff that you're interested in, I would definitely recommend checking it out.

All right, next we have a blog from Ping Identity. This is looking at remote work in 2021 and security leaders talking about, you know, what their, their top strategies are for strengthening their IAM. Yeah, so this, this was actually a series of interviews that Ping had done with some of our customer CISOs, just understanding where they're going to be focused in the next year. They talked to CISOs across manufacturing, healthcare, education, financial services, insurance, and entertainment, TV and internet. And really, you know, obviously no surprise, the overwhelming focus for 2021 was gonna be on remote workforce.

Folks are still not quite there yet. But other interesting takeaways here, you know, what kind of integrations are people looking to do? Apps that they wanna focus on, Salesforce is number one on that list. Other folks are looking at things like GCP as integration points. Another priority.

So if you're looking to understand, you know, I assume people in sales or folks who are looking for a new gig might want to know what's top of mind for security leaders. I think this is a nice blog to, to get some perspective on that. Good stuff. All right, so our, our next article here is actually a bit of bad news. Um, uh, this is a press release by Secure64.

You know, that's the, the local secure DNS company, uh, and unfortunately one of their co-founders and one of their tech visionaries Bill Worley has passed away. Bill was a Colorado— I don't know if he was a native, but he lived in Colorado, and he passed away at the age of 82 over— it looks like maybe he probably lived in Aurora. Yeah, and Bill was a pretty accomplished guy. He had, it looked like, several careers before getting to found Secure-64. Spent a lot of time at HP and then IBM and other places like that, and really did some great work, helped do things like develop the PA-RISC architecture, which is, you know, a pretty widely used architecture.

And then also the PAWW architecture, which then became the Intel Itanium family of processors, how that worked. So pretty good stuff from Bill. And it's sad again that he passed away. Yeah, definitely sad. Not the kind of news we had to share very many times on the show.

As a, you know, relatively young industry, security doesn't have as much of that, but we appreciate the opportunity to acknowledge one who we've lost. So a moment for Bill there. And then our final article of the week, we have a blog post from the ISC² Denver chapter talking a little bit about 2020 and then Looking forward to 2021 and what they're up to. Looks like 2020 wasn't the greatest year for the ISC² chapter. It's some leadership changes and doing some work behind the scenes, but this is sort of their announcement that they're still here and they're coming back strong in 2021.

Yeah, you know, if you just— I think it's probably a good time to just spend a moment, you know, talking about the fact that we do have a really nice set of different security organizations in town, kind of depending on what your interests are. You know, both you and I, Alex, you know, have a background working with the ISSA chapter, which You know, as a reminder, I don't think we said it for a long time, you know, Denver ISSA is the biggest ISSA chapter in the world. That's a great organization if you're looking to do security stuff, but there's also a lot of other groups, right? ISACA has been around for a very long time and they have a really large group here in Denver, and there's Cloud Security Alliance and OWASP and DC303, and I'm not going to be able to remember all of them off the top of my head, but fortunately, because I can't do that, you could just go take a look at our website. We have a link on the website to security organizations and read about what each of these groups do and hopefully get yourself plugged in and maybe do some volunteering with, with whatever group it is you're interested in getting involved with.

Yeah, and hopefully be able to see some of those people in person in 2021. Yeah, if not, you can still use Zoom. There you go. That's right. All right, I guess we should jump over to the Slack message of the week.

We should do it. We should thank Andre Gaeta right off the bat. Yeah, so thanks to Andre. He's been supporting us with the Slack Message of the Week for as long as it has been in existence. He, you know, pays for the prize out of the— out of his own pocket every week.

So thanks to him. He's a great member of the community and we really appreciate his support. This week we, you know, we've acknowledged for our winner is going to be Dave Hundley. Dave posted in the Good Stuff channel about the fact that he passed his CISSP exam. Alex, I know you and I have both done that earlier in our careers, and I know we both appreciate how big deal that is, and I'm sure a lot of work went into that for him.

Yeah, congrats, Dave. CISSP is, you know, a mile wide and an inch deep, so you have to remember a lot of things for that test, and it's not the easiest thing to do. So congrats. I agree, I'm sure it was a lot of work, and I'm sure he will look forward to something from the Colorado Equal Security store as a great reward for passing. Yeah, there's a— I say a bit of a trend to talk badly about certifications in general, and, you know, They certainly aren't a cure-all.

It doesn't mean that anyone's gonna be great at their job. But if you're thinking about, hey, I wanna be in security and how do I prove that I know something, man, there's not a lot of better ways to start than just going and get that cert to get your foot in the door. For sure. All right, let's talk about events coming up. You know, one of the things we like to do on the show is talk about the events happening the next 2 weeks.

And, you know, we actually have things picking up. There's quite a few events coming. Starting on the 13th here this week, this is what we talked about a little bit last week. Alex, you and I are gonna be on a panel for ISSA Denver, kind of talking about 2021 2021 and 2020. It's their annual CISO panel.

On the 14th, ACES is doing their 2021 ACES Mile High Kickoff. On the 19th, there's 2 events. We've got ISSA Colorado Springs doing their January meeting, and we also have the Cloud Security Alliance here in Denver doing their January virtual meeting. On the 21st, ISACA Denver is doing their January chapter meeting in conjunction with the IIA. And also on the 21st, ISIS— or not ISIS, excuse me, scratch that.

We'll edit this out in the post-production. No, we won't. No, we won't. ACES is doing a Women in Security Coffee Chat with Dawn Gregory. So ACES is the local physical security chapter here in town.

And then finally, the Colorado Springs ISSA chapter is doing their January mini seminar on January 23rd. All right, that's it for the next couple weeks. Looking out to jobs now, I have, you know, good news from my side. I've removed one of my, one of my Ping Identity security jobs from the list, but we still have a few we're hiring for. We're looking to hire a product security engineer, someone who has an application security background, really development background with an interest in security.

That's probably a better way to look at it. We're also looking to hire a business analyst focused on security, help us run the program itself, and I'm looking for a privacy program manager, someone to help run the privacy program within Ping on the security side. All right, Red Canary is looking for a Director of Information Technology. Uh, Tri-State Generation is looking to hire a Cybersecurity Engineer 1, 2, 3, or Senior. So really, this is a pretty broad range.

If you're a cybersecurity engineer, there's an option for you here, it looks like. PayPal is looking for a Senior Application Security Engineer. Pretty cool that that's here in town. Yeah, Denver Water is looking to hire an IT program manager focused on security. Xcel Energy is looking for a senior application security slash pen tester.

And finally, Zoom, once again another company that we might not have expected to be here in Colorado. Zoom is looking to hire a senior security vulnerability management engineer. I think that wins, uh, biggest title of the week. Yeah. Well, that's it for the podcast here, or the news portion of the podcast, but we do have a feature interview this week, Alex.

If you remember a couple of weeks ago on the show, maybe a month ago, we talked about Range Ventures, which is a new private equity or venture capital fund here in town that's really focused on emphasizing Colorado tech stuff. Well, they have— we reached out to them and I talked to one of their co-founders and we were able to get connected. Jason Jaques is doing the interview with Chris Erickson, learning all about this brand new venture capital fund here in town. I am looking forward to hearing that interview. I am too.

All right, well, big thanks to everyone. We look forward to hopefully catching you guys again in person one of these days, but in the interim, we'll, we'll keep going here remote. Sounds good. Thanks, everyone. Have a great week.

This is David McGuire, Director of IT Security at QEP Resources. This is Colorado Eco Colorado Equal Security. For Colorado security professionals, by Colorado security professionals. Colorado Equal Security. This is Jason Jaques.

Do you ever wonder who's influential in the startup scene here locally? Well, wonder no more. I talked to Chris Erickson at Range Ventures. Here's the interview. Enjoy.

Hi, Chris. Thanks for joining the podcast. Thanks, Jason. Excited to be here. So, tell me a little bit about yourself.

Where are you from, Chris? Yeah. So, originally, I grew up in the Midwest from Michigan, stayed in the Midwest through undergrad, and eventually, for grad school, made my way out to the West Coast and spent 2007 to 2019 on the West Coast, a little bit of time in LA, but most of the last 8 to 9 years in the Bay Area building Apartment List. And then, my family and I moved here to Denver about a year and 2 weeks ago. Yeah.

You spent a large chunk of the past decade in California, Northern California. Tell me a little about that. How did you like it out there? You know, well, first, you know, having grown up in the Midwest, I remember very clearly the first day in February where I was golfing and it was 70 and sunny. And that was kind of the moment where I was like, wow, you know, there's a different type of lifestyle out here.

So, let's stick around and let's try this out. But, you know, really the last 8 to 9 years in the Bay Area was an incredible experience, both personally and professionally. But it's also been amazing to see how much it changed over that period of time, just from the growth of people, the growth of companies, and also I think some of the changing mix of people in the Bay Area. And that was part of the large reason why we were super excited, you know, in addition to family, to make the move out here to Denver. Why leave?

But a big part of it's family and lifestyle too, right? Lifestyle, I think, goes a bit with the family. But one of the things that made it super exciting to make the move out here is the entrepreneurial and tech community in Denver in the last 4 or 5 years has really just exploded and taken off. And it's not just big tech, right? The Facebooks, the Ubers, and Googles that have big offices that just keep getting bigger here or in Boulder.

But it's also all of the, you know, a lot of fast-growing West Coast tech companies have opened really meaningful offices, you know, here over the last 3 or 4 years, right? You've just seen an amazing group of folks move here. And then you've had a handful of locally grown unicorns as well too, right? With the Guild Education, Ibotta, and those companies. And so just the tech community here was super exciting to us.

And I think the other thing too, it reminded me a lot of where the Bay Area was 7 or 8 years ago from sort of just the ethos and the entrepreneurial spirit of the folks that were starting companies here. And everyone, you know, I talked to here when we were moving out and then we moved out, they're starting companies because they were really excited about the problems they wanted to solve and they were really excited about the other people they were meeting and working with. Not because it was the cool thing to tell their buddy they were doing, right? And that's what the Bay Area 8, 9 years ago felt like to me. And I was super excited to get back into just a really authentic feeling community, which the Denver-Boulder ecosystem struck me with immediately.

Did you have a lot of travel out here previously to moving out here? Yeah, you know, it's strange how, you know, things work out. Denver was our first market we launched at Apartment List, which was the the company I previously founded. Um, and, you know, it was a combination of Denver's just a great market that's very representative from a real estate perspective of a lot of other markets in the US, right? California is not, right?

If you want a representative real estate or rental market, you know, nowhere in California is really where you want to go. Um, and so, as we were looking at, hey, where do we want to be to learn and test and do all of those things, you know, Denver fit from, you know, the types of rentals and the type of real estate market. And then also, it's just a fun city to come and visit, right? And if I was going to have to get on a plane to go somewhere, I wanted to go to a city that I was super excited to go visit. So, I probably took more business trips to Denver over the past 5 or 6 years than any other city in the US.

And it just worked out that this then is where, you know, family ended up and where we ended up moving. Yeah, very cool. And since you moved here recently, you really had your choice of living in any part of town. I find it fascinating where you ended up. Where'd you end up?

Yeah. So, we ended up in the very northeastern part of Denver in Central Park, which is sort of the brand new master-planned community up here. And, you know, we didn't do a ton of research. It's sort of where my wife's entire family has all moved. And so, we sort of said, hey, let's not anger anyone, right?

Let's just, you know, pick a location that's as close to them as possible. And especially through the pandemic and all that, it's been amazing because there's just wide open spaces, big parks up here, and we're right up against the Arsenal. So if we want to just, you know, go through a quick hike or something like that, you know, it's 5 minutes outside of our door. Yeah, that's awesome. So let's talk about your, uh, the company you have co-founded now, Range Ventures.

So your website is range.vc. Correct? Yep. Yeah. Tell me a little bit about Range.

Yeah. So, you know, when I was in the process of moving out here, you know, one of the first people I called was a friend of mine named Adam Burrows, who we worked with way back in the day, 2006, 2007 at Boston Consulting Group in Chicago. And we'd stayed in touch and we'd done some work together while I was at Apartment List. And I just sort of picked up the phone when I was driving on the 101 one day in the Bay Area and said, hey, Adam, you know, I'm moving out to Denver. What are you up to?

What's going on? And it just sort of, you know, serendipitously it happened. He just left his job and he's like, you know, I'm angel investing. I'm meeting a lot of great entrepreneurs here. Do you wanna look at some deals together?

And I said, great, I'd love to, you know, get more involved in Denver tech ecosystem, get to meet some folks. You know, we did a handful of deals together and it became really apparent to us just the appetite for what Range Ventures would become. In this ecosystem. There's just amazing entrepreneurs and amazing tech talent here. And what, what it takes to build a great tech company is talent and capital, right?

And the capital, especially at the early stage, was really missing in this ecosystem. And we kept hearing time and time again from the founders we were talking from said, hey, we would love to have investors like you guys who've actually built companies, who've raised capital personally, Adam, you know, was head of corp dev at HomeAdvisor when they IPO'd, right, which is still the largest tech IPO in the Denver-Boulder ecosystem. And they really wanted, you know, us as part of their companies. And we love working with early-stage companies, right? Like, you know, I loved all phases of building Apartment List and scaling it.

But, you know, at the start was what I loved most, when you're sort of, you know, still solving the hard problems, still figuring out how to get to product-market fit. Fit, right? And that's when we said, you know, we think there's a real opportunity both from founders and also a great financial opportunity for an early-stage fund that is largely focused on the Denver-Boulder ecosystem. So Adam and I sort of said, hey, we've got the great background to go and do this, so let's see if we can raise a fund to be focused on this. And, you know, kicking off fundraising in the middle of a pandemic wasn't part of our plan when we initially had the idea, but I think our first fundraising meeting was the the day Denver Public Schools closed.

So we didn't feel like that was a great sign, right, for, you know, what we were doing. But we ended up raising $23 million in just a couple of months to, you know, launch Range Ventures. And we're super excited to have the opportunity to support local founders and entrepreneurs here in this market. Has COVID and the pandemic and the, I guess, the world kind of shutting down, has that impacted you guys and your ability to start this up? You know, at first we thought it was, we thought it was going to be a real big headwind to what we were doing.

And at first it was a bit, you know, we first started talking to more institutional investors and some family offices, which, who you might more traditionally raise a fund of that size from when you get going. And they were all closed for business, you know, at that period of time. Right. And also traditionally it takes about 12 to 18 months to raise a first time. Venture fund if you go down that route.

Um, you know, so Adam and I had our first pivot, right, you know, a few weeks in, and we said, hey, you know, this traditional strategy of how people raise funds probably isn't going to fly in this environment. Um, and also, we were still seeing just amazing opportunities even during, you know, the start of the pandemic of companies we wanted to be investing in and backing, right? Um, more so than we were able to do with just our personal capital. And so we sort of went the opposite route and said, hey, you know, we're going to tap into our network of, you know, local tech entrepreneurs and founders, and let's go the individual investor route. And the response from that crowd when they heard what we were building, our focus here, because they see the opportunity being in this market, uh, was just astounding.

And we very quickly surpassed all of the goals we, we originally had set, um, and were able to raise it very quickly. I also think actually Zoom and sort of, you know, the acceptance that you could do everything virtually actually accelerated it, right? Because, you know, we were able to some days have 8 or 9, you know, pitch meetings in a day, right? Just, you know, back to back to back over Zoom, which is exhausting in its own regard. But, you know, previously you'd have to— you could have 2 or 3 meetings in a day, right?

Because the expectation would be all in person, right? Or, you know, you'd have to do the Chicago swing or the San Francisco swing or something like that. Just all back to back like that. So, on one hand, it was a bit of a headwind, but I think at the end of the day, it ended up being a blessing for how we were able to do it and the set of limited partners in our fund we got. Yeah.

Yeah. No, that's good perspective. I can definitely see how the world of remote videoing and Zoom has kind of actually sped up in a lot of ways. Yeah. But 8 or 9 hours of not only being on Zoom, but pitching yourself, Right?

You know, it can be quite exhausting at the end of the day. So, you know, I'm super excited to what we've done, but I'm much more excited to be on the investing phase of what we're doing. Yeah. The other interesting component about everything being Zoom is the fact that we hear background noise. Yeah.

Are you picking up some right now from my kids in the back? Yeah, it's totally fine. School is out. So, I have a 4-year-old and a 7-year-old. And the amount of energy they still have at this time of the day is quite exceptional.

Yeah, I've got a dog that snores and sometimes the mic picks it up. So hopefully, hopefully we don't get too much dog snoring. But that's the world we live in for sure. So the— you guys look to do really the, the early investing. And I think you were telling me before, you're looking to do 25 different investments.

So you have 25 different startups, right? Yeah. Yeah. I saw or noticed there's 4 of them listed on your website. So, you got 21 more to go?

We actually have 19 more to go. We have 2 that we haven't announced yet, actually. Neither of which I can actually announce at this point yet, unfortunately. But yeah, we're looking to make about, you know, 5 to 6 investments per year. From the fund.

And that's sort of right on pace because even though we announced the launch of the fund sort of in December, we've been investing out of it since sort of April, May timeframe. Okay. And what can you tell me about the ones that I guess are public at this point? Yeah. So there's 3 great Denver-based companies in our portfolio, Comet Chat, Suna and Nomad.

And just amazing founders and teams. And, you know, real quickly go through each of them. Suna, the CEO is Liz, and she has a background in just high-quality video and photo production and actually won an Emmy with her previous company that she had founded doing production. And she sort of looked at the content production landscape and in particular, like visual content production. And she said, wow, people either have, you know, cheap, you know, low-quality options, or they have high-quality, really expensive, and kind of slow.

I think I can bring technology to this space and sort of break that paradigm, right? And I can deliver high-quality, fast, low-cost content to people. And if you look at what Suna's done, You know, they're on just an absolute tear from a growth perspective. And you can go out to Suna, ship them your product, in 24 to 48 hours later get high-quality, you know, photos back that have professional staging, professional art direction, that you can actually shop while they're doing the shoot, you know, through their interface. And it looks just as good as anything you can get from any company, right?

And if you sort of think about You know, every company selling to a consumer today, everyone's online now, right? And every company needs 5 to 10, you know, photos, right, for their website, for their Instagram, for their Facebook, right, through any other channel that they're selling for. And they've sort of productionized the production of that content, and it's just taken off. So really impressive to see. Comet Chat is a low/no-code sort of, you know, developer-driven set of APIs that allow anyone to embed audio, video, or chat functionality into any app that they have, right?

And again, you know, it's something that I think has also benefited a bit from COVID but I don't think those styles of interactions are going to change. And it's so much better to have it in the app than to have, you know, a Zoom here while you're trying to play poker with your buddies or something like that. You know, online, right? Just, just put it all into the app. Um, the Nomad is one that is, you know, very near to the, the prior experience I have.

It's in the rental space, and they're focused on individual landlords, and they offer sort of a, a pain-free way to be an individual landlord. They have a rent guarantee, take care of any damage, take care of any security deposit. And, you know, the number one pain point of a lot of small landlords is basically like they're stressed out about, am I going to get paid this month? Right? Or if this tenant moves out, how much damage is going to be?

And Nomad solves all of those problems for the landlord. Yeah. Very cool. What qualities are you looking for in the people you invest in? Yep.

That's a great question. Yeah. Sounds like definitely some background noise. I don't know what they're playing back there, but it's It sounds exciting. They, they, they are having fun and always having fun.

Yeah. Um, so what we, we look for with, um, founders, it's a handful of things, but we're gonna focus on sort of 3 in particular. Um, one, what we like to call sort of founder-market fit. You know, what is it in this founder's background that leads us to believe that they have a really credible, unique insight for solving the problem they're targeting, right? You know, I spoke with, you know, about what Liz and Suna, right?

She had run a production company. She knew what it took to produce, you know, Emmy-winning content, right? And she said, I can change this market, right? PJ, who's the CEO of Nomad, you know, both was a landlord and comes from a family that has had a property management company here as well, right? So had seen firsthand the challenges of that, but also spent time at Opendoor, Right?

So new what you could do when you bring some tech and some risk sort of solutions to a category like that as well too.

The next thing we look for is, you know, something as well that shows us that they have a lot of resilience or grit, right? And that can come in a bunch of different forms, but really understanding, you know, what their career journey or personal journey has been like, right? Because, you know, having, you know, gone down the path before myself, like, Building a company is really, really hard, right? And no matter how well it's going, at some point you're gonna screw something up really badly, right? And you're gonna have to deal with it.

And people who know how to overcome those things, who know how to be resilient and push through those things, is really important, right? 'Cause to some degree, you know, especially at the early stage, you have to will your company to exist. Right? And that's something that you have to do.

And then the third thing that we really look for is they need to be the company's best salesperson, right? And we mean that across 3 dimensions. They need to be the company's best salesperson externally because at the start, as CEO, you're the sales team, right? And you're responsible for going and getting those first clients, right? Second, you've gotta be the best salesperson internally for recruiting, right?

You know, no one in there, it is never a logical decision, right, to go be employee number 3, 4, or 5 at a startup, right? You know, it's just not a great logical decision. It can work out great, but it's, you know, not often that, but you're making a decision largely on the vision of what the founder or the founding team tells you about what they're gonna do, right? And so you have to be able to recruit as a founder. And then the third piece of it is, um, you've gotta be the best salesperson externally for fundraising too, right?

Because, because as the CEO, you're responsible for raising money. You know, you can't have the type of outcomes or returns that we're looking for if you're not gonna raise follow-on capital, right? And so that's really the third quality is just being that best salesperson across all 3 of those dimensions. And you've gotta be able to do it across all 3 of those dimensions to succeed, because if you can't sell, clients, if you can't recruit a team and you can't raise capital, you're never going to build a big company. Yeah, yeah, that definitely makes sense.

That's good advice. Yep. So the, the listeners of this podcast and this, this Colorado Equal Security community, it's, it's a pretty diverse group amongst really primarily the security tech crowd. I mean, where there's, there's executives down to individual contributors, there's people working in some of the largest companies here in Colorado down to startups, quite frankly. So I guess, you know, a couple of questions.

So what, what can this community do for you to help you guys? And I guess alternatively, what advice would you give to someone in this, in this community that's looking to do a startup? Yeah. Well, I think what the community can do for us, you know, keep, keep growing. Right?

You know, in my experience and what I've seen is, um, you know, people who spend their time thinking about technology and solving hard tech problems come up with amazing other solutions and are the type of people, whether it ends up being something in security or something else, that drive ecosystems like this forward, right? Um, and I think that that's been one of the amazing things, right, that you've seen that's been key to the success of the Bay Area is you had people who understood technology and took what they learned there to other problems or other categories, right? And so just, just keep growing and sort of bring that technological mindset of how you solve, scale, and design solutions to other things, right? And keep trying. Um, and I think the other thing that the community can do too is, is support people as well in doing that, right?

You know, that was one of the, the amazing things too, you know, from the Bay Area that I've seen here already as well that I want people to keep doing is the number of just sort of like informal, you know, coffee chats or now, you know, Zoom chats or whatever they ever are, that like, hey, I have this idea, right? Or I have this problem and I know that you work at a different company or something like that. And you just find a lot of magic through those conversations, right? And so, you know, just keep doing that and keep growing. 'Cause I think that's what leads to, you know, really interesting outcomes is those informal networks.

And those informal conversations often spawn, I think, a lot of the most interesting things from it. Yeah, yeah, good stuff. And that's, it's funny, this, this community, especially on Slack, is, is, is the type of community that does share a lot of ideas. And, and occasionally a lot of, I guess, junk talk or smack talk as well. And I do contribute to that a little bit.

So, you know, yeah, good stuff. So you guys, You also have your own, I guess, community, sort of, a monthly meetup that you do. And I know it's, it's invite-only, but what type of people are you looking for to, to potentially plug into your community in your kind of monthly, monthly sessions or meetup? Yeah, well, I think, you know, on 2 fronts, you know, one, into our arranged community, we want to plug in anyone that is that is interested in technology, interested in building, scaling, or starting something here, right? You know, just more broadly.

And, you know, in addition to the Range sessions, which I'll talk about in a second, we have part of our team, a woman named Kendra Haberkorn, who is head of talent for Range. And her job is to just meet amazing people in the tech community here, you know, whether they're looking for something now or maybe something in the future. But really, we want to know everyone who is just, you know, great and interested in building something and wants to contribute to it. So, you know, there's always that opportunity to connect with, you know, myself, Adam, or Kendra on our team just to get to know us from that perspective. And then what you were talking about specifically is, you know, once a month, and these are virtual now, we hold what we call range sessions.

And it's a 2 to 3 hour, very informal discussion where we bring together no more than 9 people total because we don't want the Zoom screen to be, you know, more than, you know, at least the 9 Brady Bunch box, I think still works somewhat. We want it to be a lively sort of small discussion, and we bring together functional leaders around this specific topic, and we seed it with a few questions and also beer. We send pint glasses and a 6-pack of local Colorado beer to everyone as well. We find that helps the conversation to get going and kick it off with a question or two, and the conversation is sort of, you know, goes from there. The last one we did was on scaling engineering teams in high-growth companies.

And what we try to do intentionally is we try to bring together a few people who have been there and done that and seen it at the biggest scale possible you could do it, all the way down to people who are just getting started. And so on that one, we had, you know, 2 people who had been CTOs of publicly traded companies here who have, you know, seen hundreds and hundreds of engineers in their team and supported many lines of business. All the way down to the CTO of a company that just got their first round of funding and was looking to hire their first engineer, right? And cover just a wide range of topics and just try to make it a very open, you know, conversation amongst folks. And, you know, sort of our 2 rules are this is confidential and don't be afraid to share your mistakes, right?

And people learn a ton and make really good connections on that, you know. And so we're holding those monthly on different topics and I'm sure at some point, we will go into something specific to this community because we have several of the limited partners in our fund, investors in our funds, that are the founders and C-suite members of some of the bigger security companies in the Denver-Boulder area. Yeah. Let's switch gears a little bit and talk charity community involvement. I know that you are involved in something called Energize Colorado.

And you lead one of the initiatives. Tell me about that. Yeah, so, you know, when COVID, you know, really started, you know, taking off, you know, I think mid-March, end of March here, you know, Governor Polis reached out to Brad Feld and asked Brad to get involved and help bring some private-public partnerships together to help the state, right? And there was initial focus on getting, you know, PPE and some testing and things like that that Brad helped with, but there's also a longer-term focus on really supporting, you know, businesses and entrepreneurs and people with maybe not the same level of access to resources in the Front Range and on the Western Slope of Colorado just through the pandemic with other challenges, right? And so Energize Colorado was spun up as a part of that, and Brad is the chairman of it.

And it's really focused on helping, you know, anyone who's either a small business founder or works in a small business through the challenges of COVID right? Whether it be economic or, you know, needing a mentor or, you know, mental health, which is the thing that I lead. And so what we're trying to do is we're trying to help bring free mental health resources to people in Colorado to help through this, right? Because, you know, the pandemic is not just a, you know, a physical health risk, right? There's a lot of mental health challenges that are going on as a result of isolation or losing your job or the stress of worrying about people that are, that are sick.

And there's a lot of data out there about you're seeing higher suicide rates, right, as a result of this, and more people are having this. And so we offer both free group therapy that's delivered really focused on stress reduction, right, and helping people learn how to better manage stress through this. And then free access to one-on-one therapy as well for a few sessions to sort of help stabilize and bring people through. And all that can be accessed at energizecolorado.com. And if you sort of scroll down a bit to the mental health resource section, you can access that.

Okay, excellent. So that's, that's how they would, if they need help, they, they can find it. Yeah. If people want to be involved, and, and provide help, how do they do that? You know, there's a volunteer form, you know, through the website if you're interested in joining Energize in general, but if you're also interested in the, the mental health side specifically, you know, feel free to just drop me an email at chris@range.bc.

I would love to connect with anyone who'd like to help out on that. Yeah, awesome. Yeah, and just that, you know, I think that, you know, the last thing, you know, one of the biggest messages we're trying to push with that is you know, everyone is having challenges with that right now, right? You know, no one is alone in the stress and challenges of that and reach out for help, right? Because I think that's the first step is just trying to destigmatize the access to mental health care right now in particular.

Yeah, yeah, it's a tough time right now for sure, for really most of us. So, it's good that you're doing that. You know, it's great that you're in town. I think we covered range pretty well. I'm excited to see what you guys end up doing and the companies that, that you end up helping.

That's going to be exciting. I think before I let you, let you go, let's, let's just talk about hobbies real quick since you moved here to Colorado. What's, what are your hobbies? What are you getting, getting into? Yep.

Well, you know, one of the, one of the big draws was just the access to outdoors, right? And so So, you know, one of the first things I did was, you know, buy new skis, boots, new mountain bike and all of that. And unfortunately, the usage of that has not been as high as I was anticipating with some of the challenges for that. But love doing that. And then, you know, other than that, just anything around, you know, the house, either from going for a run or working out just to try to, you know, burn through as much of the stress as possible.

Also like to do, but, you know, really my wife jokes about this when I'm like, oh, I don't really have any other hobbies. And she's like, you never shut up about what you're doing work-wise, right? And I think that's one of the places where I feel incredibly lucky is like, I love working with early-stage companies and talking about early-stage companies and helping founders, right? And, you know, I know there's a lot of mixed advice on, you know, don't go do what you love or don't follow your passion or something like that. But, you know, my hobby is startups in the tech ecosystem, right, and doing that.

And that's where, you know, 90% of, you know, my free brainpower, I think, often goes to is, you know, talking to my partner Adam about it because he's exactly the same way, right? Like, if left to our own devices, like, I think we would do nothing else other than just, you know, talk about this, help companies, look for new companies, because it's fun, right? And finding a new company, helping a founder build a company, and seeing, you know, the impact that they can have on the world when they're successful. It's just one of the most inspiring and rewarding things I found in my career. Yeah, that's how I've always felt about my job.

It's, you know, what would I do if I walked away? I don't know. This is kind of just what I do. It's part of who I am. Yeah, I think, you know, the thing that has been constant for me throughout my entire life that I've always enjoyed is solving problems, right?

And, you know, each company we meet with or work with is just a new problem, right, to help solve. And there's— I've not found another hobby yet that is more fun than solving hard problems. And that's what I really like to do. And people who also want to go solve a hard problem are people I really like to hang out with and work with. Yeah, yeah, that's great stuff.

Well, thanks again for being on the podcast, Chris. And stay safe out there. And like I say, I'm excited to see what you guys do in the future. Yep. We're super excited to contribute and I'm super excited to be here in Colorado and part of this ecosystem.

So thank you very much, Jason. I really enjoyed it. And that concludes my interview with Chris Erickson of Range Ventures. Again, their website is range.vc and you can find and follow him on LinkedIn. Be sure to follow and support Colorado Equals Security on Patreon.

This is Jason Jaques saying be safe out there.

Learn more about the Colorado security scene at colorado-security.com, where you can see information about local security groups, a calendar of upcoming security events, and learn more about Colorado Equals Security. Reach out to Alex and Robb by emailing info@colorado-security.com.

Until next time, remember, Colorado equals security.