DevelopIntelligence moves operations from Boulder to Lafayette

LAFAYETTE  — Kelby Zorgdrager, founder and chief executive of DevelopIntelligence LLC, and silent partners have acquired the two-story Bridgetown building in Lafayette for $2.05 million.

The group used the entity AOA Bridgetown LLC to acquire the 11,951-square-foot building at 2675 North Park Drive from Bridgetown LLC, registered to Robert W. Taylor in Lafayette.

DevelopIntelligence, a software-developer training firm that had been in Boulder since moving there from Louisville in 2014, moved to the Bridgetown building Jan. 13 and occupies 4,000 square feet of the second floor, previously occupied by The Creative Alliance.

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The ground floor is home to Nissi’s, a restaurant, and music and events venue. Playa Lakes is occupying about 2,000 square feet on the second floor.

When DevelopIntellingence moved its headquarters from Louisville to 3200 Carbon Place in Boulder, increasing its space at the time from 800 square feet to 2,000 square feet, it was in part to be near the Boulder tech hub, but now, Zorgdrager has a different perspective.

“Over the past year, it has been harder and harder to attract talent from all over the Denver metro area and convince them to fight traffic in and out of Boulder,” Zorgdrager said. “Over the past years, we’ve probably lost the opportunity to hire 10 really great and qualified folks who live in Denver because they did not want to fight Boulder/U.S. Highway 36 traffic.”

Zorgdrager said in business, there are always tradeoffs.

“We could either stay in the epicenter of Boulder, pay high rent, fight traffic and deal with little to no parking, disrupt work-life balance due to commuting times, hoping location would help us flourish. Or, we could move east where people are excited to drive 12 minutes to work, pay less rent, have more parking than you know what to do with, and be able to hire great talent who don’t want to spend 1.5 hours in the car each day commuting.

“We chose talent over location, because when you can’t hire top talent it’s hard to scale your business at the pace the market is asking you to scale.”

Zorgdrager said that during the past three years, the company has had a 240 percent growth in revenue, doubled the number of employees and tripled the number of engineers it provides training to annually. Since its inception in 2003, DevelopIntelligence has delivered custom learning solutions to nearly 50,000 engineers worldwide.

Todd Walsh, a co-founder of Boulder-based Boom Properties, helped Zorgdrager find the building, but the deal was conducted off market between the buyer and seller, he said.