Commerce secretary joins Polis to hail area startups

BOULDER — To help nourish a climate friendly to startup entrepreneurs, “public policy needs to catch up.”

That was part of the message U.S. Rep. Jared Polis delivered to young innovators on Thursday at sports technology accelerator Black Lab Sports in Boulder after a day of touring a succession of startup businesses in Northern Colorado and the Boulder Valley as part of the fourth annual Startup Day Across America.

At Black Lab, he joined Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker to check out products and services offered by startups such as Loveland-based Aleph Objects, which makes open-source 3-D printers, and Boulder-based college campus advertising platform Flyte Desk.

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Polis said government can help by lowering corporate tax rates, passing immigration reform and making sure everyone has access to high-speed broadband connections.

“There’s lots more we can do in government to foster an environment where startups can innovate and succeed,” he said, including “help with capital formation, crowdfunding, health care, tech transfer, freeing up the internet.

“We’ve been listening to these people, and they have a lot of great ideas.”

What better place to listen than Boulder, Pritzker said, which has “six times more tech startups than the national average, and twice that of the Silicon Valley.”

Startup companies in the United States have created 1.5 million jobs a year for the past 30 years — and two of every three new jobs, she said, adding that a big reason is that “we have a culture that accepts failure, protects intellectual property and has an extraordinarily creative workforce.” She said she has learned in her travels that that culture is the envy of the world.

Pritzker echoed Polis in stressing the importance of a free and open internet to help break down trade barriers, and hailed her federal department’s voluminous storehouse of data sets not only as a resource for new businesses but also as a tool they could use to “hack the pay gap” between men and women in the workforce.

“Data has the power to unlock a number of challenges if we make it available and accessible,” Pritzker said.

One of those challenges, she said, is to make more funding available to female entrepreneurs, because “most of the venture capitalists are men.”

To expand opportunities for Americans to become entrepreneurs, Polis said, the public and private sectors need to work together to “diversify the pipeline of young people into STEM education.”

Pritzker hailed the work of a group she chairs, the Presidential Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship, or PAGE, made up of some of the nation’s best and brightest innovators tasked with using their networks and platforms to help expand the startup culture at home and abroad.

Polis, D-Colo., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., launched Startup Day Across America in 2013 as founders of the Congressional Caucus on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. According to the bipartisan effort’s website, their goal is to give local entrepreneurs around the nation “an opportunity to educate their representatives in government about the challenges they face and discuss how federal policy can support their efforts to test new ideas, create new products and grow their businesses.”

Polis’ day on Thursday started in Fort Collins with morning visits to Sidekick, a startup that retrofits bicycles with electric power, and Jessup Farm Artisan Village, where patrons can get everything from coffee to a haircut. In Loveland he toured Decibullz, which makes custom-fit ear buds. In Boulder, before arriving at Black Lab, he visited ThinkTopic, a tech startup that specializes in research and development.

Also showing off their wares at Black Lab were startups including Boulder-based Edntech, Isplack, JuicePlus, Kickfurther, Nice Recovery, Onx Sports, RideLogic and Woot Math.