Spotlight on Entrepreneurship in Colorado

Posted on Tuesday, Oct 30th 2018

The Economist recently did an article titled Why Startups Are Leaving Silicon Valley. The positive message in the article is that entrepreneurship has now spread around the world. Compelling ventures are getting built everywhere.

Today, we put the spotlight on Colorado.

First, a look at the Unicorns.

One of the most promising companies out of the state is Ping Identity. It was acquired by Vista Equity Partners in 2016 for $600 Million. Revenues in 2017 are estimated at $140 million. The space is hot, and rival OKTA dominates with a market cap of close to $6 billion. Ping Identity is definitely a Unicorn based on those numbers.

According to Stratistics MRC, the Global Identity & Access Management market is projected to grow 15% annually to $20.87 billion by the year 2022 from $7.94 billion in 2016 driven by the increased focus on compliance management, along with the growing adoption of Internet of Things (IOT), Bring Your Own Device, and connected devices among organizations. So there’s lots of headroom to grow.

Read Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity

Also, Denver, Colorado-based SendGrid was founded in 2009 by Isaac Saldana, Jose Lopez, and Tim Jenkins in 2009. It is a customer communication platform for sending transactional and marketing emails without the cost and complexity of maintaining email servers.

According to a 2017 Radicati Group report, an estimated 125 billion commercial emails are sent every day, and the number of email users is expected to grow from 3.7 billion in 2017 to 4.1 billion by 2021.

SendGrid is currently trading at around a $1.5 billion market cap.

One of our favorite entrepreneurship stories is that of Christian Vanek, CEO of SurveyGizmo. Here’s a video of his appearance at our 340th roundtable.