California, Massachusetts, New York, Colorado. That’s the order of states with the greatest dollar value of seed and early stage investment according to a PWC MoneyTree study that my partner Jason blogged about today. $290M invested in 41 companies based in Colorado in 2011. Compare that with 2006 when Colorado ranked 12th on the list with just under $90M invested in 32 companies.

That’s an incredible achievement and says a lot about the state of the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Colorado and our rising profile on the national stage. I’ve written extensively on why Boulder specifically, and Colorado in general, are great start-up markets (see here, for example). And these data show that the work and effort of many people in our state is paying off. I often tell people when they ask me how to replicate the success we’ve had here in Colorado that the journey is a long one. When building an entrepreneurial community one needs to take a 10+year view of the effort. When I think back to what the Colorado market looked like when I joined the venture industry about 12 years ago (based here, but working for a CA firm), it’s almost hard to fathom the changes. And while the number of venture firms located in Colorado has diminished significantly in that time, the overall entrepreneurial environemnt has really flourished. All giving support to what I believe to be a key truth about our industry – entrepreneurs come first!

So congratulations to all the great Colorado entrepreneurs who have made this state a great place to start and build a business.

One of the many things that makes Boulder a great city for start-ups is its incredibly collaborative environment (see posts on my love of Boulder here and here). From the willingness of mentors to help out TechStars companies, to collaborative efforts around recruiting great talent to our city, I’m constantly amazed at how many people are working to make Boulder an amazing place for businesses to thrive.

Today there’s another new initiative launching to help young tech companies in our community – Trada is opening CodeSpace, a free co-working space dedicated to startup developers and software engineers. CodeSpace will be located in Trada’s downtown Boulder offices and will have over 2000 sq ft of space dedicated to the effort.

While there are many places where non-technical entrepreneurs can meet up in Boulder to discuss their startups, there are few places where software developers can camp out for the day, week or month and work together on a project. We wanted to add this environment to the mix of coffee shops, traditional co-working spaces, and rented offices in Boulder. And in CodeSpace you don’t even have to buy coffee to camp out there (in fact the coffee is on Trada!).

But you do need to apply. There are spots for three dev teams (1-4 people each) for semi-permanent space as well as come-as-you-are dev and co-working space (with whiteboards, internet, access to caffeinated beverages, etc).

To start, CodeSpace will be open 8am to 5pm Monday through Friday. The program will run through the summer with the expectation that it will extend/expand in the fall as we learn what works best.

To apply for one of the 3 dedicated co-working spaces please visit trada.com/codespace

Someone asked me this week for some qualitative data on the factors that lead Boulder to emerge over the past 5 or so years as one of the country’s top markets for start-ups. It’s a great question and I know that there are many other cities that are trying to follow Boulder’s example. I thought it was worth posting these thoughts – I’m sure others will have things to add to this.

______________________________________________________________________

The quantitative data are pretty boring – Colorado has stayed very consistent in terms of overall venture investment activity (~ $600M/year putting us clearly in the 2^nd tier of venture markets). In fact an increasing percentage of this funding has come from out of state investors (93% in the last year I saw data for – 09’).

Given this it’s an interesting question why Boulder is considered such a great startup market (as I think you know, BusinessWeek voted Boulder the most entrepreneurial city in America, the NYT did a great story on Boulder, Fox Business was just out here, etc.). There are a couple of keys to this success in my view.

Boulder has many leaders. I said this in a post in response to a Forbes article last week on Boulder/Foundry, but Foundry, while active, isn’t the center of Boulder entrepreneurial activity. No one is and that’s one of the keys to Boulder’s success. For sure my partners and I do a ton to support and promote Boulder, but we have people like Robert Reich who started the NewTech Meetup here (attracts 400+ people monthly to their event); Andrew Hyde who organized TedXBoulder (great event, tons of stuff on that on the web), StartUp Weekend (which started in Boulder), Boulder.me (recruiting event in Boulder) and Ignite Boulder (sells out the largest space in town every time he does it); Joe Pezzillo who organizes a bunch of iPhone developer stuff locally; Eric Norlin who along with us brings the Defrag and Glue conferences (ok – he doesn’t live here, but he organizes great events here); and of course David Cohen who started TechStars here (and you know that story). You get the point – I think THE key to Boulder’s success is that we have many many pillars of the tech community.

Boulder rocks. Seriously – who wouldn’t want to live in Boulder? I say that only partially in jest. We import a lot of talent (Boulder has the highest per capita number of engineers of any city in the country, for example). We have great natural assets and we’re not afraid to use them. I regularly pitch people on moving to Boulder and it’s an easy sell. Everyone here is in shape, has tons of interests outside of work and you’re minutes from cycling, mountain biking, trail running, skiing, etc. To be sure there are plenty of great cities in the country, but we Boulder is definitely among the great places to live in the US (in my opinion!).

TechStars. I don’t think you can underestimate the effect TechStars has had on the Boulder community. It galvanized a group of tech professionals as mentors. It brought a bunch of young talent and energy to town (many of whom stayed to build their businesses here after the TechStars summer) and it helped raise Boulder’s national profile.

Openness. I could have put this under “Boulder rocks” but one of the truly great things about Boulder is how open and helpful people here are. There’s little to no BS around making sure you’re doing better than everyone else and it’s considered an expectation of people in this community that you give back. To other entrepreneurs. To your favorite charity. To programs like TechStars. It’s had a huge effect on this ecosystem.