I met Jim Pollock a little over a year ago when I first got involved with CTEK. At that time, Jim was fairly new at the job here in Boulder as Executive Director of the CTEK Boulder Venture Center. Jim started introducing me to everyone in town, including a few investments I made in companies that he was helping such as Hypersites and Solidware. I quickly formed a friendship with Jim, and offered him some office space to work out of in downtown Boulder. This proved to be a really neat setup because we regularly had on-the-fly one hour brainstorms about companies we were involved with, how Boulder was doing as a startup town, and just life in general. Jim was also meeting with every startup under the sun in Boulder and would invite me to sit in on the most interesting ones. All of this helped me come up with thoughts and topics for this blog on a regular basis.
My favorite phrase that Jim uses all the time is (paraphrasing) “get up in the morning and tell everybody you know everything you know.” I used to joke that should only take him five minutes. But Jim is a master networker, and much of what I learned about networking came from observing him.
One of the companies that he was helping is AWhere (formerly Mud Springs), which I covered back in November. Jim helped the company raise funding from a terrific group of investors, and recently signed on as President. We’ll miss Jim’s smiling face all over Boulder as he hunkers down with AWhere in Golden. But if I know Jim he will not vanish from the Boulder startup community. He’s still helping out with Techstars this summer, and something tells me he’ll still be offering to help out any entrepreneur he meets for years to come. Jim visibly improved the startup scene in Boulder during his two years with CTEK, and we’re lucky to have had him.
Now Marc Silverman (pictured, right) has stepped in to fill Jim’s rather large sandals at CTEK Boulder. I just met Marc for the first time the other day, and he’s very excited about his new role. Marc was the co-founder, President, CEO, and Director of Performance Health Technologies which makes software and hardware systems to help individuals recover neuro-motor function resulting from injury or disease. The company’s first customer and partner was Major League Baseball. Marc is bringing 25+ years of technology product design, development, manufacturing, distribution, corporate management, investor relations, and early stage financing experience to the table. I think he’ll be a great addition to the Boulder and Colorado entrepreneurial ecosystem in his new role. Marc really wants to hear from you if you’re a startup looking for help in Boulder or if you’ve got a little extra space that you might let him to work out of for a while (CTEK is a non-profit, so everything helps). Drop him a note at Marc dot Silverman at CTEK dot biz and say hello.
It will be interesting to watch how the relationship between the city of Boulder, CTEK, the Boulder Innovation Center, and now Keiretsu evolves. There is so much support for entrepreneurs here in Boulder that the challenge is now in finding productive ways to work together to continue to attract, encourage, help, and retain the amazing entrepreneurs who are drawn to the area.
Here’s to Jim for putting a pretty big dent in that puppy.
