Quick Rorschach: I say shark. Some people see terror. Others see the amazing creature that's been quietly running the ocean. Same creature. Completely different projection.
Now I'll say AI. Welcome to Boulder Startup Week 2026. I co-lead BSW, and for the last three years I've been building programming for the event. I've also been showing up as an attendee for many more years before that. So when I tell you this year feels different, it’s not hype. It’s pattern recognition.
We officially kick off on Monday, May 4th, at Rosetta Hall (at 8:00 am!), with Jeremy Bloom, Olympic athlete, CEO of X Games, founder of Owl AI, and a person who is very much building with us. That's intentional. We don't do inspiration theater here. We do operators. The Kickoff Breakfast is where you meet the people you'll be learning from and building with all week. Come early. Bring questions. Bring your appetite.
Then the week begins in earnest, and..it is a lot. How does 223 sessions over five days sound to you?
On the AI stuff...yes, we went there. All the way.
There isn't a corner of company-building that AI isn't reshuffling right now. How you hire. How you sell. How you ship. How you fall apart. How you put yourself back together. We have sessions on all of it, and we didn't soften the framing.
"From Spicy Autocomplete to Dark Factory: Agentic Coding in Practice" is set for Monday at 12 noon, and it sets the tone, featuring Uche Ogbuji, Bill McIntyre, and Andrew Spott. (Oh, and there are at least eight other AI-focused sessions on Monday, so this article is anything but an exhaustive list! Be sure to check out the full schedule.)
Tuesday at 10:00 brings "Stop Prompting. Start Building: How Three Operators Automated Hundreds of Hours of Work." This is followed at 2:00 by Ala Stolpnik with "What Actually Happens When You Replace Your Engineering Team with AI" — which has the most honest title of the week and will probably have the longest line.
At 3:00 on Wednesday afternoon, local filmmaker and business owner Rob Shearer leads "Generative AI is Terrible: Change My Mind." We scheduled that one because this community can handle the counterargument. They might even enjoy it.
The sessions on AI governance and AI velocity are on the same day. Sometimes the same hour. That tension is intentional. Wednesday's keynote is Colorado's AI Bill, the researchers who shaped it in the same room with founders building under it. An hour later: "Moving at Machine Speed: AI Founders on Velocity, Safeguards, and Pricing When the Rules Keep Changing." We didn't resolve the contradiction. We put it on the schedule and let you sit in it.
RMAIIG – the Rocky Mountain AI Interest Group – is present throughout the week in the form of dozens of experts bringing the technical receipts. Google Cloud is bringing their GTM keynote Tuesday afternoon. We're going deep on securing your MCP server (Monday), agentic workflow architecture (Thursday), "10,000 Agents Later: Orchestration That Works" (Wednesday), and post-quantum cryptography on Tuesday – because as a CTO you need to hear it, like, yesterday.
Featuring Ryan St. Pierre, "My Covariance Matrix is Better Than Your Shit-Tier LLM: Tales from the Edge of High School Math" is Tuesday morning at 9:00 and has the best title in the entire schedule. Full stop.
And because we built our own scheduling tool this year – practitioners, practicing – you can find all of this at revelco.org/bsw.
But know that Boulder Startup Week contains multitudes.
Here is a partial, incredibly non-exhaustive list of things also happening this week: a blood drive on Tuesday. Fusion Energy Trivia Night at the Toosteppin Saloon, starting at 6:00 on Wednesday. Morning Tai Chi — twice. Yin Yoga. Guided Breathwork — also twice. "AA for AI: A Support Group for AI-Obsessed Founders" (Thursday at 2:00, no sign-in required).
A session called "Make Triggers Your Bitch." Another called "High-Performance Founders: Using Psychedelics (Legally) to Expand Clarity, Courage, and Capacity." A LEGO Serious Play leadership workshop. Meme Talks. "How to Start Outdoor Computing." "The Human Neuron: Become Part of a Live Neural Network." "One-on-Nones: Surrendering Our Voices to Vibes." And there’s a good chance there will be karaoke, because why not?
Oh! And we're having a freaking Field Day on Thursday morning at 9:30. It's a kickball tournament, featuring actual field day energy. Because Boulder is Boulder and we refuse to apologize for it.
The week closes Friday with the Builders' Room Showcase – three-minute demos from whatever got built in the open hackathon space all week long. I genuinely cannot predict what comes out of that room. Seventeen years in, and that uncertainty feels like the most exciting thing I've said about this week yet.
On the human stuff – we didn't skip it.
"Orbiting What We're Avoiding," featuring Peter McEwen, is at 11:00 on Wednesday. "Fundraising Is Broken. AI Won't Fix It." follows at 1:00.
"What to Do as This World Falls Apart: A Founder's Framework for Action" is Thursday morning at 9:00, which tells you something about where we are collectively. "You're Building a Company — Who's Building You?" is a fireside at 10:00 with Wendy Lea, Julie Penner, and Nicole Glaros — three women who have been in rooms where the hard conversations happen, and who will actually have them.
Finish up the human-focused part of. your week with "Wild Rebellion: The Session Your Nervous System Has Been Asking For" on Friday at 11:00. It's billed as "a guided experience designed for founders and operators running on fumes." Who doesn't need that?
Just know: None of this is accidental. Here's the thing underneath all of it. The reason Andrew started this 17 years ago. The reason I keep doing it:
Anyone should get to build. Anyone should get to create. You shouldn't need a rich uncle, a fancy degree, or the right zip code to get in the room where the knowledge lives. That's not a platitude, it truly is the operating principle. FREE. No pay-to-play stages. No paid speakers. The person with the best idea and the most grit gets the same access as everyone else. That's the whole design.
Boulder figured something out early: When you lower the velvet rope, the room gets smarter. The energy gets better. The connections that actually change things, they happen in rooms where people showed up because they wanted to be there, not because they could afford to be there.
Here's the other thing nobody talks about enough: Building is lonely. And sometimes, genuinely, achingly lonely. The doubt that hits at 2:00 am. The decision nobody else can make for you. The feeling that everyone else has it figured out and you're the only one holding it together with duct tape and caffeine. You're not. You never were. But you have to be in a room with other people who are doing it to know that.
That's what BSW is, maybe more than anything else. Not a conference. Not a networking event. A reminder that you're not alone in this. That the person sitting next to you in that session is carrying the same questions, the same weight, and the same stubborn refusal to quit. We care about each other in Boulder. We show up for each other. And that's not marketing copy, it's just what keeps happening.
That's still why we do this. That's still who we are.
(Sorry, rich uncles – we love you, we just don't need your money to get a seat!)
On the community: This...is the whole point.
Sunday night before the week even starts: Founders and Funders Pickleball at Boulder Pickleball. Some of the best relationships in this ecosystem didn't start in a conference room. We know that. They started in motion.
Monday really kicks things off. Tuesday presents us with "Boulder Gives Back: Unlocking the Philanthropic Potential of the Startup Community" at 1:00. This is a session that exists because we know our own giving gap and we're willing to name it on stage.
The late afternoon of May 5th brings "Let's Vibe Boulder – Cinco de Vibo," because apparently we needed a name for what happens when a community this technically sharp also genuinely likes each other.
AI Builders returns to Founder’s Central on Thursday at 5:00. Friday closes with the 420 Dance Party, which has the best closer energy in BSW history and requires no further explanation.
In 17 years, this community has produced co-founders who met at a BSW session. Companies launched because someone showed up and met the right person. Introductions that changed trajectories. None of that was planned. All of it was made possible by creating the conditions, free, open, community-led...and then getting out of the way.
We're all mid-air right now. The tools are extraordinary. The velocity is real. So is the ground. So let’s go together.
What I'm most proud of heading into this week isn't the session count. Or the 20,000+ (!) registrations. It's the intentional opportunities to connect. The joy. The surprises. The fact that this community shows up for itself, every single time, when given the space to do it.
I just get to hold the door open. Lucky me.
It's May 4–8. And it's free. All of it. Boulder, Colorado.
