Pic of the Week: The Inaugural Boulder Founders Summit
On April 23, the Boulder Founders Summit made its debut with a day-long collaboration between CU Boulder students, the local entrepreneurial community, and the Boulder Chamber.
The event was designed to spark connections between student entrepreneurs and Boulder’s thriving startup ecosystem – or what Henry Wright, an organizer of the Summit, called a focus on “curated collisions around entrepreneurship and innovation.”
To that point, this inaugural Summit launched with two main goals: empowering entrepreneurial CU students and providing experienced entrepreneurs and company founders in the Boulder Chamber with direct access to talent, energy, and campus resources.
As an advisory board member of CU Boulder’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Initiative, Wright is passionate about how critical it is to link up these two communities, both of which have a strong focus on growth, but which often move past each other instead of working closely together.
BFS event director Jennifer O’Neil was excited about this new alliance and discussed the great amount of positive energy and thoughtfulness she witnessed in what was a true intergenerational collaboration, saying, “Boulder Founders Summit was a live snapshot of what’s possible when the full force of our city’s ecosystem shows up with heart and intention.”
O’Neil added, “For the first time, the Boulder Chamber came out in full support of the startup community – not just attending but engaging deeply and bringing real momentum and vision to the table. We honor that commitment and are excited to see how this energy carries forward.”
Other co-leads of the Summit included graduating CU senior Jayden Kazantsev, an active member of the CU Boulder Innovation & Entrepreneurship Initiative; Cody McDonald, product management leader at SCRAM Systems; and Stephanie Sladnick, program manager at Boulder’s Highland Institute.
Wright summed up the potential of this collaboration with a look to the future: “The Founders Summit is how we do entrepreneurship in Boulder, along the Front Range and in all corners of Colorado. It is a mindset of ‘give-before-you-get’ and ‘pay-it-forward.’ This is how and what distinguishes us, and it is part of our unique value equation.”
Or, as O’Neil put it, “That’s the magic. That’s the future. I’m honored to have helped rapid prototype this inaugural year, and I can’t wait to see what we build together in 2026 and beyond.”