The New Yorker sees Denver atop "The Tech Boom's Second Cities"

A story in The New Yorker  described Denver as one of "The Tech Boom's Second Cities."

Excerpt:

It now appears that Denver is having a moment of its own. As in Austin and Seattle, a high concentration of good universities in Denver and nearby cities, like Boulder and Fort Collins, has contributed to the region's well-educated workforce. The cost of living in Denver is also relatively low, as are real-estate prices. Though the city isn't the headquarters for any big tech companies -- like Dell in the Austin area or Microsoft and Amazon in Seattle -- several of them, including I.B.M. and Oracle, have offices here.

The presence of those offices, and of the universities, has also helped create a vibrant startup scene: people get educated here or come here for jobs, and then they graduate or leave those jobs and become entrepreneurs. In other cases, established businesspeople are coming to Denver to start companies. Scott McNealy, a founder of Sun Microsystems, chose Denver as the headquarters for a data-analysis startup called Wayin. Explaining to the Denver Post why he left California, he said, "The prices of everything have skyrocketed. The regulations. The pension deficit. The traffic. It's just not a fun place to go start."At this point, none of the Denver startups are well known, but investors seem to find them promising. Last year, the research firm CB Insights released a report that ranked Colorado sixth among states that had received the most venture capital, after California, Massachusetts, New York, Texas, and Washington. In 2015, Denver startups attracted more than eight hundred million dollars in venture-capital funding, led by technology, energy, food, and marijuana companies. At least some of the investments appear to be paying off: in 2014, Oracle paid more than a billion dollars to acquire Datalogix, a Denver-based data-collection firm.

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