Rural Venture Capital in Colorado — with Cory Finney

Cory Finney is Managing Partner of Howdy Partners, the rural Colorado venture fund formerly known as Greater Colorado Venture Fund. He and Dan are both investors in Agile Space Industries, which builds spacecraft thrusters in Durango. When Agile went looking for a home for its new rocket engine test center, Oklahoma competed hard for it, and won.

Cory's answer to the question he gets asked most, why rural, starts with a map: the places venture capital flows line up almost exactly with the places that produce half the country's GDP. By his math, Agile's roughly 140 employees mean as much to La Plata County as a 2,500-person company would mean to Denver. Dan's argument is that Colorado can't take advantages like that for granted while other states work hard to take them.

The conversation covers what rural Colorado is building right now, from autonomous tractors made in La Junta and Florence to farmers in Sterling who pitched Cory on how they use AI day to day. Plus, also in this one: Dan's case that Colorado's housing problem is supply, not land, and when Agile becomes a unicorn.

Learn more about Howdy Partners and the rural Colorado founders it backs: https://www.howdy.vc

Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book

Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch

Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen

To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com