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Newsletter — Issue 42 — Thursday, August 20, 2026
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This newsletter has been published by Engage Colorado.
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The Drivers Series — The Closing
Honest Assessment Wrap Up: Colorado's Big Opportunity
This Engage Colorado Newsletter reflects the personal opinions of Dan Caruso, written with the support of the Caruso Ventures team. The Ensuring Colorado's Innovation Future Coalition did not review and has not endorsed this Engage Colorado Newsletter.
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Over the past many issues, we walked through The Honest Assessment. We laid out the structural, regulatory, legislative, and rhetorical factors contributing to Colorado being categorized by founders, investors, and business leaders as an environment far less desirable than other geographies such as Texas, Florida, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona.
The Honest Assessment closed out on a positive note: Colorado's Big Opportunity, which this issue summarizes.
As with the broader Innovation Vision and The Honest Assessment, I led the preparation of this section and it reflects only my views.
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Colorado Sunshine — The Sky's the Limit
Colorado begins with an endowment that no policy created and no competitor can copy: the mountains, world-class outdoor recreation, and 300 days of sunshine a year. The state carries an entrepreneurial spirit embedded from its earliest days as the gateway to the Rockies and the West, when the frontier drew ambitious risk-takers who came here to build.
Over the past two decades and more, we complemented those advantages with everything a modern innovation economy requires — a top-ten airport hub, major research universities and national laboratories, a growing quantum and aerospace corridor, and a global position in AI infrastructure and energy innovation. Layered alongside are leadership roles in other important industries:
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• Critical metals and the mining expertise behind them, anchored by the Colorado School of Mines.
• An agtech corridor running from Colorado State University in Fort Collins through the farm and ranch economy around Greeley.
• A natural and organic foods cluster centered in Boulder.
• An outdoor recreation industry built on the landscape itself.
• A deep bioscience, healthcare, and wellness sector.
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The arts and culture scene is deepening in parallel — with the Sundance Film Festival launching in Boulder in January 2027, the recent arrivals of Outside Days in Denver and Tulagi Fest in Boulder, and the longstanding traditions of the Aspen Ideas Festival, Aspen Jazz Fest (JAS), and Telluride's film and bluegrass festivals.
What resulted is the third most concentrated tech economy in the nation.
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302,288
Tech workers
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$106B
In GSP
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4.3 / 5
Hardest-to-build factors
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On the factors that are hardest to build and slowest to erode — quality of life, infrastructure, institutional depth — Colorado averages 4.3 out of 5 on current position, ahead of both the Destination and the Departure Geographies.
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Human-Made Storm Clouds on the Horizon
Over the last few years, Colorado has lost significant momentum. Among the innovators who launch and invest in businesses — and who decide where those businesses are built and where they themselves live — Colorado is increasingly categorized as a state to avoid. The founders and executives leaving California, Seattle, Portland, New York, and Chicago want precisely what Colorado offers, and Colorado should be their obvious national destination. Instead they are choosing Texas, Florida, and Tennessee — and closer to home, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, and New Mexico. Even more alarming, the founders already building here face growing pressure to relocate their businesses, or to place their next expansion in another state. Many are even considering moving their homes from Colorado to one of those same geographies.
The Honest Assessment laid out the reasons in detail, factor by factor. They share a single root: rhetoric from our political leaders, paired with policies already enacted and others clearly foreshadowed, that together leave innovators feeling unwelcome, unappreciated, and under attack. And here is the good news: that is all that has to change — and we can change it. If we do, Colorado emerges as the number one hub for innovation in the world. Of course, that will take a sustained effort from those of us who care deeply about this state and understand the critical role innovation plays in creating opportunity and well-being for every Coloradan — and for the generations that will follow us.
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If We Work Together, the Sky's the Limit
That completes The Honest Assessment. From here, this series turns to the path forward. If we can come together as a Colorado community — business, political, and community leaders alike — we can get back on track, and quickly.
Colorado can be the most attractive innovation ecosystem in the world, and every Coloradan will share in the economic and cultural prosperity that results from being the world's leading geography for innovation. This is the Innovation Vision for Colorado.
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