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At the most recent Built In Denver CEO luncheon, I noticed that the number of Denver CEOs and Boulder CEOs in the room was about equal. This tiny observation validated the announcement that was made by Built In Denver’s Chair, Erik Mitisek, at the luncheon: Built In Denver is rebranding itself as Built In Colorado. Since kicking off in Denver in November 2012, the Built In Denver team has been thrilled to collectively promote Colorado’s digital tech successes. Now, our name reflects that.
To help us celebrate the new brand, Foundry Group Managing Director Brad Feld, Rally Software Chairman and CEO Tim Miller and Rally Software Founder and CTO Ryan Martens stirred up interesting conversation at the luncheon between Boulder and Denver folks alike by digging deep into the past experiences of Rally, a quintessential Colorado success story that started in 2001.
The most interesting tidbits of insight came as a result of Feld prying Miller and Martens about Rally’s early stages, like, for example, when Miller said he decided to throw in the towel and retire for three days before Feld said, “Tim, you be CEO, Ryan, you be the CTO – and we will invest.”
After that initial investment, Rally took a long and winding road to their present-day success story, including hiring in anticipation of an additional funding round-a key lesson learned the hard way. “I thought the world was going to end; we had to lay off 25 people,” said Miller.
Clearly, Miller and Martens’s world did not end and Rally continued to push itself to provide cloud-based solutions for Agile development, despite tough financial times and a stalemate with a top competitor in 2009.
“In 2009, we cancelled our entire roadmap,” Martens said. “For three quarters, we gave our engineers no new features, just direction to fix the current problems; we then hired a new lead engineer. Then, by the beginning of 2010 we doubled in size and revenue. We out-spent, out-hired and out-marketed our competition.”
In addition to the outdoing of Rally’s competitors, 2010 finally saw Greylock Ventures come on board to back Rally (Greylock had previously said no to Rally four times, Miller said!).
Fast forward to April 2013: an $84 million IPO for Rally, which has grown to about 350 people across six offices. The IPO isn’t even close to a simple ending, but instead is bringing whole new challenges for Miller and Martens: “It's a startup all over again; it’s like Day 1 of a startup again except the players are bigger,” Martens said.
The successful journey of Rally is something I wish upon all of Colorado’s startups (although, of course, a less tumultuous ride would be nice!).
Built In Colorado is looking forward to supporting a statewide digital tech community, alongside organizations such as Denver Startup Week, Startup Colorado, CTA, BDNT, Colorado Innovation Network and many more. We hope our online and offline community helps stories like Rally’s to be shared and learned from, so that more Colorado companies may meet similar successes.
