One of the many great things about the Governor of Colorado is that heâs an entrepreneur, having started multiple successful technology companies, including BlueMountainArts.com (acquired by Excite for $800m) and Provide Commerce (IPO, then acquired by Liberty Media for $500m). Heâs also a co-founder of Techstars with me, David Cohen, and David Brown.
So, it shouldnât be a surprise that one of Jared Polisâ relatively early new initiatives as Governor is the Colorado Digitial Service.
The founding team includes several entrepreneurial friends along with extremely capable technologists around Colorado. The idea is to do âcivic service tours of dutyâ to rapidly improve a number of citizen-facing applications that millions of Coloradianâs use on a regular basis.
I much prefer this approach, with a highly functional agile team of experts, rather than yet another $100 million contract with a large consulting firm, government contractor, or legacy technology company that will result in a three-year build and deployment of a system that never actually sees the light of day.
If you have deep technical, designer, or application development skills and are interested in a civic tour of duty helping improve the software that Coloradianâs use to interact with our state government, go apply to help out.