The Bear Roars

Matt Hunter was a founder for 15 years. He co-founded Turnstyle, which Yelp acquired in 2017, and served as president and US CEO of Founders Pledge. Today he’s an executive coach to founders and CEOs of venture-backed companies. His new book, Tough Enough: How to Lead a Team to Greatness Without Being a Jerk, is co-written with John Baird, the Silicon Valley coach who worked with the leaders of the first iPhone team who reported to Steve Jobs.Dan opens by joking that the book could have been written about his career. Then he challenges its premise. Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg and Michael Jordan all have reputations as jerks, so would they have achieved as much if they’d been nicer? Matt doesn’t dodge it. He agrees that leaders in what the book calls the “hardcore zone” get the best results. But most people can’t operate that way and don’t want to, so the book gives them a different path: seven habits of toughness that drive results without the damage. Dan adds research from his old professor Steve Kaplan on what actually predicts CEO success, and why great CFOs tend to have nearly the opposite traits.Plus, where the line falls between a bold vision and the “danger zone”: why Theranos crossed it, and whether Elon Musk sometimes does too.Learn more about Matt: https://www.matthunter.coOrder Tough Enough: https://www.matthunter.co/toughenoughOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Adeel Khan was a Teach For America teacher, opened Conservatory Green High School in Denver in 2017, and later managed principals at the district level. Then he built MagicSchool. It reached a million educators in four months, and today more than 8 million educators have signed up. That’s more than twice the number of teachers in the United States.Dan opens with the big question: should schools treat AI like social media and keep it out? Adeel’s answer is that the bans in Los Angeles and New York City remove AI from the one place where responsible adults can teach kids to use it well. Kids from families with means will learn it anyway. Dan compares it to the study of NHL players born just after the youth hockey cutoff, where a small head start compounds every year. The results back Adeel up. In Aurora Public Schools, students using MagicSchool’s writing feedback tool posted 28% year-over-year growth on state writing scores. The district’s top MagicSchool users also matched its top-growth teachers almost one for one, and Stanford is now studying them.Plus, the 13-year-old who wanted to stop AI from taking his job until he learned he could build his own video game, how Dan modeled a $60 million building purchase in Claude without opening a spreadsheet, and why Adeel tells parents that choosing Alpha School means “electing your child into an experiment.”Learn more about MagicSchool: https://www.magicschool.aiOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Bill Owens was Colorado’s governor from 1999 to 2007, and he is still the last Republican to hold the office. He grew up in Texas, one of five kids of a door-to-door salesman who reminded them that every morning, he was responsible for 21 meals. Bill came to Colorado by choice in his mid-twenties and never left.Dan opens with a disclaimer: he’s an independent, and this year he finds himself agreeing with Republicans more often than not. Then they go straight to Amendment 87, which would replace Colorado’s flat income tax with graduated rates. Bill’s case is that in a country with 50 states, you can’t double the tax on successful people and businesses and expect them to stay. They agree Colorado’s tech community got complacent, and the Colorado AI Act was the wake-up call. Bill’s fix is participation, and a second party in the battle of ideas.Plus, why both think Governor Polis was right to commute Tina Peters’s sentence, Bill’s four decades of work in Russia and Ukraine, why he calls Putin “aggressive but not crazy,” and the case for striking Iran’s nuclear program.Learn more about Governor Owens: https://www.nga.org/governor/bill-owens/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/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Jill Adler Grano is running for Boulder City Council, and she has spent years in the public record working out how Boulder got so expensive. Her answer starts in 1955, when the city adopted low-density postwar zoning. Today, 74.3% of Boulder's residential zoning is still low density. In the 1970s, the city layered growth controls on top of that, then decades of review on top of those, a pattern known as "growth control by hassle." The result, Jill says, is manufactured scarcity.Dan opens by saying what he expects: they'll agree on the problems and disagree on the fixes. They agree on a lot. Office vacancy has climbed to 26%, schools are closing, and the non-student population is shrinking. Employers tell Jill that Longmont, 15 minutes away, offers commercial rent 65% cheaper. Dan tells the story of Zayo's hundreds of employees leaving the 29th Street Mall, and the city never calling to ask what it would take to keep them. Where they split is the duplex rule meant to create middle-income housing, which produced luxury second homes selling for $2.5 million per side. Jill wants guardrails like owner-occupancy requirements. Dan argues that more rules are how Boulder got here.Plus, the Alpine-Balsam purchase, why Dan's own Glenwood redevelopment never penciled out, whether city employees should live in the city they serve, why Boulder shouldn't become the next Aspen, and the national investors buying up housing near fast-growing state universities.Learn more about Jill and her campaign for Boulder City Council: https://www.jillforcouncil.comRead Jill's thesis, Landscapes of Privilege: Housing, Capital, and the Contradictions of Progressive Urbanism in Boulder, Colorado: https://jilladlergrano.substack.com/p/who-is-boulder-forOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Jarvis Caldwell is the House Minority Leader in the Colorado House of Representatives, and he got there in his first term. He grew up in a trailer, went into the medical field the day after high school, then joined the Air Force and kept fighter jets flying out of Bagram. In 2010, in a bunker during a rocket attack, two airmen next to him argued over whether it was the Taliban or Al-Qaeda firing at them. Jarvis realized he didn't know the answer, and decided he had better start paying attention.Dan opens with a confession: lots of people assume he's a Republican. He isn't. From there, the two find more common ground than either party's loudest voices would predict. Jarvis's case against the graduated income tax runs through Deion Sanders: a top recruit choosing between Texas, with no state income tax, and a higher bracket in Colorado has an easy decision. Dan's addition is that pro sports has a salary cap and business doesn't, so every great founder can go play for Texas. Site selectors, Jarvis says, find Colorado the easy sell. It's the policy and the rhetoric that scare them off.They agree housing is a supply problem, and that faster permitting isn't a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. They don't agree on everything. When Jarvis describes the view he grew up with, that government mostly shows up with its hand out, Dan makes the case for safety nets.Plus, why young voters are drawn to democratic socialism, how to get college students into a real conversation, and how a freshman legislator who says he isn't overly ambitious ended up leading his caucus.Learn more about Representative Caldwell and his work in the Colorado House: https://leg.colorado.gov/legislators/jarvis-caldwellOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

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.vcOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Recorded live in front of an audience at Tulagi Music Festival, Dan sits down with David Linde, the CEO of the Sundance Institute, in one of the first interviews he's given since taking the job. His own first Sundance was 1992, when a call sent him racing to a small Park City theater to watch Reservoir Dogs premiere from the front row, with Quentin Tarantino standing up afterward to talk about it.Now he's bringing that festival to Colorado, and he quotes its director, Eugene Hernandez, on what the move actually is: they aren't relocating Sundance, they're growing it. Eleven screening venues, three of them on the CU Boulder campus, and Macky Auditorium alone getting 245 speakers in its ceiling. The governor told him it wouldn't be his Egyptian, it would be his Carnegie Hall.What he's most interested in isn't the eleven days. A conversation about what Sundance could do for Colorado turned into a conversation about jobs for the 6,000 CU graduates every year, and it's now a workforce panel he wants running in Boulder all year. Plus, two questions from the live podcast audience; how 16,000 submissions become 150 films, and what happens to the artists who can no longer afford to live here in Boulder.Learn more about the Sundance Institute and the 2027 Festival in Boulder: https://www.sundance.orgOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Trey Foskett is the co-founder and CEO of Watchmaker Genomics in Boulder. Sequencing the first human genome took ten years and $3 billion. Twenty-five years later, that cost has fallen roughly 100,000-fold: a drop that outpaced Moore's Law, and one most people outside the field never noticed.Watchmaker doesn't sequence DNA. It makes the enzymes that sequencing companies use to do it. Cheaper, more precise testing means more testing, and more demand for what Watchmaker makes. It also moves genomics out of the research lab and into routine cancer detection. Trey and Dan also get into gene editing, designer genes, and what changes when genetics becomes something money can buy.Tom Cech won a Nobel at CU Boulder, and life sciences companies grew up along the Front Range, until larger pharmaceutical companies bought them and the work left with the buyers. Trey is rebuilding it here. Plus: why life is written in exactly four letters, and whether its ingredients arrived from somewhere else.Learn more about Trey's work in genomics: https://watchmakergenomics.comOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Colorado Governor Jared Polis has five months left in office, and Dan didn't want a retrospective. Polis leads with the win he's proudest of: Colorado went from 27th in the country for preschool enrollment to 3rd, and #1 in the nation for education — funded by a ballot measure that passed with more than two-thirds of the vote, in Republican counties and Democratic ones alike.From there it's a builder's conversation. Why Americans pay two to four times what France or Japan pays for the identical drug, and why closing half that gap would take 8% off every employer's premiums. Why housing is a supply problem, and what gets taken away from a generation when the $300,000 starter home no longer exists.Then Dan puts the hard question on the table: Colorado has every right to be the world's best innovation ecosystem, so why are the people leaving California looking somewhere else? Polis's answer is that investors can love a founder in Colorado and still not want to put money into Colorado. Two different problems, and Colorado has been better at the first.Plus, the three-month sabbatical where he says no to everything, why he thinks the AI bubble will burst without taking AI down with it, and the Sundance he'll finally get to enjoy without his phone going off.Learn more about Governor Polis and his administration's work: https://www.colorado.gov/governorOrder Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]

Aquiles La Grave is back on The Bear Roars, this time live in front of an audience at Tulagi Music Festival, three weeks into his campaign for mayor of Boulder. In July, U.S. News named Colorado the best state in the country for education. In August, Boulder Valley School District proposed closing four elementary schools.His case is that Boulder doesn't have a values problem, it has a delivery problem. He counted nineteen candidates on stage at the first forum of this year's race. They all love the town, he says, and almost none of them talked about how they would actually get anything done. Then there's the money. In November, Boulder votes on a $400 million bond that will cost about $650 million to pay off over twenty years, in a city that spends roughly $500 million a year. The city published a list of what the money would build, but it isn't required to stick to it.Dan pushes back throughout, including why the city council and city manager were the only people missing from the community gathering the night before. Also in this one: the rule Aquiles says he would impose on day one, and an audience member who wanted one specific thing that would make Boulder affordable.Learn More About Aquiles: https://boulder.vote/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/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: [email protected]