I work at another Boulder company just down the road from SparkFun, also founded by a CU student in his dorm room, which has been successful without VC investme

I work at another Boulder company just down the road from SparkFun, also founded by a CU student in his dorm room, which has been successful without VC investment. Boulder is an odd hybrid of new tech companies and more traditionally bootstrapped companies like SparkFun. There's plenty of VC-funded startups in Boulder, too. The main pedestrian mall downtown, Pearl Street, is flanked by tech companies on the 2nd/3rd floors, above the retail shops. It feels quite similar to University Ave in Palo Alto, back when I lived there in the 90's. Perhaps the biggest difference is that where Silicon Valley is geographically locked-in and there's no cheap office space to be had, in Boulder you can go East a little bit and the price of office space drops dramatically. Taking SparkFun as an example, it's not on Pearl Street, it's several miles outside of town in an industrial park. As such, Boulder gets to be both a micro-size Silicon Valley and a more normal commercial environment as well. It's also just a great place to live, housing costs are reasonable (relative to California anyway), there's tons to do, and it's a good place to raise a family.