Daniels College of Business alumni Ben Deda and Erik Mitisek (front row: second and third from left) celebrate with Gov. John Hickenlooper the fact that Denver Startup Week attracted more than 10,000 registrants this year.
The 2015 Denver Startup Week (DSW), the nation’s largest gathering of business and tech entrepreneurs, featured a stronghold of successful alumni from the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. The event ran from Sept. 28 to Oct. 2 in various venues downtown and in Denver’s RiNo district.
Erik Mitisek (BS ’99), CEO of Colorado Technology Association, and Ben Deda (MBA ’11), EVP of marketing and business development at Galvanize, are co-founders of DSW, a thriving Front Range phenomenon that reeled in more than 12,000 participants in its fourth year.
For more than a decade, Mitisek has been instrumental in growing the Colorado startup community, helping to create Startup Colorado, Denver Startup Week and BuiltIn Denver. At Galvanize, Deda ensures that underrepresented students and entrepreneurs thrive in the tech industry nationwide, through community-focused venture capital investments.
“Denver Startup Week is about the spirit of innovation and collaboration with our community to elevate startups in Denver,” Mitisek says. “DU’s commitment to fostering this creativity and innovation, across academic disciplines, has never been more important. DU has always been entrepreneurial, which is certainly embodied in the spirit of Daniels College of Business.”
During DSW, the ever-popular “Startup Crawl” featured three hot companies founded by DU alumni. Bart Lorang (MBA ’10), CEO of FullContact; Joey Alfano (MBA ’12) and Samantha Holloway (MBA ’12), co-founders of GoSpotCheck; and Wayne Guerra (MBA ’07), co-founder of iTriage, all showcased their entrepreneurial acumen on the 2.5-mile tour that flowed north from downtown — allowing “crawlers” to peer behind the curtain of Denver’s homegrown tech culture.
Additionally, seven years after meeting her husband, Alex Hasulak (BS ’08), at DU and co-founding local granola empire Love Grown Foods, Maddy D’Amato (BA ’08) became one of the first fully-booked “mentors” for the entirety of DSW, counseling “mentees” on the ins and outs of running a successful startup in Colorado.
“In the halls of Daniels [College of Business], the term entrepreneur and innovator should be synonymous,” Mitisek says. “They should be attached to every degree — it’s a state of mind that Daniels and the University of Denver naturally breed.”