Entrepreneur of the year: Galvanize co-founder Jim Deters is building an ecosystem for new-wave creators.

AuthorLewis, David
PositionCover story

SOME ENTREPRENEURS SUCCEED THROUGH A SHOTGUN APPROACH, firing ideas into the sky and seeing what comes down. Some are serial business builders, taking a shot at one enterprise after the other.

Jim Deters, co-founder and CEO of Denver-based Galvanize LLC and ColoradoBiz magazine's Entrepreneur of the Year, is strictly a sniper, obsessively seeking his target.

Galvanize is his religion. Deters says, and he isn't kidding.

The 39-year-old is not one of those business-people celebrated for giving his last ounce to the community, or some other spiritual goal. He recently quit the last of his board of director memberships and now says he has nothing to distract him from his two sole preoccupations: family and Galvanize.

Galvanize remains in its pioneering stage, but it embodies Deters' vision, which is an idea so audacious it takes up all of his time, brainpower and considerable energies.

"The big 'why' behind this whole thing when I started was helping to become a multiplier for other entrepreneurs," he says. "We've reinvented education with the three C's: community, curriculum and capital."

The idea is to re-make, reform and re-imagine technological education and to marry that study to entrepreneurship and employment, stimulating venture funding for software-development education programs.

Deters explains it better.

"We have built a whole bunch of societal norms and systems and accreditors, credentials, electives--that is all out of date. (Galvanize is) building 21st century education in a modern environment, particularly for digital innovators and entrepreneurs." That is the "community, curriculum and capital" concept.

"If you look at what we're doing, we're making learning and working look like the same thing. But the world I live in, today, this is a world built on, 'What have you created?' 'What have you built?"'

Lest all of this sound a little hifalutin, let us note that Galvanize's revenue rose tenfold last year, says CFO-COO Chris Onan, and the company expects revenue to quadruple in the next four quarters. (Privately held Galvanize does not disclose dollar figures.)

It all comes back to our Entrepreneur of the Year. ColoradoBiz magazine's editorial board judged nominees on the impact and the commercial promise of their enterprises, along with factors such as ingenuity, integrity, vision and risks undertaken.

Deters grew up in small-town Illinois where, "I picked up some ambition. I don't know why or how that happened but from a very...

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