Back to the launch pad: after a few dormant years, tech entrepreneurs are returning to the game.

• Author: Mast, Carlotta
• Position: Q4 TECH REPORT: STARTUP FEVER RETURNS TO COLORADO

Having launched a successful Internet startup in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, serial entrepreneur Kimbal Musk says he needed some convincing before deciding to headquarter his latest Internet venture, Me.dium, in Boulder, the town he has called home for the last several years.

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"I was very skeptical," says Musk, who took a break from technology to move to Boulder and open The Kitchen, a popular restaurant, in 2004.

Musk was asked to head up Me.dium in 2005, and the company's early backers--which included Denver-based Appian Ventures and Boulder-based investor Brad Feld--believed Boulder would be an ideal location for the nascent maker of collaborative Web-browsing software.

"But before I agreed," Musk says, "I met with 30 or 40 CEOs and entrepreneurs in town to get their honest opinion about what I was in for."

Musk must have liked what he heard because Me.dium was moved from New York--where the company was founded by Robert Reich, David Mandell and Peter Newcomb--to an office on Boulder's Pearl Street in 2006. Since moving to Colorado, Me.dium, which has created a Web browser plug-in that enables you to see the sites other Me.dium users are currently surfing, has raised $20 million in two funding rounds from Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Spark Capital, Appian Ventures, Feld, and Musk's older brother, Elon, who co-founded PayPal.

"This has been a phenomenal place to start a technology company," says Musk, Me.dium's CEO. "The nuclear winter of 2000 to 2005 seems to be over. Everyone is very excited about the future again."

Entrepreneurs like Musk are helping to breed that excitement. After several years of lying low and traveling or trying their hands at other projects, these technology visionaries are once again launching new ventures.

"Many of the experienced folks who were taking a breather after the dot-com crash are back in the game," says Brad Feld, managing director at Boulder-based Foundry Group and Mobius Venture Capital. "Lots of real companies are being created, and there are lots of smart people willing to take risks again."

From Boulder's Medium and Collective Intellect to Louisville's Lijit Networks to Denver's Newsgator and Photobucket (which also has offices in Palo Alto, Calif.), to name just a few, many of these new high-tech companies have chosen to drop roots in Colorado.

"This is an awesome environment for technology startups to grow in--that's why I am here," says Ari Newman, co-founder of Boulder-based Filtrbox, maker of a new breed of content monitoring software that enables users to create customized topic filters to find online information that is most pertinent to them. "I left the Valley in 2002 to move out here. There are lots of good ideas and tons of motivated people."

Helping these companies germinate and grow are the growing number of private and venture capital investors located in Colorado, says Marc Silverman, an angel investor and executive director of the CTEK Boulder Venture Center. "What that means is that there are a lot of local people starting businesses."

CHANGE IN THE AIR

John Kembel, a former Silicon Valley technologist, is one of those people. "I could just smell it in the air that the market was back," says Kembel, who left a Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh to move to Boulder in 2005 and start an Internet company called HiveLive.

Kembel may be new to Colorado, but he is no newbie when it comes to running a technology company. Labeled a "design maven" by Fast Company magazine in 2005, Kembel earned mechanical engineering and product design degrees from Stanford University before joining forces with his twin brother, George, to launch a design-consulting company in Palo Alto. While there, John and his brother worked with such consumer technology heavyweights as IBM, Leap Frog, Intel, IDEO and Paul Allen's Interval Research.

In 1999, the Kembel brothers started DoDots, a dot-com startup that, like many others, was pumped full of millions of dollars in venture capital financing and grew to employ more than 100 people before plummeting back down to Earth when the Internet bubble burst. The company, which created business-to-business infrastructure software that enabled companies to brand, package and distribute content to their customers, shut down in March 2001.

One failure isn't going to keep Kembel...