Startup Junkies get monthly fix.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Small Biz

STARTUP JUNKIE UNDERGROUND IS A monthly gathering of entrepreneurs, inventors and dreamers who are serious about their ideas but don't take themselves too seriously.

There's networking, a chance to rub shoulders with angel investors and to listen to guest speakers, but on top of that, at every meeting, a Sigmund Freud Action Figure Award is given to the person who climbs up on stage and tells the most pathetic story of a personal business failure.

The Freud likeness was chosen "because anyone starting a business faces family and friends telling him he needs to have his head examined," explains group leader Thomas Frey.

The message behind the award and the sharing of personal failures is obvious: Behind every jackpot-winning product or business idea is usually a string of failures leading finally to success. Persistence is everything. Startup Junkie is a support group in the often-lonely world of the inventor and the solitary entrepreneur.

Larry Nelson, founder of the W3W3.com online media network, once won a Sigmund Freud Action Figure Award (like a Ken or Barbie doll, except in the image of the bearded Dr. Freud) for telling how he and his wife built a million-dollar business but lost it all.

"It's good group--unique in my experience in Colorado," says John Eckstein, an attorney with Fairfield Woods LLP. Eckstein is an experienced hand at representing emerging companies and has been a guest speaker at the Startup Junkie meetings. He describes Startup Junkie Underground as "kindred spirits getting together. Sort of mutual support for getting companies off the ground. I think it's a pleasant way to get in the game if you haven't otherwise been there."

Frey, executive director of The DaVinci Institute, a futurist think tank in Louisville that he founded in 1997, launched Startup Junkie Underground about a year ago. The group used to meet at the Rattlebrain Theater in the basement of the D & F Tower in downtown Denver. Recently, though, it changed its meeting place to the Pinnacle Club on the top floor of the Anaconda Tower in downtown Denver, leading Frey to muse that the group should probably now be called the Startup Junkie Above Ground.

His reason for starting the club: "Almost everybody on the street has an idea tucked away in the back of their head," says Frey, 49. "They think, 'When I get a chance, that's the one that's going to make me a multi-gazillionaire.' But they have no clue how to get it off the ground. We're trying to nurture...