Board of Directors
The Board of Directors is a group of established Colorado business leaders who ensure the Network remains sustainable. They determine BEN’s long-term strategy, provide input, and offer guidance into the Network’s initiatives.
Legacy Board Members
For those that serve on our Board of Directors, we ask for a three-year dedication. We thank these business leaders for their outstanding service.
Founders
BEN Colorado was co-founded by Senator Michael Bennet, renowned Colorado Venture Capitalist & Ecosystem Philanthropist Brad Feld, and Attorney General Phil Weiser in 2014 during Weiser’s tenure as Dean of the University of Colorado Law School.
Network Advisors
Network Advisors are Colorado's most successful entrepreneurs and scale-up business executives from one of five targeted industries (see below). They form the core working group of the Network because of their extensive expertise in starting or scaling a company and provide critical guidance when Network companies face key strategic challenges. Each Advisor volunteers to act as an objective sounding board and a peer-to-peer resource.
Please be aware that we do not share our network members' contact information without express permission.
Spring 2023 Advisor Class
We are delighted to welcome the newest members of our advisor network, who all joined in April. We are grateful for their enthusiasm and commitment to making a positive impact on the Colorado business community.
This Spring Class of Advisors bring with them a wealth of experience and expertise to our network. They have a deep understanding of the challenges and opportunities facing businesses in Colorado, and they are passionate about helping businesses succeed.
Hamra Black
Hamra Black is a passionate Customer Success executive who has built and grown teams to advocate for customers over the past 25 years. The success she has achieved throughout her career is built upon a single, enduring principle: if you keep the customer at the center of the decision-making, you will usually get to the right answer. Hamra has worked in all stages of tech start-ups across many business sectors. She has carefully crafted her career to gain a 360° view of the customer - from product management, project management, customer onboarding and experience, and customer success - including customer growth.
Colin Cheadle
Colin North Cheadle is a seasoned HR leader and executive coach with over 20 years of experience including work with Fortune 50, Fortune 500, private global marketing & technology, national manufacturing corporations, startup corporations and governmental agencies. From guiding foundational strategy to leading strategic improvements to the collective experiences of people in the workplace, Colin has led transformational, diversity-centered organizational change at every stop of his career. He has led advancements in Talent Management, L&D, Marketing & Communications, and Organizational Design. He has also provided leadership through complex pre & post acquisition phases.
Brian Cramer
Brian is an operating partner at BVP Forge, which is the unique combination of a private equity firm for growth-oriented, self-sustaining businesses paired with access to BVP’s renowned venture platform. Before joining BVP Forge, Brian was chief executive officer of Smarsh. He transformed the business into a global enterprise player and grew more than six-fold through a mixture of organic growth and add-on acquisitions. Continuously driving a focus on technology and product capabilities led to Smarsh being named the Gartner MQ Leader for Enterprise Information Archiving for the 3 consecutive years.
John Dunning
John Dunning brings a strategic, fast-paced, results-oriented entrepreneurial perspective to the practice of advising leaders of early/growth stage technology/software companies. John was most recently COO of Recall Masters, a growth stage software company based in Laguna Hills, CA which has developed the largest database of unperformed automotive recalls in the industry. As a shareholder of the company, John has performed a variety of roles as needed at RM; previously he was President and led all daily operations of the company including implementation of a next generation plan with a variety of structural, operational, and strategic changes to better position the business for fundraising and its future.
Pamela Glick
A driven, entrepreneurial, and hands-on HCM SaaS Chief Executive, I have the vision and confidence to roll out innovative new products, ideas, and processes. I have a strong ability to set a strategic vision, break it into short- versus long-term goals, communicate and rally the company around the vision, and define what it means for everyone and how they can contribute to the overall success of the company. I’m a solution-oriented leader with the ability to see the big picture and effectively manage through and overcome internal and external obstacles.
Paul Hurley
Technology/Internet entrepreneur and executive with 30 years of experience starting and growing B2B and B2C businesses. Founder and CEO of 4 companies; from cocktail napkin to $100+ million in revenue. My most recent company, ideeli, was #1 on the Inc. 500 list in 2011. I've raised over $150 million in venture funding and have public, private and non-profit board of directors experience.
Helen Lee
As a Private Client Advisor at Bank of America Private Bank, Helen works closely with clients from diverse backgrounds, including women with wealth, entrepreneurs, and healthcare professionals to help them manage the multiple dimensions of complex wealth. Helen has more than 25 years of experience managing assets and client relationships.
Dave Mayer
Dave Mayer is a serial entrepreneur and community builder with a long history of helping to scale startup communities in Boulder, Denver and the Western Slope. Dave has more than 23 years of experience in building engineering and executive teams for engineering organizations. For the past 13 years he's been the Founder and CEO of Technical Integrity which has helped build teams for countless startups and enterprise organizations like Paypal, Twitter, Twilio, IBM, Ball Aerospace and more. He and his wife live in Basalt, CO where they adopt senior dogs.
Amy Noblin
Amy has 25+ years of experience as an investor, advisor and brand builder in the consumer, retail and digital sectors. Currently, Ms. Noblin is a member of The Board, which is rewriting the role of consultants through the creation of dream teams. Most recently, she was the Chief Revenue Officer for Neighborhood Goods, a retail startup re-imagining physical retail for brands. During her tenure, Amy reorganized and rebuilt the company's strategic brand partnerships team, implemented new processes and systems to set the business up for efficiency and scale, resulting in strategic brand partnership fees and GMV more than doubling over an 18-month period.
James Taylor
James is a high-performing fractional CTO and Technology Advisor with over 24 years of engineering experience and 11 years as a senior technology executive. He excels in scaling engineering capacity, creating successful SaaS and AI/ML quantitative data products, and implementing process improvements for high-growth companies.As Chief Technology Officer for Analytical Data Systems, James provides thought leadership, develops software product strategies, scales teams and processes, and leads product design initiatives, often including AI enablement.
Brian Peterson
Brian Peterson is an accomplished SaaS business leader with a unique background as both a startup founder & CEO and a product executive. With over 20 years of experience, he has demonstrated exceptional ability in driving revenue growth, profitability, and innovation for both Fortune 500 companies and small to medium-sized businesses. One of Brian's recent achievements is his successful transformation of Campminder, a camp management software company based in Boulder. During his tenure as VP of Product, the company achieved a 450% growth in revenue and a 400% increase in profitability (EBITDA). Brian is a growth-oriented and go-to-market product leader who thrives on helping companies perfect their product-market fit, pricing, packaging, and multiple-product offerings.
Scott Walker
Scott is a creative problem solver who enjoys helping ambitious organizations tackle complex challenges. He has fifteen years of executive leadership experience scaling up two very different, world-class organizations. The first was Accuvant (now Optiv), an information security provider he co-founded and helped grow to over 500 employees and $500 million in revenue. Accuvant peaked at #220 on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest growing companies and has since become the world’s largest cyber solutions provider. The second was DSST Public schools, a regional charter school network that during his tenure as COO doubled in size to serve over 6,000 students and won the 2018 Broad Prize honoring the best large charter school network in the US.
Magdalena Znamirowska
Magdalena is a highly skilled COO/CFO with 25 years of experience in finance and private investments. Her strong track record of driving execution, improving efficiency, and maximizing profitability has been honed through extensive work with investment firms and tech startups throughout her career. Magda began as an investment analyst for venture capital and private equity funds in Warsaw, Prague, and London, including Enterprise Investors, Baring Communications Equity, and CVC Int., a Citigroup private equity arm with exposure to global emerging markets.
Our Targeted Industries
Click an image to view industry-specific criteria. To see all industry criteria, click here.
Network Companies
Network Companies expand our region’s network of entrepreneurs and sustainable successes. Each company engagement level varies depending on the stage of the company, the type of resources needed, and the key growth issues each CEO identifies.
BEN Colorado has welcomed over 115 different companies into the network to date and continues to seek more. Companies are defined within the Network as Gazelles, Prospective Gazelles, or To Watch, depending on their current stage of growth and scale-up potential. Based on how the company is classified within the Network, we promote it in ways tailored to their its position. This might entail increasing its market visibility, providing new expertise, or offering a variety of opportunities to give back to the scale up community. To see a list of the qualifying guidelines for our network companies click here.
2023 NETWORK COMPANIES
Each month, one or two high-growth firms from Colorado present their story to our Network Advisors. It is an opportunity for them to meet serially successful entrepreneurs who have “been there and done that”, who are committed to walking alongside the entrepreneur and help them tackle their most pressing scaling challenges.
2022 NETWORK COMPANIES
GAZELLE COMPANIES
We are excited to feature our Gazelle Companies. These companies are categorized by their rapid growth and clear potential to quickly scale to large economic profiles and outcomes.
CURRENT NETWORK COMPANIES
We are privileged to work with these companies currently and are excited to see the impact they make on the Colorado entrepreneurial community.
ALUMNI COMPANIES
We were privileged to work with these companies in the past and continue to recognize impact they have made in the Colorado entrepreneurial community. Thank you for your support!