The Bear Roars

Loud Bear Productions

The Bear Roars is hosted by three-time decacorn entrepreneur and venture investor Dan Caruso. Colorado Innovators, the Bandwidth revolution (associated with Dan's book), and DeepTech are areas of focus. The purpose is to celebrate innovators, inspire listeners, and spark conversations within the innovation community.

  1. 4d ago

    Amendment 87 and Colorado’s Income Tax | Former Governor Bill Owens

    Bill Owens was Colorado’s governor from 1999 to 2007, and he is still the last Republican to hold the office. He grew up in Texas, one of five kids of a door-to-door salesman who reminded them that every morning, he was responsible for 21 meals. Bill came to Colorado by choice in his mid-twenties and never left. Dan opens with a disclaimer: he’s an independent, and this year he finds himself agreeing with Republicans more often than not. Then they go straight to Amendment 87, which would replace Colorado’s flat income tax with graduated rates. Bill’s case is that in a country with 50 states, you can’t double the tax on successful people and businesses and expect them to stay. They agree Colorado’s tech community got complacent, and the Colorado AI Act was the wake-up call. Bill’s fix is participation, and a second party in the battle of ideas. Plus, why both think Governor Polis was right to commute Tina Peters’s sentence, Bill’s four decades of work in Russia and Ukraine, why he calls Putin “aggressive but not crazy,” and the case for striking Iran’s nuclear program. Learn more about Governor Owens: https://www.nga.org/governor/bill-owens/ Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  2. Oct 13

    Why Is Boulder So Expensive? Housing, Zoning & the Next Aspen | Jill Adler Grano

    Jill Adler Grano is running for Boulder City Council, and she has spent years in the public record working out how Boulder got so expensive. Her answer starts in 1955, when the city adopted low-density postwar zoning. Today, 74.3% of Boulder's residential zoning is still low density. In the 1970s, the city layered growth controls on top of that, then decades of review on top of those, a pattern known as "growth control by hassle." The result, Jill says, is manufactured scarcity. Dan opens by saying what he expects: they'll agree on the problems and disagree on the fixes. They agree on a lot. Office vacancy has climbed to 26%, schools are closing, and the non-student population is shrinking. Employers tell Jill that Longmont, 15 minutes away, offers commercial rent 65% cheaper. Dan tells the story of Zayo's hundreds of employees leaving the 29th Street Mall, and the city never calling to ask what it would take to keep them. Where they split is the duplex rule meant to create middle-income housing, which produced luxury second homes selling for $2.5 million per side. Jill wants guardrails like owner-occupancy requirements. Dan argues that more rules are how Boulder got here. Plus, the Alpine-Balsam purchase, why Dan's own Glenwood redevelopment never penciled out, whether city employees should live in the city they serve, why Boulder shouldn't become the next Aspen, and the national investors buying up housing near fast-growing state universities. Learn more about Jill and her campaign for Boulder City Council: https://www.jillforcouncil.com Read Jill's thesis, Landscapes of Privilege: Housing, Capital, and the Contradictions of Progressive Urbanism in Boulder, Colorado: https://jilladlergrano.substack.com/p/who-is-boulder-for Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  3. Oct 6

    Colorado's Graduated Income Tax and Housing Crisis | Jarvis Caldwell

    Jarvis Caldwell is the House Minority Leader in the Colorado House of Representatives, and he got there in his first term. He grew up in a trailer, went into the medical field the day after high school, then joined the Air Force and kept fighter jets flying out of Bagram. In 2010, in a bunker during a rocket attack, two airmen next to him argued over whether it was the Taliban or Al-Qaeda firing at them. Jarvis realized he didn't know the answer, and decided he had better start paying attention. Dan opens with a confession: lots of people assume he's a Republican. He isn't. From there, the two find more common ground than either party's loudest voices would predict. Jarvis's case against the graduated income tax runs through Deion Sanders: a top recruit choosing between Texas, with no state income tax, and a higher bracket in Colorado has an easy decision. Dan's addition is that pro sports has a salary cap and business doesn't, so every great founder can go play for Texas. Site selectors, Jarvis says, find Colorado the easy sell. It's the policy and the rhetoric that scare them off. They agree housing is a supply problem, and that faster permitting isn't a Republican idea or a Democrat idea. They don't agree on everything. When Jarvis describes the view he grew up with, that government mostly shows up with its hand out, Dan makes the case for safety nets. Plus, why young voters are drawn to democratic socialism, how to get college students into a real conversation, and how a freshman legislator who says he isn't overly ambitious ended up leading his caucus. Learn more about Representative Caldwell and his work in the Colorado House: https://leg.colorado.gov/legislators/jarvis-caldwell Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  4. Sep 29

    Rural Venture Capital in Colorado — with Cory Finney

    Cory Finney is Managing Partner of Howdy Partners, the rural Colorado venture fund formerly known as Greater Colorado Venture Fund. He and Dan are both investors in Agile Space Industries, which builds spacecraft thrusters in Durango. When Agile went looking for a home for its new rocket engine test center, Oklahoma competed hard for it, and won. Cory's answer to the question he gets asked most, why rural, starts with a map: the places venture capital flows line up almost exactly with the places that produce half the country's GDP. By his math, Agile's roughly 140 employees mean as much to La Plata County as a 2,500-person company would mean to Denver. Dan's argument is that Colorado can't take advantages like that for granted while other states work hard to take them. The conversation covers what rural Colorado is building right now, from autonomous tractors made in La Junta and Florence to farmers in Sterling who pitched Cory on how they use AI day to day. Plus, also in this one: Dan's case that Colorado's housing problem is supply, not land, and when Agile becomes a unicorn. Learn more about Howdy Partners and the rural Colorado founders it backs: https://www.howdy.vc Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  5. Sep 25

    David Linde: Why Sundance Film Festival Left Park City for Boulder

    Recorded live in front of an audience at Tulagi Music Festival, Dan sits down with David Linde, the CEO of the Sundance Institute, in one of the first interviews he's given since taking the job. His own first Sundance was 1992, when a call sent him racing to a small Park City theater to watch Reservoir Dogs premiere from the front row, with Quentin Tarantino standing up afterward to talk about it. Now he's bringing that festival to Colorado, and he quotes its director, Eugene Hernandez, on what the move actually is: they aren't relocating Sundance, they're growing it. Eleven screening venues, three of them on the CU Boulder campus, and Macky Auditorium alone getting 245 speakers in its ceiling. The governor told him it wouldn't be his Egyptian, it would be his Carnegie Hall. What he's most interested in isn't the eleven days. A conversation about what Sundance could do for Colorado turned into a conversation about jobs for the 6,000 CU graduates every year, and it's now a workforce panel he wants running in Boulder all year. Plus, two questions from the live podcast audience; how 16,000 submissions become 150 films, and what happens to the artists who can no longer afford to live here in Boulder. Learn more about the Sundance Institute and the 2027 Festival in Boulder: https://www.sundance.org Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  6. Sep 15

    Trey Foskett on Genomics, Gene Editing, and Boulder's Life Sciences Comeback

    Trey Foskett is the co-founder and CEO of Watchmaker Genomics in Boulder. Sequencing the first human genome took ten years and $3 billion. Twenty-five years later, that cost has fallen roughly 100,000-fold: a drop that outpaced Moore's Law, and one most people outside the field never noticed. Watchmaker doesn't sequence DNA. It makes the enzymes that sequencing companies use to do it. Cheaper, more precise testing means more testing, and more demand for what Watchmaker makes. It also moves genomics out of the research lab and into routine cancer detection. Trey and Dan also get into gene editing, designer genes, and what changes when genetics becomes something money can buy. Tom Cech won a Nobel at CU Boulder, and life sciences companies grew up along the Front Range, until larger pharmaceutical companies bought them and the work left with the buyers. Trey is rebuilding it here. Plus: why life is written in exactly four letters, and whether its ingredients arrived from somewhere else. Learn more about Trey's work in genomics: https://watchmakergenomics.com Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  7. Sep 11

    Governor Jared Polis on Quantum, Aerospace, and What Colorado Is Leaving on the Table

    Colorado Governor Jared Polis has five months left in office, and Dan didn't want a retrospective. Polis leads with the win he's proudest of: Colorado went from 27th in the country for preschool enrollment to 3rd, and #1 in the nation for education — funded by a ballot measure that passed with more than two-thirds of the vote, in Republican counties and Democratic ones alike. From there it's a builder's conversation. Why Americans pay two to four times what France or Japan pays for the identical drug, and why closing half that gap would take 8% off every employer's premiums. Why housing is a supply problem, and what gets taken away from a generation when the $300,000 starter home no longer exists. Then Dan puts the hard question on the table: Colorado has every right to be the world's best innovation ecosystem, so why are the people leaving California looking somewhere else? Polis's answer is that investors can love a founder in Colorado and still not want to put money into Colorado. Two different problems, and Colorado has been better at the first. Plus, the three-month sabbatical where he says no to everything, why he thinks the AI bubble will burst without taking AI down with it, and the Sundance he'll finally get to enjoy without his phone going off. Learn more about Governor Polis and his administration's work: https://www.colorado.gov/governor Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/book Listen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretch Check out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallen To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  8. Sep 8

    Best in the Country for Education, and Closing Schools — with Aquiles La Grave, Part 2

    Aquiles La Grave is back on The Bear Roars, this time live in front of an audience at Tulagi Music Festival, three weeks into his campaign for mayor of Boulder. In July, U.S. News named Colorado the best state in the country for education. In August, Boulder Valley School District proposed closing four elementary schools.His case is that Boulder doesn't have a values problem, it has a delivery problem. He counted nineteen candidates on stage at the first forum of this year's race. They all love the town, he says, and almost none of them talked about how they would actually get anything done. Then there's the money. In November, Boulder votes on a $400 million bond that will cost about $650 million to pay off over twenty years, in a city that spends roughly $500 million a year. The city published a list of what the money would build, but it isn't required to stick to it.Dan pushes back throughout, including why the city council and city manager were the only people missing from the community gathering the night before. Also in this one: the rule Aquiles says he would impose on day one, and an audience member who wanted one specific thing that would make Boulder affordable.Learn More About Aquiles: https://boulder.vote/Order Dan's book — Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom: dan-caruso.com/bookListen to Dan’s song Stretch: https://distrokid.com/hyperfollow/dancaruso/stretchCheck out music by Jason Mendelson (Jace Allen): https://www.youtube.com/@jaceallenTo nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

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Ratings & Reviews

4.8
out of 5
16 Ratings

About

The Bear Roars is hosted by three-time decacorn entrepreneur and venture investor Dan Caruso. Colorado Innovators, the Bandwidth revolution (associated with Dan's book), and DeepTech are areas of focus. The purpose is to celebrate innovators, inspire listeners, and spark conversations within the innovation community.

Information

  • Creator
    Loud Bear Productions
  • Years Active
    2024 - 2026
  • Episodes
    116
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Loud Bear Productions
  • Show Website
    The Bear Roars

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