The Bear Roars

Loud Bear Productions
  • 4.7 (15)
  • Business

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. 2d ago

    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

  2. 5d ago

    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

  3. Sep 1

    Two People, Three Years, and a $9 Billion IPO — with Ed Hallen

    In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Ed Hallen — co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Klaviyo, the company he and Andrew Bialecki started in 2012 and took public in 2023. Before they had an idea, they had a rule: find a problem, solve it with software, and get someone to pay by credit card within two months, or move on. It took four or five tries. What they sold was email marketing. What they were actually building was the customer data underneath it. Ed's argument is that the constraint on AI isn't the models — it's that most companies still can't say what a customer or a lead actually is. His answer is "highly opinionated" data, where a purchase means a purchase at every brand and there's nothing left for anyone to debate. He and Andrew ran the company as just the two of them for three years, hit $250,000 in revenue in year two and a million in year three, and raised money they left sitting in the bank untouched. Ed came to Boulder in 2016 planning to stay two months, and bought a house four months later. A decade on, what keeps him here is that it's a place where people build real things instead of telling great stories about them. Plus his second company, Team Engine, why he thinks public markets make companies better, and his answer to Dan's most provocative question: did any of this actually do good in the world? Learn more about Ed's work: https://www.klaviyo.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 To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  4. Aug 25

    X Games Wasn't Broken. It Was Under-Imagined — with Jeremy Bloom

    In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Jeremy Bloom — CEO of X Games, two-time Olympic mogul skier, former NFL wide receiver, and the founder behind Integrate and Owl AI. Jeremy takes the seat as a fan first: the X Games launched in 1995, when he was 13 and skateboarding was still something you could get arrested for downtown. The heart of the conversation is what he's building now. For 30 years the X Games was one event a year — an extraordinary brand that, as he puts it, was bought with no bank account, no CRM and no customer data. He's turned it into a global co-ed league: eight clubs backed by private equity and family offices, athletes on salary with health insurance for the first time in action sports, and $500,000 to the winning team. This season's MVP was a 15-year-old skateboarder from Japan who outscored every man in the league. Then there's Owl AI, the Boulder company that started with a phone call to Sergey Brin about the blown call that cost the Saints a Super Bowl. Plus what a good AI judge turns out to also be, why he sued the NCAA at 19, and why he'd live nowhere but Boulder. Learn more about Jeremy's work: https://www.jeremybloom.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 To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  5. Aug 19

    Why Losing Made Him a Better CEO — with Kent Thiry

    In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Kent Thiry — the legendary healthcare executive who led DaVita's turnaround from the brink of bankruptcy into one of America's most admired companies — for a candid conversation about leadership, failure, and what it takes to build community, in business and across a state. Kent traces an unlikely path from a small town in Wisconsin to Stanford, Harvard, and a partnership at Bain, before deciding he'd rather build things than advise them. He's refreshingly honest that his defining lesson came from failure, not success — a turnaround that lost half its investors' capital and humbled him completely, and which he says is the only reason he was ready when DaVita called. He walks Dan through taking over a company six weeks from missing payroll for 7,000 people and, over 21 years, growing it into the "DaVita Village" — 75,000 teammates across 13 countries treated as citizens, not employees, its value climbing roughly a hundredfold. The conversation then turns to Kent's second act, which is now about 80% civic: a healthy, functional democracy, the environment, economic mobility for low-income high school graduates, and the shared prosperity of Colorado. He and Dan dig into political polarization, how a state governs itself well, and polling Kent commissioned showing more than half of Colorado's voters now identify as independent — most by choice — and want both parties to moderate and simply get more done. They don't agree on everything, which is the point of the show, but they share a hopeful, pragmatic argument for community-first leadership that asks "is this good for Colorado?" before "is this good for my party?" Learn more about Kent's civic work: https://kentthiry.com/kent-thiry/about/leadership/ 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 To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  6. Aug 18

    Colorado Is Losing the Critical Metals Race — with Hugo Schumann

    In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Hugo Schumann — founder and CEO of EverMetal Capital and former CFO of Boulder's Jetti Resources — for a conversation about the chokepoint most people miss in the critical metals story. Hugo opens with getting sent to the Congo at 26 to build an iron ore project, an AK-47 pointed at him at the airport, and a mountain hike that took the company from $20M to $400M in a couple of months. From there he makes the case that mining was never the bottleneck. There's ore in Chile, Brazil and the US, but almost all of the refining that turns rock into usable metal happens in China, which spent the 2000s building that capacity while the West shut its own down. Dan and Hugo get into why that hands China a switch it can flip both ways, and why doing this work here is better for the environment than doing it there. Then it gets local: Colorado has the School of Mines, a Denver mining cluster and the talent to match, and is still watching these plants go to Texas and Oklahoma. Plus Hugo's super-alloy recycling roll-up, and a candid exchange on using AI in dealmaking. Learn more about Hugo's work in critical metals: https://www.evermetal.capital/hugo-schumann 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 To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

  7. Aug 11

    Can Boulder Get Out of Its Own Way? with Aquiles La Grave

    In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Aquiles La Grave — serial entrepreneur, community builder, and candidate for Mayor of Boulder — for a candid conversation about whether Boulder can get out of its own way before it prices out the very people who make it special. Aquiles arrived in Boulder in 1995 as a 15-year-old immigrant from Venezuela, and within a single generation his family built thriving lives here. His worry is that today's Boulder wouldn't offer that same chance. He and Dan dig into the numbers behind the anxiety — roughly 3,600 fewer K–12 students and looming school closures, about 30% downtown office vacancy, and permit timelines that can stretch a six-month project into years — along with what Aquiles calls a "crisis of empathy" in a city government whose staff largely neither live in Boulder nor come into the office. They also get into what he'd actually do about it: treat adaptability as a governing framework, bring city staff back to serve the community in person, make it easier to build the homes working families need, and lead with "yes, and here's how" instead of "no, and here's why." And why it matters well beyond city limits — Boulder anchors the Front Range, producing some $10 billion in annual payroll, most of it in jobs beyond its own borders. It's a conversation about accountability, opportunity, and keeping a community's door open to the next family chasing a better life. Connect with Aquiles: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aquileslagrave/ 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

  8. Aug 5

    Can You Trust AI With Payroll? with Gabe Monroy

    In this episode of The Bear Roars, Dan sits down with Gabe Monroy — Chief Technology Officer of Workday — for a candid conversation about building AI you can actually trust in the highest-stakes corners of the enterprise: people and money. Gabe reflects on a career spent at the center of modern computing — helping shape the container and Kubernetes technology that quietly powers nearly every major AI system today, standing up the container and distributed compute businesses inside Microsoft Azure, and serving as a product and engineering leader at DigitalOcean and Google Cloud before taking the CTO role at Workday, where roughly 70% of the Fortune 500 are customers. He explains why he walked away from the world of runaway AI infrastructure spend after sensing a "bubble-ish" disconnect from reality, and why the real opportunity is solving AI where a mistake isn't a bad chat response — it's a missed payroll or a broken ledger. They get into how AI is reshaping engineering itself — from swarms of agents that let two people ship in a week what once took sixteen engineers six months, to why "taste" and systems thinking now matter more than specialized skills. Gabe makes the case for deterministic guarantees over probabilistic magic, why open-weights models are becoming a critical counterbalance for enterprises wary of a government "kill switch," and why he believes Colorado has every right to lead the next era of innovation — if it leans into the change instead of legislating against it. Learn more about Workday: https://www.workday.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 To nominate a founder or yourself as a future guest speaker, email: contact@loudbearproductions.com

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Ratings & Reviews

4.7
out of 5
15 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
    110
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Loud Bear Productions
  • Show Website
    The Bear Roars

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