Page 70 - PureMontana // 2016

BOZEMAN & BEYOND
CITY of the FUTURE
Take one look at the energy around town, and it won’t surprise you that Bozeman is Montana’s tech incubator
Montana Gubernatorial can- didate and tech pioneer Greg Gianforte founded customer-experience software com- pany RightNow Technologies in 1997. He later said that their nascent venture was an “experiment in whether Internet could remove geography as a constraint in where you locate a business.” Nearly 20 years later, Gianforte has proved that a tech business could survive— and thrive—in a picturesque Montana mountain town. But it wasn’t any moun- tain town. It was Bozeman.
e city is chock-full of tech entrepan- eurs, innovators, and successful start-ups.
Last year, the Big Sky state was ranked as the most entrepreneurial in the United States.
e Bozeman Daily Chronicle reported in fall 2015, following the rst bi-annual Montana high tech jobs sum- mit, that the high tech industry is adding jobs at a faster rate here than any other sector, and that the jobs are generally higher paying.
e trend isn’t new, though— Gianforte was not the rst tech giant to pop up in Bozeman. e industry’s leg- acy here can be traced back to the early 1990s, when Chris Nelson formed Zoot Enterprises, which parses credit le data.
As the University of Montana’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research reported, the trend has stayed strong ever since. “Growth in high tech businesses is outpacing that of other sec- tors of the state’s economy,” a study reads. e university itself is a locus for progres- sion in the local tech industry.
“ is is like a tech founder’s dream,” James Woodson, CEO of a startup that streamlines heart attack and stroke care, told the Chronicle. “When it comes to getting resources, [Bozeman] has been a fantastic environment start to nish. It was a no-brainer to set up here.”
Intelligent tech workers migrate here for the same reason that most people do—the beautiful quality of life and nat- ural amenities. e region may “not have the same sway as Silicon Valley,” Lewis Kendall, the Chronicle’s business editor has written, but “the area is quickly gain- ing a national reputation.”
“You don’t think about the Gallatin Valley as being the hub of technol- ogy,” Senator Steve Daines told the U.S. Senate in a 2015 speech, “But as the world is changing, as technology is removing geography as a constraint, you have places where the quality of life is exceptional and [you] can grow world class high tech companies there.”
70 PURE MONTANA // PureWestRealEstate.com // 2016
The setting sun makes use of Bozeman's big sky. WILL RYNEARSON