Colorado’s mission to become an entrepreneurial and innovation hub for private companies is well on its way. And that has left the Colorado Innovation Network needing to refocus.

COIN, Gov.  John Hickenlooper’s pet project launched in 2011, did just that on Thursday, nixing its annual summit and introducing Reverb — with a little help from investor and actor Ashton Kutcher, known for his role in “That ’70s Show” and now starring in “The Ranch,” a Netflix comedy set in Colorado.

“We can be the leaders for the entire nation right here today,” said an impassioned Kutcher, who took the stage at Reverb following the governor. “This can start today. We can start a movement and push this through the nation.”

Let’s back up a bit.

COIN, a privately funded organization that sits inside public government, wanted to bring businesses, government and the private sector together to figure out how to attract talent, entrepreneurs and capital to the state. Denver has since racked up a number of honors, most recently Forbes’ top city for business and careers.

As COIN’s executive director Anna Ewing and her team began refocusing in the past year, Kutcher and his Sound Ventures investment firm were looking for public officials willing to take a chance on promising technology to make government processes more efficient. The other common denominator: Liberty Media executive Chad Hollingsworth, a member of the Sound Ventures investment team.

Hollinsworth was working with COIN and convinced Kutcher there was real interest in Colorado in making institutional changes. “So we said ‘All right, let’s put this conference together just to get the discussion going and maybe we can figure out where this friction is and start to eliminate it,’” Kutcher said. “Maybe the companies can pivot a little bit, maybe the government can pivot a little bit and we can find some common ground.”

The mix of attendees Thursday was different than at past COIN Summits. People who work for the state’s fire prevention division, department of public safety and office of information technology mixed in with startup founders and venture capitalists. And instead of just the usual speakers on stage, the conference made time for one-on-ones between companies, government officials and Kutcher himself.

“The ecosystem in Colorado has evolved so dramatically that we really wanted to focus on something where we could be progressive, add value and do something new that the private sector wasn’t doing,” Ewing said. “We know the technology is being developed by private innovators but there are some significant hurdles for getting those systems embedded into government systems, whether it’s the procurement process or risk tolerance.”

Some government officials talked about the limits of working in the public sector. Colorado Department of Transportation chief Shailen Bhatt mentioned last month’s successful trip of an autonomously-driven truck carrying a load of Budweiser beer from Fort Collins to Colorado Springs.

“My buddies in Silicon Valley, they always talk about failing: We want to fail. We want to reward failure,” Bhatt said. “But if the (autonomous) truck shipment had not gone well last week, it’d be, ‘Who are you going to replace the former executive director of CDOT with?’ Because that’s not what happens in our world when you make a big investment and something goes wrong.”

Kutcher, who has been investing in tech startups, including Uber, for the past decade, said don’t think about the impossible but the possible.

“The first inclination is why it’s not possible, as opposed to why it is possible and how do we overcome the hurdles,” he said. His goal is to get public agencies connected to tech startups in collaborations that make sense. If that works, he hopes to roll out the Reverb model to other states.

He said his team has done the work of vetting companies to make sure the technology works and meets regulations. For example, he said, one of his companies Mark43 has law enforcement software to reduce a police officer’s office work load. It’s currently being used in Washington, D.C., California and other parts of the country.

“It reduces the amount of time it takes an officer to do a police report by a factor of 10. So you can take a police report down from an hour to 10 minutes,” Kutcher said. “That’s an additional 50 minutes a day that the officer can be on the beat and on the streets actually doing the job they like doing.”

Kutcher said that his interest in technology started after his twin brother, Mike, received a heart transplant at age 13.

“A virus attacked his heart. I became increasingly interested in biochemistry and genetic engineering and how to stop that virus from replicating,” said Kutcher, who went on to study biochemical engineering at the University of Iowa before dropping out to model and, eventually, act.

His brother now lives in Denver.

Kutcher began investing around 2006 because he noticed “online buffering speeds get faster and faster and though we could quantify creativity and quantify the distribution content,” he said.

He went on to co-found venture capital firm A-Grade Investments about six years ago and Sound Ventures in 2015. Investments include OpenGov, a cloud-based system to help public agencies budget better; Neighborly, which eliminates the middleman in municipal bonds; and education platforms Albert.IO and Panorama Education.

“I’m just a nerd,” Kutcher said. “Honestly, they always say that the thing you should be doing is the thing you do on the weekends. I work on the weekends.”

 

Cops in the cloud from CNBC.

Most venture capitalists don’t anticipate finding prospective entrepreneurs at a murder scene. But that’s exactly where the Govtech Fund’s Ron Bouganim saw the CEO of his latest startup investment Mark43. Bouganim, the managing partner of the venture capital fund, recalled watching a news report about a shooting May 4 on the local NBC TV station in Washington, D.C.

“There was the local news, and then literally, there’s the CEO [Scott Crouch] of Mark43 in a flak jacket unfurling the caution-do-not-pass tape for the crime scene,” Bouganim said. “You can barely make him out, but there he was.”

Crouch had been on a ride-along. It was one of the hundreds of late night and early morning rides Mark43 has conducted since it launched as a police analytics platform in 2012. Bouganim said the story illustrated the kind of dedication and entrepreneurial obsession that’s catapulted the startup’s funding to $12.8 million. In a more recent round of funding on Aug. 3 the Govtech Fund, which exclusively targets govtech startups, was joined by top-tier firms like Spark Capital and General Catalyst to invest $10.8 million of Series A funding.

Bouganim said Mark43 is emblematic both of what a government tech startup can do and the rising interest from traditional venture capitalist firms.

Crouch was a junior at Harvard, when he and fellow co-founders Matt Polega and Flo Mayr created Mark43 as an all-in-one analytics cloud platform that provides police with data from different departments. It relays incident reports, can do background checks across multiple datasets, scans social media and phone records via warrants, and can even show a suspect’s criminal associations.

For their efforts, Forbes included the co-founders in its listing of top 30-under-30 enterprise entrepreneurs for 2015, while FastCompany magazine ranked Mark43 within its top 50 most innovative companies for 2015. This month the startup will deploy its technology throughout the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and 30-plus federal agencies — a move affecting more than 15,000 government employees.

Already, the company claims its software has assisted law enforcement in the arrest of hundreds of sexual predators, gang members, murderers and violent criminals.

“I just keep banging the drum, this is a serious space, and there are serious startups,” Bouganim said.

Bouganim is a believer that the decades old govtech space — not to be confused with the civic tech industry — is undergoing a change driven by an influx of startups entering the market. The strong commercial interest can be traced to government’s need for affordable innovation and cloud technologies that enable small companies to scale rapidly. For evidence, Bouganim points out that most of the companies in the Govtech Fund’s investment portfolio have entrepreneurs under 30, and collectively, they boast an average government sales cycle of 86 days.

“We are gravitating to investments where the pain point is so great within the market that, one way or another — and with various procurement approaches — the buyer is saying, ‘I’m going to jump through whatever hoops I need to make this happen,’” Bouganim said.

In law enforcement the problem is the amount of paper records tied to antiquated data management systems. SceneDoc, a competitor and similar incident reporting solution piloted in Palm Springs, Calif., is estimated to potentially save the city thousands of dollars and would put additional patrol officers on the street. It would do this by eliminating the time officers take to transport reports to departments, grab signature approvals and file them into records systems. Palm Springs Sgt. William Hutchinson said officers spend an average of 45 minutes filing paperwork for an incident. On busy nights, officers can respond to as many as 15 incidents.

Given that kind of paper-based workload, law enforcement may be more than willing to part with old vendors in favor of Mark43. Bouganim said the fresh start and comprehensive approach was a big selling point for the investment.

“We’ve looked at a number of technologies in the law enforcement space, but the ones we looked at always seemed to be incremental,” Bouganim said. “Mark43 is completely rethinking the way that police departments would be organized, the way that officers would do their daily jobs, and you have everything from arrest reports to analytics — it’s the whole gamut.”