In Burlington, Vermont, an engineer codes from a hammock. Down the hall, two co-founders debate marketing strategy in a Spiderman-themed meeting room. In the corner, a pair of designers sketch out a video game. Through the kitchen windows, Lake Champlain stretches toward the horizon.
This is VCET – the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies – and on first impression, it looks like any number of scrappy startup hubs. But spend enough time here, and something less obvious comes into focus.
I joined VCET in the summer of 2023 as a marketing intern, fresh from a Middlebury College course taught by Sam Roach-Gerber and Dave Bradbury that had piqued my curiosity about the organization. Over the next three years, I wrote 36 feature stories about the people and businesses behind VCET – portfolio companies, board members, partner organizations, coworking members.
Now, after leaving Vermont to explore new opportunities in New York, I keep returning to one conclusion: the founders building companies here are not playing a smaller game.
Vermont has 650,000 people. And yet, the companies I covered competed on national and international stages.
One Vermont battery company served clients in 44 countries across seven continents. A local manufacturer competed head-to-head with household names like Lenovo and Dell. Another company made the Inc. 5000, the annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in the country.
What struck me was that founders didn’t see Vermont as a limitation. They saw it as a laboratory. A marketing lead at a local data science company put it plainly: to be a pioneer in their space, they first needed to sharpen their value proposition – and Vermont, they believed, was the place to do it.
“If we can keep breaking through in this smaller market,” another founder told me, “you learn all the fundamentals in a bigger and better way.”
Read the full piece here.
-Blaise
