Lee Granas (EPOBio, Hist’01) is the co-founder of , a San Francisco-based company providing space for people seeking distraction-free work. WIRED called the company “the latest productivity solution to come out of Silicon Valley.”

At focused, clients attend a 2.5-hour small-group session, which starts with a one-on-one goal-setting meeting and a brief meditation practice. Then, it’s time to get to work on the project or task at hand. The cost: $40. With any luck, at the end of 2.5 hours, their work is done.

Granas previously worked for a productivity app called Workflowy and the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Human Project. She also helped create an online “atlas of human emotions” for The Dalai Lama.

Here she talks about what makes focused work and what it takes to get unstuck during a project.

What is it about life today that creates the need for focused?

Our modern world continually chases our attention. It’s no surprise how we are unintentionally pulled to our phones, yet it is often a surprise how fractured our attention is even at our computers. When our clients turn off Slack, messenger apps and email they are often amazed at how much they can get done. We help you reclaim your intention and become productive in a more conscious and satisfying way.

Is your service effective because it puts a person, physically and mentally, in a different place?

Absolutely. Many of our clients normally work from home or cafés. They find that coming into our space provides a different type of supported container, allowing them to get more done. They also can tackle harder and more complex work that they might avoid or distract from on their own. Our space is like a refuge from the modern world and feels like a retreat center in the middle of a city. 

That being said, we are currently piloting remote sessions via video-chat. We are adding components to help create a supportive environment even from your home.

Can you share a success story about someone who just couldn’t complete a task until coming to focused?

One woman always wanted to apply to an artist residency program, but she had been putting it off for months. Every time she tried to work on the application on her own, she became intimidated and found ways to distract herself. When she came to focused, the structure and support allowed her to finish and submit the entire application.

Often we help our clients with their fears, which allows them to get unblocked and complete hard tasks. Other clients use focused to work on novels or screenplays that they can never make time for during a busy week. 

What do you do when you get stuck and just can’t get something done?

Usually there is an underlying emotion when you are stuck. Perhaps there is fear, or perfectionism, or a deeper reason why the task is challenging. If you can identify that emotion, it can often help you get unblocked. We have found, unexpectedly, that compassion for a hard task is usually more powerful and effective than extra discipline.

Milwaukee journalist was a 35-year newspaper reporter, finishing that career at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Now a freelance writer, his work includes fact-check reporting for PolitiFact and sports reporting for Associated Press. His reporting on Steven Avery was featured in Making a Murderer. Kertscher is the author of sports books on Brett Favre and Al McGuire. Follow him at and on Twitter: and @KertscherSports.

Photo courtesy Lee Granas

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Gavin Lodge couldn't find a fashionable diaper bag for fathers, so he created his own. 

It wasn’t for a lack of effort. Gavin Lodge (IntlAf, Phil’99) just couldn’t find what he was looking for.

When he and his partner, Todd Ellison, were preparing for the birth of their first child in 2011, a key baby item was not meeting their needs: The bag.

“It was while we were doing registry stuff that I wondered, ‘Why isn’t there a slick-looking diaper bag out there?’” said Lodge, a New York City actor. “Everything was either quilted or feminine or schlumpy and apologetic.”

Eventually, they relented: “We bought a schlumpy bag.”

Upon welcoming their second child in 2013, Lodge was not giving in as easily. He decided to design his own diaper bag with dads in mind.

The effort took years. Lodge was performing in the Broadway play Annie and juggling life with his two children, Ellison and Colton. By the time he had a usable bag, his youngest was out of diapers. But he’d sparked a long-term venture for himself.

“There’s this baby industry out there almost entirely catering to moms,” he said. “I want to empower dads.”

In fall 2016 he launched his diaper bag company, E.C.Knox, with a navy bag with black racing stripes. A year later, Barneys New York was selling it.

“I like to say I built this company in four-hour increments of babysitting,” said Lodge, who often raced to design meetings across the Manhattan Bridge on his bicycle.

His sleek messenger-style bag contains ample pockets; removable, waterproof linings; a zip-out changing pad; flashlight; computer sleeve; and instant access to wet wipes. It converts to a backpack when needed. And there’s room for a sippy-cup — or, when occasion arises, a wine bottle.

“I definitely designed that intentionally,” Lodge said.

Entrepreneurism wasn’t part of Lodge’s career plan as an actor, nor was it a thought in college. 

Lodge, an only child who grew up in Lakewood, ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ, received a Boettcher Scholarship, which brought him to ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder. Aspiring for a foreign service career, the Presidents Leadership Class member jumped full force into college life.

“With his incredible time management skills, he was good at everything he committed himself to,” said ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ theater professor Bud Coleman, who worked with Lodge on three ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ musicals.

But when the Broadway musical Rent came to town seeking talent, Lodge — a member of the ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ a cappella group Extreme Measures — was intrigued and tried out.

He didn’t make the show, but the experience was transformative in making him rethink his future plans: “I didn’t feel like having a career yet.”

After graduation, he worked for the 2000 Al Gore presidential campaign and then as executive assistant for Maria Cantwell, a U.S. senator from Washington. She encouraged him to pursue a job in Washington, D.C. But Lodge still felt a pull to Broadway, and moved to New York instead.

He made his Broadway debut in 2004 by performing in the musical 42nd Street. He also met his partner Todd, who was a conductor for the play.

In 2009 the couple decided to have children via surrogate.

Their parenting experiences shaped Lodge’s bag design, which often ranged from quick diaper changes on city park benches to business meetings after preschool drop-off.

After receiving his first bag sample in spring 2016, a fellow preschool parent helped him secure 15 minutes to pitch his bag to Barneys.

Today, his $250 bags are sold at Maisonette, the online luxury baby retailer, Amazon and several boutiques across the country, including Twinkle by Zoe in Aspen, ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ. Lodge also has expanded his E.C.Knox line  to include a weekender bag and swaddle blankets.

“Politics taught me that if I knock on more doors than the competition,” Lodge said, “my persistence will pay off.”

Photos courtesy Gavin Lodge 

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In 2015, SoulCycle co-founder Elizabeth Cutler (DistSt'89) launched a spin sensation.

Amid the sea of freshmen fidgeting in the stands of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s basketball arena at convocation in August 1985, Elizabeth Cutler (DistSt’89) pondered what she’d just heard.

“First, he said 25 percent of us wouldn’t be here next year because we’d flunk out,” she said of a dean. “The second was that we’d have to be our own advocates, because ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ is a large school. The third thing he said is don’t get too focused on what job you think you are going to do, as 90 percent of us are going to do a job that has not yet been invented.”

The final point struck a chord: You can blaze your own way.

Two decades later, in 2006, Cutler and a partner did it by opening a fitness center, SoulCycle, in a 1,400-square-foot former dance studio in Manhattan. It proved the start of a high-end fitness phenomenon.

“You could hardly find our front door, and we turned the hallway into the locker room,” Cutler said. “But we were beyond freaking-out-excited.”

 SoulCycle was born of Cutler’s search for community in New York.

Today, SoulCycle is a marquee name in the business of boutique fitness, operating 90 studios across North America. There are no memberships — exercisers book seats online by noon on Mondays — and classes sell out fast, even at $40 or more per session. Charismatic instructors teach up-tempo cycling classes in candlelit rooms, shouting encouragement to cyclists by name. It’s not uncommon for riders to cry as they pedal in sync in the dark.

“As I dabbed my eyes and my sweat after class,” wrote an Atlanta magazine journalist in June, “I wiped away my cynicism, too. Whatever the special sauce, whatever the science, I’m sold on SoulCycle.”

Acquired in 2015 by Equinox Fitness, SoulCycle was born of Cutler’s search for community in New York.

Although a big-city girl from Chicago, she’d moved east from tiny Telluride, Colo., where she’d lived 10 years, working as a real estate agent and Jin Shin Jyutsu acupressure practitioner. She was used to seeing familiar faces on the street and taking restorative hikes with friends. 

“By the time the hike was over, we had solved our problems and were ready to get on with our day,” she said.

After the birth of her second daughter, in 2005, a friend invited her to a spin class. Cutler was anxious — about whether she’d finish, about how she’d feel afterward. She hungered for an urban sanctuary offering the physical, social and psychic benefits of an outdoor escapade with friends.

Soon Cutler met Julie Rice, a former Hollywood talent agent with a similar yearning for socially fulfilling exercise. Over lunch they hatched a plan for a cycling studio prioritizing communal feeling.

“[T]here was really nothing out there that was efficient, that was joyful, that was about community,” Rice told Business Insider.

Cutler found a tiny West 72nd Street studio for rent on Craigslist and the pair opened shop. They charged $27 a session and adopted the then-unusual per-class reservation system to encourage riders to feel invested — and show up.

“We wanted to create an experience where people could clip into the bike when the lights came down, listen to a teacher who spoke to them in a real way and leave the class after 45 minutes having allowed their being to be able to sort everything out,” said Cutler.

As SoulCycle grew, first in New York, then in California, celebrities discovered it. Kelly Ripa raved. Jake Gyllenhaal, David Beckham and Lady Gaga became regulars. Oprah came on her 60th birthday.

“We were in service for people living their best lives,” said Cutler, who left SoulCycle in 2016, after she and Rice sold their full stakes to Equinox for $90 million each. They now run LifeShop, a business advisory and investment firm.

Cutler still enjoys the fellowship of SoulCycle. Visiting Chicago last year, she joined a class — pedaling and sweating her way into harmony in the dark.

In our print edition, this story appears under the title "Master of Soul." Comment on this story? Email editor@colorado.edu.

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It’s hard to believe now, but there was a time when there was no Google in Boulder.

No 700-employee (and growing) workforce.

No multi-building campus at Pearl and 30th Streets with aspens in the lobby, indoor fire pit and lovingly restored 1961 camper for meetings.

No chatter about how the world’s most famous search engine would figure in the life and rhythms of this small, iconic city.

For Brad Schell (ArchEngr’82), the pre-Google days were a happy blur: In the 1980s and ’90s, he and partners were building companies from scratch. One of them, it turned out, would prove to be a Google magnet: In 2006, the tech giant acquired @Last Software, establishing a Boulder beachhead that has evolved into a major U.S. office. Google moved into its new, $131 million Boulder site in December.

Some @Last engineers ran into some Google engineers at a trade show...

Today, Google is both a marquee local employer and — along with outposts of Twitter and Microsoft — a powerful symbol of Boulder’s flourishing tech industry.

“There’s a lot of people in this town that go for it,” said Schell, who at 57 sports thick ringlets of blond hair worthy of a cinema surfing champ. “You get excited about something and you want to see if you can bring it to life.”

Like the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, the Google era has also been exciting for Schell, who moved to town in 1978 as a ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ freshman from Steamboat Springs, one of five Schell siblings to attend ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder.

After working for Google for about a year, he embarked on a series of adventures — boat-building school in Maine, Spanish lessons in Guatemala, a tour of Baja by camper, kite surfing in the Pacific Northwest and an array of business endeavors in tech, real estate and wind energy. Most mornings you can find him at Boxcar Coffee Roasters on Pearl, an animated and friendly eminence grise of the Boulder tech scene.

From time to time, he drops by Google’s new offices, where many members of the former @Last crew still work, including site director Scott Green — the top Googler in Boulder.

“We still talk about how damn much fun it was,” Schell said.

The short version of the @Last-Google story goes like this:

Keen to work for himself, Schell in 1989 co-founded CadZooks, a small Boulder software firm that vastly simplified the production of complex construction drawings, largely automating what once required intense labor by skilled draftsmen able to think in 3D. After California-based Autodesk acquired CadZooks in 1996, Schell stayed on for a while, then turned toward new possibilities.

When Joe Esch, a software developer he knew, suggested starting a new company in 1999, Schell shared some notes and sketches he’d made over the years for easy-to-use 3D modeling software. Esch liked them, and they founded @Last in an office at 10th and Pearl in Boulder.

Scott Green, left, Google’s Boulder site director, with Brad Schell, at Google in January.

Their core product, SketchUp, was intended for anybody who wanted to design in 3D, Schell said — “a 10-year-old or the highest-profile architect in the world.” In a burst of brain work Schell called “the best six weeks of our professional life,” the @Last founders created a prototype and lined up investors. Though initially of interest to professional designers — architects, landscape architects, engineers — SketchUp had a simple interface that captured “the spirit of drawing,” Schell said, making it possible for amateurs to use it. For redoing the family kitchen say, or designing a woodworking project or making a castle for history class.

By 2005, @Last had two small offices overseas and about 50 employees in a new space behind the Starbucks on Pearl.

Around that time, some @Last engineers ran into some Google engineers at a trade show. They discovered a mutual admiration and kept in touch. Wouldn’t it be cool, they all thought, if people could use SketchUp to insert 3D creations into Google Earth?

In Brief: 

1982: Brad Schell (ArchEngr) graduates from ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder.

1989: He co-founds CadZooks, a Boulder firm that makes software for 3D construction planning.

1999: Schell co-founds @Last Software. The Boulder firm produces software for “anybody who want[s] to design in 3D.”

2006: Google acquires @Last, planting a flag in Boulder.

2014: Google announces it will build a multi-building campus at 30th and Pearl Streets for up to 1,500 workers.

2017: Google moves in.

One day in 2005, Schell recalled, someone at @Last’s offices said to him, “Schell, do you know there’s a guy from Google in the conference room? You ought to go in and meet him.”

He did, and the encounter led to a subsequent tête-à-tête at Trident Booksellers and talk of a partnership.

Months later, Schell’s cell phone rang as he passed through a Boulder alleyway. It was another Google executive: “Would you entertain an acquisition?”

By early 2006, the deal was done.

Over a three-day weekend, Google remodeled @Last’s offices, installing, among other things, an eye-popping snack bar.

“All of us are fairly food-motivated,” Schell said of the former @Last crew, marveling, more than a decade later, over the “extreme makeover.”

“Somebody said to me, ‘Schell, can we eat this stuff?’”

Google continued to iterate and improve SketchUp, ultimately selling it to Trimble, a California-based producer of positioning tools, in 2012. Trimble’s SketchUp team remains in Boulder, as do many original @Last employees — some at Google, others at start-ups of their own.

“There are hundreds of absolutely fascinating, inspiring stories from this town,” Schell said.

Of @Last’s story, he’ll say this: “Let’s admit it — it is fun that we had a part in Google being here.”

Photos by Glenn Asakawa 

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Madalyn Kern (MechEngr'12; PhD'16) at the Catalyze ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Demo Day in July. Her company, ReForm, is developing a low-cost, adjustable prosthetic socket for amputees.

Photo by Logan Guerry

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Entrepreneurs are coming out of the woodwork at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder. It's no accident. 

Kimberly Drennan had two goals in late summer 2014, and neither involved starting a business.

The ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ instructor, an architect, was honing an idea for an upcoming sophomore design studio and aiming to aid America’s long-suffering honeybees.

Yet three years later she’s CEO of HiveTech Solutions, LLC, a Boulder-based start-up firm developing technology and data services for commercial beekeepers to monitor hive health remotely, enabling timely, efficient interventions.

“All of this was new to me,” Drennan said of start-up life.

At root, HiveTech is the product of an idea, an attitude and an increasingly robust ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder entrepreneurial ecosystem that encourages students, faculty and staff to see themselves as enterprise builders — and helps bring enterprises to life.

ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ hasn’t always been an easy place for would-be entrepreneurs. That began to change after local investors and business leaders convened with ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ professors and executives in 2007 to tackle two big questions: What is an entrepreneurial university, and how could ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder become one?

Kimberly Drennan, ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ instructor

Among the first initiatives to emerge from the 35-member group’s discussion was the New Venture Challenge (NVC), a nine-month, incubator-like program culminating in a spring championship with real money at stake.

In 2016 HiveTech won NVC’s grand prize, walking away with nearly $25,000 in all. The most recent top five finishers netted almost $100,000 in prizes and private investment. Greater sums will be on the line in 2017-18, NVC’s 10th anniversary.

Since NVC’s founding, ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder has vastly expanded support for entrepreneurs across campus. There’s broader access to relevant academic courses, new co-working and maker spaces, a selective business accelerator program, intensifying interaction with Boulder’s start-up community — and a growing appreciation that entrepreneurship isn’t just for MBAs and software developers.

“Now it’s really the opposite of 10 years ago,” said the law school’s Brad Bernthal, who oversaw NVC until this year and teaches a popular venture capital course. “It’s a different university.”

NVC now falls under the purview of ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s Research & Innovation Office, home of a burgeoning cross-campus innovation and entrepreneurship initiative.

Ideas to Action

Amid all this, in 2014, Kim Drennan was exploring projects for her environmental design students.

Scouting a potential site on ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s East Campus one summer day, she spied a cluster of beehives along Boulder Creek. Aware of the dramatic decline of the honeybee population in recent decades, she wondered if there might be a way to help them through architectural design. Maybe her class could dream up better hives.

Drennan tracked down the hives’ owner, a doctoral student named Chelsea Cook (PhD’16), who was studying how bees regulate hive temperature. They then met with Drennan’s faculty colleague Justin Bellucci (EnvDes’08; MCivEngr’12), an expert in sensors. “We sat down over martinis and just started talking,” Drennan said.

The idea began to evolve beyond the project her students would ultimately take on. Maybe Drennan, Cook and Bellucci could develop a sensor technology system that would generate data for commercial beekeepers — data about hive temperature and humidity, perhaps, or weight and acoustics. This would add a more scientific dimension to beekeeping, minimize reliance on time-consuming visual inspections and benefit both bees and hive operators’ bottom line.

When Drennan filed an invention disclosure with ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s tech transfer office, she learned about the NVC and dove in headfirst.

“We wanted to test if our idea could be a business,” she said. “We really didn’t know.”

NVC has deliberately minimal entry requirements. Teams need one person with a valid ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ ID — faculty, student or staff — an idea they can articulate and the chutzpah to present it to a live audience in 60 seconds at an annual fall “quick pitch night.” Last year 30 teams showed up, including NVC 9 overall winner Give & Go, which has developed an automated film-editing process for sports teams.

Give & Go ultimately walked away with $64,000 in seed money. Second place finisher ReForm, which is working on self-adjusting prosthetic limb sockets, netted $21,500.

A year earlier, Cook (now a postdoc at Arizona State University) had made HiveTech’s opening pitch, taking home the award for best idea, the first in a series of successes.

“It was a real shot of energy,” Drennan said — and yet not HiveTech’s biggest score that October night.

Sue Heilbronner, CEO of MergeLane, a firm that cultivates and invests in women-led start-ups, was among the judges. Peggy Tautz (MBA’17), then a ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ MBA student with an engineering background, was in the audience.

“Sue actually grabbed Peggy’s hand, grabbed me and said ‘Y’all need to talk,’” Drennan said.

Heilbronner went on to mentor HiveTech. Tautz helped the team explain the technical aspects of their evolving project in terms businesspeople could appreciate.

ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder's start-up infrastructure is paying off.

At a later mentor-matching event, the HiveTech founders met other local businesspeople who would help them test their ideas, asking tough questions and unearthing “all the pieces we didn’t have in place,” Drennan said.

“Every time we went to one of those events, some other little golden nugget showed up,” she said.

The HiveTech trio found a name, won midway NVC contests and gradually came to see the firm as both a technology and data services provider. The founders also polished a five-minute pitch for NVC’s championship round.

In the spring, Drennan, Cook and Bellucci delivered it jointly before a standing-room-only campus crowd.

Before the night was out, NVC 8’s four-judge panel declared HiveTech the year’s overall winner.

As a ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ doctoral student, bee expert Chelsea Cook and two ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ instructors co-founded a Boulder firm that aims to help large-scale commercial beehive operators maximize hive health and business efficency.

Acceleration 

Fresh off the NVC victory, HiveTech won a spot in another campus program for entrepreneurs, Catalyze ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ. Where NVC is a highly-inclusive shaper and filter of ideas, Catalyze ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ is a selective business accelerator that hastens the formation of actual companies.

Founded in 2014 by the College of Engineering, Catalyze ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ offers entrepreneurs of all backgrounds an intensive eight-week summer boot camp: Weekly lectures on business fundamentals plus opportunities to rub elbows with other start-up teams while refining their ideas with mentors and beginning to build businesses. Each team gets a $4,000 stipend.

Drennan learned about raising capital, business plans, budgeting and types of corporate structures. She and her co-founders labored over their technology, began talking with potential customers and expanded their idea of what the company could be. Was it just a hardware maker, or a data services and analytics firm, too?

By the end, the HiveTech team better understood their aims and potential and were convinced that an architect, a civil engineer and a biologist could also be entrepreneurs.

That’s the mentality ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ wants to foster, said Sarabeth Berk, assistant director of the innovation and entrepreneurship initiative — one that “pushes people beyond what they thought was possible for themselves.”

HiveTech is still in its early stages. The firm is perfecting its technology and fine-tuning its focus to address the needs of large-scale growing operations in particular. But there’s momentum. The company has grown to six people with diverse expertise. It’s testing its latest prototype on dozens of hives while courting customers and investors. And it’s winning notice outside Boulder: The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture recently awarded HiveTech $100,000 to forge ahead.

“The training wheels are off,” said Drennan. “We are in full-scale execution mode.”

Without NVC and Catalyze ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ, HiveTech might be a good idea, she said — but not a business. “It wouldn’t be anywhere but back in the classroom,” she said.

Photos courtesy HiveTech Solutions; © iStock/Antagain

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Will Americans eat insects? Dave Baugh and twin brother Lars are betting on it. 

Kurt Perkins rarely eats before 10 a.m. and usually not until afternoon, a practice he calls “intermittent fasting.” When the time comes, he reaches for a protein bar made of cricket.

The ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Springs chiropractor said fasting promotes health by minimizing strain on the digestive system. He likes cricket bars because of their exceptionally high protein content and keeps a supply on hand for patients, too.

“I brought ’em home to my kids — five, three and a one-year-old,” he said. “They chowed it down. It passed the kid taste-test.”

Billions eat bugs worldwide 

Perkins gets his flavored cricket bars — blueberry vanilla, banana bread and dark chocolate brownie — from Lithic Nutrition, a start-up health foods company founded by former U.S. Marine Dave Baugh (Mgmt’10) and his identical twin brother, Lars, a University of Arizona Graduate.

For all Perkins’ enthusiasm about the Baughs’ bars, he isn’t oblivious to the challenge they face in selling Americans on insects as food.

“The biggest hurdle is going to be Western culture,” he said. “The ‘ick-factor.’”

The Baughs, 28, know it, too: “There’s a huge education component to the whole thing,” said Dave, who discovered insect-eating while stationed in Asia with the Marines.

That’s why the amiable brothers, clean-cut and quick to laugh, are starting with flavored cricket bars and cricket-protein powders for mixing into smoothies and baked goods. None of their products look anything like insects or insect parts, and their packaging bears no bug imagery, though it’s clearly labeled “cricket protein.”

“This is a nice easy way to ease people into it,” said Dave, who lived in Arnett Hall at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ and played water polo. “Everybody’s used to what protein bars look like.”

Americans may find the thought of eating insects unappetizing, but elsewhere in the world bugs are a dietary staple. A 2013 United Nations report estimates that at least two billion humans eat insects, primarily in Asia and Africa, but also in Latin America. Beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps and crickets are common fare. As the Baughs and a handful of other insect protein entrepreneurs see it, bugs could, and should, have a place in the U.S. diet, too. The brothers know of a handful of domestic competitors, one of which, Utah-based Chapul, appeared in the reality TV show Shark Tank in 2014 and ultimately received an investment from Mark Cuban.

The marketplace has sent other encouraging signals.

In March the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story about insects as an emerging food fad titled “Millennial Entrepreneurs Think Americans Should Eat More Bugs.” In April the Baughs were invited to participate in Twitter’s annual “snack fair” at the firm’s San Francisco headquarters. And Amazon has agreed to add Lithic products to its inventory this summer, starting with pure cricket flour. The flavored bars, which retail for $2.99 each and typically sell in variety packs of 12, will come next, the Baughs said.

They believe one consumer category will be especially receptive: Hard-core, diet-conscious athletes — “people,” Dave said, “who might already eat things considered different for the nutritional benefits.”

Why Eat Insects? 

Advocates of insect-eating, or entomophagy, cite a few basic arguments for it, all practical: Bugs are plentiful, nutritious and generally easy to cultivate at low environmental cost.

Crickets, for example — the Baughs use a tropical species, Acheta domesticus — offer more calcium per gram than milk, more iron than spinach and more vitamin B12 than salmon, they said. Crickets are also rich in protein: Pure cricket flour is 67 percent protein by weight, they said, compared with about 35 percent for lean ground beef.

“This is a superfood,” Dave said.

The brothers cast insect protein as an alternative to better-known protein-rich food sources, such as whey and soy products. They emphasize that humans are well adapted for processing insects, having eaten them for millennia.

“We’re giving you what your body’s used to,” Lars said.

Then there’s the environmental benefit: Raising crickets is less resource intensive than farming cattle, a traditional protein source for Americans. Growing one pound of cricket protein requires less than one gallon of water, according to the UN report “Edible Insects: Future Prospects for Food and Feed Security,” which runs nearly 200 pages. For one pound of beef, it takes 2,500 gallons.

This Is the One 

Whole Crickets 

Protein-Rich
Non-GMO
All Natural
Sustainable
Soy Free
Gluten Free
Lactose Free
Paleo

Lithic Bars 

100% Pure Cricket Flour 

Dave was the first of the twins to give bugs a try. It was 2013 and he was in Asia with the Marines. During a jungle survival exercise with the Thai military, the Thais began roasting whole grasshoppers and crickets over an open fire and offered to share.

“I’m a try-everything-once kind of guy,” he said. “I said ‘absolutely!’”

Roasted and salted, he added, they tasted “kind of like a potato chip.”

When Lars, then working in corporate sales in Denver, saw a picture of Dave and his snack on Facebook, he remembered reading an article about insect protein and eventually began wondering if there might be a business in it.

The twins’ entrepreneurial bent was well established. As preteens they'd collected and resold stray hubcaps and golf balls. And while living apart for nearly a decade, they exchanged ideas for future enterprises.

“We began thinking, ‘This is the one,’” said Lars. “‘We could be on the leading edge of a food supply revolution.’”

The timing was right, too. In high school, both brothers had their sights set on ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder. But the twins agreed it was important for them to experience life separately for a while, so they flipped a coin to decide who would apply. Dave won, and they’d been apart ever since, at times separated by oceans and continents. They were ready to reunite.

In fall 2014 a business plan began taking shape. Within six months, Dave, then stationed in San Diego and surfing before work most days, told his commanding officer he planned to resign to start a bug-food business.

“‘You what?’” Dave said, recalling the commander’s reaction. “‘That sounds crazy! I don’t understand.’”

I'm a try-everything-once kind of guy."

Lars left his job, too, and in September 2015 the brothers moved in with their retired parents in Centennial, Colo., and got to work.

They applied for and received FDA and other licenses. They rented a 1,000-square-foot factory-warehouse in Aurora, east of Denver, and they began importing finely ground cricket powder from a farm in Thailand. They also hired a contract food scientist to help develop their first products, the all-natural flavored protein bars, introduced in mid-2016.

Along the way, they raised more than $12,000 through a Kickstarter campaign, won ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Denver’s business plan competition and its $9,500 prize and assembled a board of advisors that includes Justin Gold, founder of Justin’s Nut Butters, the Boulder firm acquired last year by Hormel Foods, maker of Skippy and Spam.

“If there’s a window of opportunity to go for it, it’s now,” said Dave, mindful that he and Lars are young, unencumbered bachelors.

Bug Banquet 

To be sure, Lithic is still a start-up. The brothers, who have mainly financed Lithic from savings, are still living with mom and dad and have yet to pay themselves a salary. As of May, they were personally making and packaging every one of their cricket protein bars.

But good things are happening.

By early 2017 demand had grown sufficiently to warrant plans for mass production through a third-party manufacturer. This will allow the brothers to devote more of their time to sales and marketing.

Already they’re regulars at trade shows and food fairs, and they make appearances at gyms that stock their bars. In January they participated in a “Bug Banquet” hosted by Linger, said to be Denver’s only restaurant with insects on the menu (cricket-and-cassava empanada, for instance). In April they flew to San Francisco for the Twitter event. And in May they planned to attend Los Angeles’ Annual Bug Fair for the second year running.

Amid all this, they’re filling orders for paying customers: One Tennessee family regularly orders two pounds of 100-percent pure cricket flour for blending into smoothies and pancakes.

“That’s our ultimate goal,” Dave said, “to get that normalization in the American diet.”

Hooking more Americans on insect protein will take time, and bugs may never become a staple food source. But as the Baughs' fellow industry pioneers have observed, another critter, once ignored, has managed to find a secure niche in the national cuisine.

“At the turn of the [20th] century,” Dave said, “nobody ate lobster.” 

Photos by Glenn Asakawa 

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Entrepreneurial Spirit 

You said in your annual state of the campus speech this fall that ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder is becoming known as an entrepreneurship university, where you are developing graduates with entrepreneurial and creative problem-solving mindsets. What do you mean by that?

Forbes recently ranked us No. 18 among national universities for entrepreneurship, but more important is that we are establishing an entrepreneurial culture across the entire campus, in all disciplines. That sounds good on paper, but our students, graduates and employees are continually demonstrating it.

How are they demonstrating this entrepreneurial mindset?

I’m very proud of Maithreyi Gopalakrishnan (EngrPhys, MApPhys’16) [see page 21], who founded a company to create affordable hybrid electric motors to replace purely gas-powered rickshaws in her native India, with the goal of reducing massive pollution and high-priced fuel for operators who can’t afford to educate their children. Her team includes students from other majors around campus. They are using knowledge gained at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ to change lives and transform a society.

Are there other examples?

Many, and here’s one outside the realm of business — Christine Lehnertz (EPOBio’85) [see page 15], became superintendent of Grand Canyon National Park over the summer, the park’s first female superintendent. During the 100th anniversary of the national  parks this year we’ve all read that these treasures are challenged by resources, aging infrastructure and great popularity. Christine has a track record of innovative problem solving that put her in this challenging position. Whether it’s today or 30 years ago, engineering or biology, our graduates are in a position to make a difference.

What do you attribute that success to?

Entrepreneurship and problem solving are important ways of life here. It is not just an academic discipline, but a way of thinking by students, faculty and staff in all disciplines — from the hard sciences to the arts.

You’ve been on campus for 43 years. How has the meaning of entrepreneurship changed?

The old definition of entrepreneurship was restricted to business schools, but entrepreneurship is a valuable life skill that can help students succeed in any career or endeavor. On our campus, it’s embedded in every academic course of study today. In fact, our certificate in music entrepreneurship is the first of its kind in the country. 

Illustration by Melinda Josie

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ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ in 1967

16,877

Total fall enrollment

$286

Tuition per year for ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ residents

$1,134

Tuition per year for non-residents (beginning fall 1967)

FIRST

Ralphie run through Folsom Field

$2

Cost to see student production of Oklahoma! at Macky Auditorium

4,700

Students voting in a Nov. 8 campus election: Topics included the Vietnam War and the legalization of marijuana

50

Pages in The Seer, a booklet published by ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ student government evaluating teachers and courses 

For Heartbreak, Try...Anything 

We might have more control over the pain of romantic rejection than we realize, according to new research led by ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder scientists.

In a brain-imaging study of 40 subjects recently involved in an “unwanted romantic breakup,” researchers found that administering a placebo — basically, a fake medicine — diminished both negative feelings and also activity in brain regions associated with rejection.

“Doing anything that you believe will help you feel better will probably help you feel better,” said ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ’s Leonie Koban, a postdoctoral research associate in psychology and neuroscience and the study’s lead author.

The research paper, “Frontal-brainstem pathways mediating placebo effects on social rejection,” was published in the Journal of Neuroscience.

For further details, visit . 

Heard Around Campus 

"There is probably not as much gang-joining happening in prison as we once thought." 

— ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder criminologist David Pyrooz, author of recent research that casts doubt on the common belief that prisons foster gangs. 

Venture Capital 

A sports-related film editing platform, an adjustable socket for prosthetic legs and a digital networking platform for aspiring musicians took home the top prizes at ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder’s ninth annual New Venture Challenge competition in April.

In all, entrepreneurs won nearly $100,000 in awards and investments.

Established in 2009, the challenge is a business development and mentorship program for ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ Boulder students, faculty and staff. Teams form in the fall, develop their ideas during the academic year and pitch them to a panel of judges in the spring.

The 2016-17 winners are, respectively, Give & Go (film), ReForm (prosthetic socket) and Gigsicians (musician networking).

The challenge maintains lists of winners at .

Related Articles

Sarah Kauss’ ��’w����� water bottles have style.

With about 200 billion plastic water bottles consumed and trashed in landfills worldwide each year, there’s ample opportunity — and growing competition — to provide reusable alternatives. Sarah Kauss (Acct’97) embraced the challenge and has shown that her company, , can elevate the ordinary in an appealing way.

“I’m trying to make the most fashionable water bottle,” she says.

In just five years, ��’w����� has struck gold with a sleek, chic line of more than 100 bottle designs, selling more than four million units since 2010. Last year the New York-based firm generated more than $10 million in revenues.

“Every one of our sales channels are exploding in demand,” says Kauss, 40, who attended Harvard Business School after ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ.

When she launched ��’w����� in 2010, Kauss avoided the sporty or functional looks of bottles made by other companies in favor of self-consciously stylish bottles. She started with an old-fashioned milk bottle design in Ocean Blue.

The stainless steel ��’w����� bottles are priced at $25-$45, depending on size, and consumers use them for more than water, Kauss says. Some people store wine for picnics, others use them to keep their children’s hot chocolate warm. Even the 9 ounce bottle, originally made for children, is gaining popularity because it fits inside a woman’s clutch.

“��’w����� merges style and function with environmental and social consciousness,” says Kauss. “We base our designs the same way the fashion industry works, looking at seasonal Pantones and prints and applying them to our bottles.”

The approach has struck a chord with fashionable people and retailers. ��’w����� bottles have appeared in two Guy Pearce movies and on Ellen DeGeneres’ talk show. Facebook ordered 500 bottles for employees and clients. Starbucks, Nordstrom, J. Crew, Whole Foods and Neiman Marcus all sell ��’w����� bottles.

Kauss came to entrepreneurship well prepared, with business school training and experience working with entrepreneurs as an Ernst & Young accountant in Los Angeles. A few years after business school, a job took her to New York City, where the abundant resources made starting a company seem feasible to her.

She settled on a water bottle company after attending a panel talk about the global water crisis.

“I had carried the idea for ��’w����� internally for some time,” says Kauss, whose environmentally conscious attitude dates to her ŷ���ڱ���Ƶ-Boulder days, when she usually carried a giant reusable cup or bottle around campus and into the mountains. “Once I learned of the scale of the water crisis, I was inspired to create a product that could give back to these communities around the world that did not have access to clean drinking water, while eliminating the need for plastic bottles.”

Within a year of ��’w�����’s first sale, the world — and Oprah — took notice. O, the Oprah Magazine featured ��’w����� bottles in its 2011 “O List” of summer products. Soon afterward Kauss landed her first big clients, Crate & Barrel and J. Crew. By 2012, ��’w����� had about 300 accounts, including Starbucks. Sales boomed further after Kauss appeared in a 2014 Fortune magazine article.

Today she presides over a company with more than 40 employees and ambitious plans to introduce new products and enter new markets, especially in Asia. Canada and Brazil are already hot markets.

Commercial success has allowed Kauss to expand her commitment to environmental and humanitarian causes. This year, ��’w����� donated $100,000 to UNICEF’s efforts to provide children with clean drinking water, and proceeds from some ��’w����� bottles support the planting of trees in American forests.

“I’m not a tree-hugger, but am an environmentalist,” she says. “The message for me is trying to replace plastic in an elegant way.”

Photography © Patrick James Miller via ��’w����� (Sara Kauss); Glenn Asakawa (water bottle)

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