The Big Sky Venture Capital Conference, held last Thursday and Friday at Big Sky Resort, is now in its third year, and the fact that a number of the companies that were pitching their businesses to investors were not even from the Rocky Mountain region underscores the relevance of one of the conference's main missions: to help stimulate entrepreneurial activity in the Rocky Mountain West.

While Colorado has an active high-tech and venture capital scene, and there are pockets of activity in Boise and Salt Lake City, much of the mountain West is devoid of the economic culture and business infrastructure needed for ambitious start-up businesses. If you believe - and the statistics do support it - that start-up activity is very important for creating good jobs, strong local economies and the opportunities that go along with them, that's something worth addressing.

Yet on a number of levels, the conference showed that there's progress.
For one thing, the event itself was more vibrant than last year, at least on an anecdotal level. There was good representation from the Colorado and Salt Lake venture capital communities, and the quality of the 20-odd presenting companies seemed to be higher. Montana, which has no mainstream venture capital firms and has long struggled in its efforts to mobilize state investment resources to support entrepreneurs, now has a couple of potentially important new players: the Frontier Angel Fund, organized by former Montana West Economic Development director Liz Marchi, and a local presence of the Seattle-based private equity firm Buerk Dale Victor, spearheaded by TechRanch executive director (and New West board member) John O'Donnell.

I won't try to handicap the prospects of the presenting companies, but they were an interesting mix of biotech, consumer products, and Web-based businesses.

And if it still seemed like a long way from Silicon Valley, well, that's true of most places, and entrepreneurial economies don't develop overnight. Indeed, that was a key theme of the closing remaks from Brad Feld, the Boulder-based VC (and New West investor).

He pointed out that a similar conferance in Colorado was now in its 26th year, and that the start-up ecosystem of talent, money, and professional services infrastructure can only develop slowly, often driven by one successful company that spawns related businesses. How to speed that process? Two things, says Brad: set aside a small pool of state investment resources for VC-type deals aimed at econmomic development rather than maximum return, and invest in eduation. Amen to that.