By Margaret Hedderman, Mark Madic, & Brook Sutton
The center of Fremont County sits about 45 miles southwest of Colorado Springs. It’s a stunningly beautiful area, with red rock cliffs, the towering Royal Gorge, and wide open views of the Sangre de Cristo mountains to the west.
The two biggest cities–Cañon City and Florence–boast beautiful downtown districts, phenomenal access to hiking and mountain biking trails, and quiet neighborhoods. It’s the kind of place where you fall asleep to the music of owls and coyotes.
Despite the beauty and mild climate (for Colorado, at least), years of stagnant or negative economic growth led to the familiar “rural brain drain” narrative.
The industries that fueled the area are classic Colorado: mining, agriculture, ranching, and recreation. These are capital intensive and hard-to-scale industries. Because of this, Fremont County was long overlooked as a viable place to start new business.
However, about a decade ago, a shift began to take root. The area began to transform into an emerging technology hub, not by chance, but through the deliberate efforts and investments of visionary leaders who posed the question, “Why not here?”
Their early efforts to assess the region’s viability as a tech hub unearthed an “underground” network of tech and business professionals already living in the county. You might say they were hiding in plain sight. At the time, the relatively unknown towns of Fremont County didn’t add much gravitas to a C.V., so people often listed “Colorado Springs” on their LinkedIn profile to benefit from its urban prestige.
Fast forward to 2025 and many of those same professionals are proudly listing their location in Fremont County, an area that now supports a growing tech scene, numerous startups, and overall growth. What changed?
In short: a lot. That’s what we’ll explore in our first case study of 2025.
The revolution did not happen overnight. It’s the result of a cooperative ecosystem of development efforts, led by a diverse group of entrepreneurs and business support agents.
A Brief Economic History of Fremont County
Some consider Fremont County to be the “climate capital of Colorado” and others dub it the “prison capital.” These unconnected nicknames shed some light on the complex cultural and economic influences that have shaped the area.
It was originally home to the Ute Indians before American settlers began arriving in the mid- to late-1800s. Drawn by the Pike’s Peak Gold Rush of 1858, an influx of miners established the extractive industry as an economic center, and pushed the Utes largely out. Cañon City became home to a number of metal ore smelters. Even oil was discovered in 1862.
Simultaneously, the region’s fertile soil and mild climate boosted a rich agricultural scene. By the late 1800s, agricultural production had expanded to cover more than 45,000 acres of land, especially suited to apples, cherries, apricots, and peaches. It remains an agricultural center in Colorado.
A third economic driver emerged in 1861, and is today a leading source of employment in the area: the Colorado Department of Corrections. Fremont County is home to 15 different correctional facilities, including the nation’s only Supermax jail. At one point, more than half the county’s jobs were generated, in one form or another, by the corrections industry.
Planting the seeds for an emergent tech scene
Rob Brown grew up in Cañon City. Like many rural kids, he skipped town immediately after high school. Post college, he built his career in tech, working with multiple Denver startups and indulging his own entrepreneurial spirit across several businesses. As workplaces slowly became more flexible in the early 2000s, Brown decided to relocate his business and return to his hometown.
He was shocked.
“I saw the economic situation of the town that I grew up in had not kept up with the times. It wasn’t growing and flourishing, like it was in the Front Range cities,” he said.
To help turn things around, Brown took a part-time consulting position with the Fremont County Economic Development Corporation (FEDC).
Today, he is the executive director. Brown’s superpower is connecting the people and pieces necessary to create the culture and infrastructures that power economic development.
“At first, [the FEDC wasn’t] able to gain any momentum. In 2013, which was also the FEDC’s 30th anniversary year, we invited 150 local business leaders and government leaders together to glean what they thought the FEDC should be doing.”
The community was clear it wanted the FEDC to make connections between business startup support and community-based initiatives, like education, and job creation and retention.
At that meeting, Brown suggested breaking the room into economic clusters—or micro-startup ecosystems—divided by industry. This decision proved pivotal for tech to take hold in Fremont County, and for other avenues toward economic resiliency (like agriculture, arts, trade, and STEM education) to follow suit.
Brad Rowland was at the 2013 meeting. He was a remote tech worker and serial entrepreneur who had moved to the area around that time. As he began connecting with other attendees, he was surprised at the number of fellow tech professionals in the room. Most of them thought they were the only ones in the area.
They gathered around a table and sensed potential. Together, they formed what would eventually become FEDC’s TechSTART program, an initiative to develop and foster the local tech scene.
Launching TechSTART in Fremont County
TechSTART officially kicke