Toby Krout wants to know who buys the idea

In 2015, Toby Krout was explaining whom an accelerator ought to serve when his co-founder finished the thought for him. Krout had put the entrepreneur ahead of the investor. Jose Vieitez supplied the diplomatic ending: investors benefited when founders were served well. Between them, they had identified a surprisingly awkward question for a business that takes equity in other businesses. Who, exactly, is the customer?

It is a useful place to begin with Krout, now chief executive and co-founder of Boomtown Innovation. His career has moved through software companies, a creative agency, a state branding project and startup programs. The common problem is practical: getting people with different interests to make something work together. An introduction is pleasant. Agreement about what happens next is considerably harder.

“The entrepreneur is the most important thing to us, not the investor.”

Toby Krout, 2015

A founder’s education, before founder school

Krout’s early experience included work at TriZetto, Mariner Systems and Clear Technologies. He later co-founded and ran Atomic20, a Boulder creative agency whose clients included Crocs, Whitewave, Zayo and Gaiam. Those are different working worlds. Software must function; advertising must make someone care. A young company usually needs to accomplish both before its bank balance becomes a matter of literary suspense.

At Atomic20, he also led a team on Colorado’s multiyear rebranding effort. A state is an interesting client for anyone accustomed to startups: its audience cannot be narrowed to a tidy customer segment, and its identity belongs to rather more people than the ones in the meeting. The work put him among designers, writers, brand specialists and public leadership, coordinating a creative undertaking with many constituencies.

There was a business-school connection behind the agency, too. Krout earned his MBA at the University of Denver’s Daniels College of Business. Fellow Daniels alumnus Jeff Donaldson co-founded Atomic20 with him and later became a Boomtown mentor. The relationship is a small example of how these careers accumulate: a classmate becomes a business partner, then someone who helps the next group get started. Education keeps turning up after graduation.

Boulder had startups. He saw room for another school.

Boomtown took shape in 2013 and launched its accelerator in 2014. The original founding group brought together Krout, advertising veteran Alex Bogusky, former Google designer Vieitez and media entrepreneur Stephen Groth. Its opening emphasis included advertising technology, media and design. The combination made sense for a place trying to connect the creative business with the startup business, two communities with plenty to discuss and different ways of discussing it.

Krout admired the work already happening around Techstars and Foundry Group. He also saw unmet demand. The early Boomtown format offered a dozen weeks of instruction, mentors and shared workspace, with $20,000 in funding in exchange for a 6 percent stake. Founders eventually presented at the Boulder Theater. Those were the terms of that early program; the work would later take other forms.

The theater made for a visible finish. The curriculum dealt with less photogenic necessities: identifying an audience, designing a business and learning how to finance it. The distinction matters to Krout’s story. He was building an organization around the development of entrepreneurs, which requires more patience than polishing a presentation. A founder has to keep making decisions long after the microphone has been switched off.

There was a personal motive behind the undertaking. Krout wanted his children to see the lessons involved in taking a risk. Leaving an example mattered alongside leaving resources. That makes the accelerator an unusually public way of working through a private question: what should children learn from the way a parent spends a working life?

Atlanta gets its own name

In March 2017, Krout stood before more than 1,000 people at the Georgia Technology Summit and announced The Farm, an accelerator with Comcast NBCUniversal. It would operate at The Battery, the development associated with the Atlanta Braves. He emphasized the entrepreneurial community already there. The intention was to add to an existing ecosystem, an acknowledgment that arriving with a program does not make a city a blank page.

The Farm had a name of its own, drawing on baseball’s farm-system language, and programming intended for Atlanta. Boomtown would run it, but the local setting would shape it. This was a consequential choice for an organization expanding beyond home territory. Repeating a logo is easy. Learning why a particular group of founders needs a particular kind of help takes work.

For Krout, the move also extended the business relationship at the center of his later career: entrepreneurs working alongside an established corporation. Each side could bring something the other needed. Making that exchange useful required more than putting executives and founders in adjacent chairs. Someone had to organize the work between the introduction and the result.

The check can become a distraction

By 2018, Krout was publicly challenging the prominence of fundraising in startup culture. His argument was that venture capital’s influence could persuade entrepreneurs to treat securing an investment as their central objective. He wanted attention returned to the customer and the problem. It is an awkward argument for an investor to make, which is part of what gives it weight.

Money buys time, people and equipment. It also produces an announcement with a number in it, which is convenient for everyone writing announcements. A customer’s changing requirements are less obliging. Krout’s position puts the slower, less ceremonial activity at the center of the company. The test becomes whether somebody has a reason to use what the founder is making.

That same year, Boomtown’s fall program described an approach built around individual attention, revenue and a willingness to change direction. Its 11-company cohort included ventures working on food systems and business operations. The variety helps explain why a standardized set of answers would have limited value. The useful habit was learning enough about each problem to ask a better question.

What happens when the customer is already in the room?

Comcast NBCUniversal SportsTech made the customer question more tangible. Its first class arrived in 2021, with Krout and Comcast’s Jenna Kurath identified as leaders of the venture. Boomtown brought its program experience into a network of sports and media organizations. A founder could work with people who understood the business in which a product would have to survive.

By 2024, the program ran for six months and selected ten companies from more than 1,500 applicants across 52 countries. Its itinerary included experiences at Universal Studios Florida, Daytona International Speedway and professional golf events. Those settings offered something a classroom could not reproduce: a look at the operating conditions behind the spectacle. Television makes a sporting event look effortless. Somebody has to manage everything outside the frame.

The fifth class, chosen in 2025 from more than 1,600 applicants, included Dubai-based translation company Camb.ai, Iceland’s OZ Sports and US companies working on commerce, audience engagement and venue navigation. The international mix made the opportunity clear. A solution could originate far from the broadcaster, stadium or league that might use it. Finding the match was only the beginning of the job.

A scoreboard beyond the stage

When the 2025 class finished, the program counted 14 proofs of concept, 13 pilots and 20 commercial deals. Eight of its ten companies were working within Comcast business units. These are collective program outcomes, shared across founders, corporate teams, advisors and operators. They make a more useful endpoint for this part of Krout’s career than another photograph of a successful Demo Day.

The individual examples bring those numbers down to earth. Camb.ai supplied Spanish-language broadcasting for NASCAR’s Motor Racing Network at the Mexico City Street Race. Diddo enabled shopping moments during NBA broadcasts. PAM worked on navigation with the PGA TOUR. Each asks a specific operational question: how do people hear an event, buy something while watching, or find their way around the place?

Krout’s current leadership group includes co-founder and operations chief Erin Stadler, finance and investment leader Jason Searfoss, general counsel Jack Donenfeld and portfolio director Vieitez. The range of responsibilities is revealing. Working with founders inside established organizations involves contracts, money, schedules and product decisions, alongside the original enthusiasm. Even an exciting idea needs somebody to read the paperwork.

Back in Boulder, Krout has also served on University of Colorado entrepreneurship and environmental advisory boards. His undergraduate studies were in environmental science and geography. In the university’s 2025 graduate-program work, he and Boomtown research head Tripp Baltz were capstone partners on a project examining obstacles facing urban sustainability ventures. Buildings, energy, mobility and water brought the inquiry into another set of real-world systems.

That returns the story to the question shared across his work. A creative agency needs an audience; a founder needs customers; a corporation needs a workable reason to adopt something unfamiliar. Krout’s career keeps placing him among people trying to resolve those needs together. The pitch earns a hearing. The interesting part is what everyone agrees to do on Monday.