Nearly 20 years before Phil Weiser first burst onto the political scene in Colorado, he was a fresh hire at the University of Colorado Law School. And the young professor was already armed with a big question.
Why wasn’t the Centennial State’s flagship university doing more to support entrepreneurship?
He answered with , an interdisciplinary research center and technology hub. The barrier-breaking enterprise’s founding, evolution and legacy show the thinking that has carried Weiser to the Democratic nomination for governor. It also gives some insight into how — if he’s elected — he may approach some of the biggest issues facing Colorado.
In 1999, Weiser was new on the Boulder campus, and the first tech bubble had not yet burst. The startup spirit was thriving around the city, recalled , a venture capitalist and entrepreneur, in a recent interview. But the university itself wasn’t playing much of a role, or at least it wasn’t capitalizing on the environment.
Enter Weiser, just five years removed from graduating from law school himself — and a long way from becoming the state’s two-term attorney general. He’d just finished a stint with the Clinton administration’s Justice Department, where he focused on telecommunications matters, and was trying to use his time in academia to make an impact on the wider world, Weiser recalled in an interview.
That chance arose only a few months into his time at CU Boulder, with a telecommunications conference. That one event started as a chance for Weiser to host an interesting conversation, with “intellectual honesty and intellectual rigor,” he said.
The program turned into a hit before it even began, Weiser said. He raised enough sponsorship money to schedule a second event. The conferences ended up as precursors to , a place that now supports interdisciplinary events and programs year-round to help steer technology policy and connect law students, researchers, entrepreneurs and others working in the field.
Feld, who moved to Boulder in the mid-1990s, recalled being impressed by Weiser’s ideas and openness. What’s more, this was a law school professor, out of all of the university’s wide-ranging faculty — which included those in more obvious pro-entrepreneurship departments like business and engineering — convening people from different interests and backgrounds.
But CU could also do more, he thought.
“When I showed up, I said: ‘This is super-awesome, but the rest of CU is kind of sucking around entrepreneurship — and I’d really like to do more about entrepreneurship,’ ” Feld said, now acknowledging that “sucking” was a bit of frustrated hyperbole at the time. “(Weiser) didn’t say, ‘Not my area.’ He didn’t say, ‘Go talk to the business school.’ His first question was, ‘Why does CU suck around entrepreneurship?’ ”
Weiser said he recognized even then that there was “a vacuum and an opportunity” for CU Boulder to serve as a hub for policymakers, business leaders, researchers and others involved in the burgeoning tech field. He recalled telling Feld and others that he didn’t know why CU Boulder was so hard to work with. His answer was to suggest they try to do things together — and see what they could build.
“It was important to me to not be someone who disappeared into the ivory tower,” Weiser said of starting Silicon Flatirons. “I wanted to remain engaged in the real world.”
From professor to politician
The question — and the result — provides a peek into Weiser’s thought process, leadership approach and willingness to take initiative, from a time long before he was the frontrunner to become Colorado’s next governor. He would spend 15 years at the University of Colorado — before and after another Justice Department stint — as a professor, as the founder and executive director of Silicon Flatirons, then eventually as dean of the law school.
People who worked with Weiser then describe him as a man who never confined himself to one academic arena, as a person who was more focused on today and tomorrow than yesterday, and on where he could best put his energies to use. He also didn’t wear his political aspirations on his sleeve, assuming he even had them 25 years ago.
Weiser didn’t have any apparent scandals during his time at CU and turned down a reappointment as dean of the law school only when his political goals did start to emerge in 2016, ahead of his run for Colorado attorney general in the 2018 election.
“The nice thing as dean is, I didn’t have to be cleaning up messes,” former CU Law School Dean Hal Bruff, who first hired Weiser there, joked before offering superlatives about Weiser. “That wasn’t true of every faculty member I knew. He’d report in, and I’d just say, ‘You go boy.’ ”
Weiser’s past at CU didn’t figure heavily in this year’s Democratic primary, which resulted in him defeating U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. It hasn’t been a big factor so far in the general election race against Republican Victor Marx, the founder of a nonprofit ministry whose unusual backstory has faced significant scrutiny.
But some of the traits people saw in Weiser back in his CU days — a willingness to bring together competing interests, to put egos aside, to collaborate and experiment in the interest of a common aim — are visible in his recent accomplishments as attorney general. They also point to how Weiser may govern Colorado: not with flash or bravado, but as a “bureaucratic entrepreneur,” as one associate put it, with the ability to rework (or sidestep) the confines of government to build new institutions and achieve aims bigger than himself.
They also give a sense of how Weiser, if elected, might navigate the travails awaiting the next governor. Those are likely to include ongoing budget cuts and working with Democratic legislative majorities that are poised to wrestle with challenges like business and tech regulation, affordability, water, education, childcare and more.
In the past month, Weiser was credited with helping negotiate a political peace agreement on the state’s road funding, averting a potentially bruising election fight this fall that would have pitted lawmakers against the construction industry.
The industry had proposed a constitutional amendment requiring the state to use vehicle-related taxes and fees to pay for road construction and safety; Democratic legislators, fearing it would handcuff their ability to pay for other state needs, passed a law attempting to neuter the amendment before it could take effect. Weiser’s deal promised even more money for road construction while stopping the proposed constitutional requirement.
He for a recent settlement deal with Meta, Facebook and Instagram’s parent company, over a multistate lawsuit alleging the company intentionally sought to addict young users to its platforms, and then lied to the public about it. The settlement, worth up to nearly $18 billion, was about more than just financial punishment.
To end the lawsuit, Meta agreed to a number of policy concessions that were lauded by public health experts, such as stronger age-verification policies, time-of-use restrictions for young users, and automatic blocking of content about eating disorders and self-harm.
Weiser said that last point also served to underscore how he’d evolved since the early days at CU.
Back then, a lot of the conferences focused on the upside of the internet and the optimism ushered in by the new age. Now, Weiser said, he’s more aware of “a dark side” to the technology — and despite his closeness to some of tech’s most influential people, he’s still willing to “always search for the truth and take it wear it leads.”
‘Persistence in innovative ideas’
During the hiring process back in 1999, Bruff said two aspects of Weiser stood out: Weiser’s “rather astonishing” energy, and his expertise in telecommunications law. In December 1998, only about a quarter of U.S. households — 26.2% — , demonstrating a prescience about the importance of the looming technology.
He characterized Weiser’s stewardship of the Silicon Flatirons program as having a “persistence in innovative ideas.”
“He was willing to persist in the strategies that he thought would work,” Bruff said.
The program’s alumni have gone on to serve on boards of venture capital firms and as experts on emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence. It has served as a crucial link between the university and the wider startup world, opening doors to expertise, partnerships and discourse as well as to students trying to find their footing.
Over the past 25 years, the program has served as a jumping-off point not just for technology policy and firms, but for the very foundations of the modern internet, such as the principle of . The principle dictates a nondiscrimination standard for internet traffic, meaning providers and regulators can’t steer where users go or throttle traffic for certain ideas.
Professor Tim Wu, then of the University of Virginia, introduced the idea at a 2003 Silicon Flatirons conference. It has since been within telecommunications law.
, a retired law school professor and former executive director of Silicon Flatirons, said the underlying philosophy of the center ties back to foundations laid by Weiser.
“From the origin, (Silicon Flatirons) was never just about law and legal policy matters,” he said. “Phil had, and continues to have, a real interest in the economic perspectives, the business perspectives, the underlying technology and engineering perspectives. That caught my attention because he was, from the start, the most multidisciplinary professor I met.”
Silicon Flatirons itself fell outside the typical incentive structure for a new university professor, Bernthal said. Most new hires, who don’t have tenure yet, are told to publish research as much and as fast as they can.
Weiser didn’t neglect that part of the job, but in Silicon Flatirons, Bernthal said, he built something bigger than another tenured professor.
Bernthal described working “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Weiser at Silicon Flatirons as a fellow there before succeeding Weiser as its leader. He was impressed by Weiser’s ability to multitask while serving as a panel moderator — and then to proceed to ask insightful, thoughtful questions of the experts without missing a beat.
But perhaps more important, Bernthal recalled observing a person who cared more about building up the institutions he worked within than about building himself up. He called Weiser a “bureaucratic entrepreneur,” in the sense that Weiser never got trapped by the machine of the system, and constantly shifted it toward those end goals.
“He is someone who is in these projects for the right reasons,” Bernthal said. “And those reasons are not for the glorification of Phil. They’re because he believes in the work that those institutions do. He believed in Silicon Flatirons, and now he believes in the attorney general’s office. … I think if he’s in (the governor’s office), he’ll make it not just better while he’s there, he’ll make the state government better even after he’s gone.”
Connecting CU to entrepreneurs
Feld, for his part, called Weiser “the canonical example” of how a university should interact with the entrepreneurial world.
The university world, historically and generally, viewed itself as the center of its solar system. Its faculty would spin off research that companies could harness, creating an orbit effect like planets around a sun. Weiser and others behind the initiative turned that concept on its side, saying the university should instead be a convening force — so that startups could feed off of each other and harness the expertise and viewpoints of others.
That willingness to pivot a quarter-century ago demonstrates qualities that Feld thinks would translate well to the governorship. (Feld was an early endorser of Weiser in the primary. He also backed his attorney general run in 2018.)
“He is not a siloed leader,” Feld said. “He is not afraid, as a leader, to work across boundaries. He’s very, very comfortable exploring and engaging with things where he is not the primary power player, or he is not the top-down leader.”
Weiser, reflecting on the center, said it taught him a number of key lessons that he’s carried with him — among them, to experiment, to never lose focus on intellectual honesty and wide perspectives, not to limit himself or his team to one discipline, and the importance of “a low-ego, high let’s-get-stuff-done mindset.”
Russ Moore, the former provost of CU, hired Weiser in 2011 to lead the law school. He beat out several “crackerjack” applicants, despite prior experience on campus — something that can often be seen as a knock as leaders seek outsiders offering fresh perspectives, Moore said.
Five years later, Moore was ready to offer Weiser an extension when he found out the dean had his eyes on the attorney general’s office. As a consolation, he said, Weiser did pick up the brewery tab.
Fundraising and fighting to keep the growth of CU’s law school tuition — already high among peer institutions — in check were among the feathers in his cap. He also spearheaded a tuition forgiveness program for law school graduates who practiced in underserved areas.
While Silicon Flatirons preceded Weiser’s time as dean, Moore said it showcased the thinking that he carried into the job. Traditionally, law schools act like “castles on the hill,” separate from the rest of campus.
Weiser broke down some of that barrier, in his view.
“He was good at convincing not only his faculty, but other faculties, that for a faculty member to be successful, they don’t necessarily have to be the prototypical law professor. They can have different qualities,” Moore said, citing Silicon Flatirons as an example. “He wasn’t afraid to value people who brought nontraditional approaches to the activities that went on in the law school, and I think the law school benefited from that.”
