A word with Idaho entrepreneur Dan Berger

According to a number of nationwide publications, Idaho, and Boise in particular, is attracting tech people from all over the U.S. But few have made as big a splash as Dan Berger, who moved to Idaho last year after picking it from the 20 cities he’d visited on a 15,000-mile road trip.

Berger jumped in with both feet, meeting with people in the business community, deciding to invest in two Idaho companies and volunteering for Boise Startup Week. He’s also created a crowdsourced resource guide for Idaho’s technology community and written a guide for how a tech person can get established in a new city.

We visited with Dan to find out how he came to be in Idaho and what he’s doing here.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

What brought you to Idaho?

I thought I had it figured out: I was planning to return to New York City, where I’m from, in early 2020 but then the pandemic hit. To quickly pass quarantine, I decided to do a road trip which, by the fourth month, snaked its way through Idaho. I had never been before but fell in love as soon as I got to Boise. A week later, as I was driving on what seemed to be an endless straight line somewhere between Santa Fe and Austin, I challenged myself to disrupt my plans and consider moving somewhere unconventional (to me). It was, after all, the first time in my life where I had nothing / no one depending on me. In other words, I had the freedom to make a big change. I came back to Boise in early July as an experiment and haven’t left since.

Tell us about your background before coming to Idaho.

After graduating from Hunter College in New York City, I worked for a Member of Congress for four years. That’s where I saw the power of community organizing and bringing people together. I then went to grad school in Washington, D.C. and soon thereafter started a hospitality and events Software as a Service company, Social Tables, in 2011. We raised multiple VC rounds — $26 million in all — and sold in Q4 2018 to PE-backed Cvent, an event tech company. We had 120 employees, $20 million in bookings, and 6,000 customers, including several (like the Boise Centre and BYU Idaho) in Boise. I stuck around for a year to integrate my company into the acquirer and left in December of 2019.

I now have a portfolio of direct investments in the hospitality industry including a restaurant group, a music festival, a couple of hotels and a Boise-based coffee company, Iron Mule. In summary, my background is tech, events and hospitality.

How have you been spending your professional time since you got here?

I jumped head-first into meeting as many people as I could and offering my help as a founder to other entrepreneurs. I guess you can say I treated it like a startup because of how focused I was on integrating into the community when I first got here. I got involved with Boise Startup Week, joined the Boise Metro Chamber, transferred my YPO membership from Washington, D.C. to Idaho, and, thinking I have nothing to lose, put myself out there.

Based on your experience elsewhere, what does Idaho’s entrepreneurial community need and how should it get it? 

Based on my observations many people try to bring things to Idaho that they think it’s missing — like capital, for example, when instead they should think about how Idaho can own these “gaps” to our advantage and be authentically Idaho when defining our community. I have observed that folks don’t like to be told what to do here — they want to figure things out on their own. Therefore, raising money from a traditional fund may not necessarily be the way to build a business here and bootstrapping is more the vibe, given the pioneering spirit of the state. In summary, instead of comparing us to other markets, I think it’s better to carve out our own niche in the entrepreneurial universe.

How did the Startup Community Resource Guide come about and what will it do?

Blake Hansen and Jeff Blickman came up with the idea. They saw what Salt Lake Citu did in terms of providing a resource guide for entrepreneurs, so we brainstormed and put the guide together. The goal is to help entrepreneurs — new and established — get their footing quickly so they spend more time meeting/doing than researching/sourcing. With it being a community initiative, anyone can jump in, make edits and help improve it.

What do you plan to do in 2021?

Currently, I’m focused on two main areas. First, I am building a commercial cleaning business alongside a wonderful and hungry operator named Nikola. I wanted to try my hand in a retail business after doing software for the past decade and I want to employ hardworking Idahoans with a living wage.

Second, I’m getting even more involved in the community through organizing, investing and mentoring. I was asked to co-chair Boise Startup Week (whose name we are reconsidering) so I’m looking forward to making 2021 the conference’s best year yet.

What surprised you most about Idaho, now that you’ve been here a while?

That it exists! Just kidding. It’s hard to say because I had zero premonitions about the place given the fact I essentially crash-landed here… but now that I’m here, I feel a real sense of belonging and am the most content I’ve ever been.