• Photos: Daria Bishop, Jeb Wallace-brodeur, James Buck And Kevin Mccallum

Fifteen years ago, shortly after the launch of the iPhone, Seven Days helped plan the first Vermont Tech Jam. It was a response and solution to the state's "brain drain" — the widely held concern that young people were leaving for better jobs. Then-governor Jim Douglas had convened a commission to address the problem. One of its initiatives was to host parties in Boston that would lure Vermonters back.

At the same time, lots of local companies were advertising good-paying jobs and having trouble hiring. Sound familiar? Dealer.com had just moved into a newly renovated factory on Burlington's Pine Street. It offered Silicon Valley-style amenities and was aggressively staffing up, with state-subsidized help from retraining org Vermont HITEC. Companies such as Physician's Computer Company, BioTek Instruments, MicroStrain and Vermont Information Processing were all growing, too. The Vermont Software Developers Alliance, now the Vermont Technology Alliance, had formed in 2004 to assist them.

We thought it was the right time for a really big job fair that would bring Vermont's tech sector into the light — a physical event that would encourage people to make connections: between colleges and career changers, students and employers, funders and entrepreneurs. We convinced 50-plus companies to show up and exhibit, many of which Vermonters had never heard of. I remember recruiting a Colchester company called Polhemus, which had won an Academy Award for its motion-capture technology on the movie True Lies. A couple of years later, we discovered a company in Stockbridge called Advanced Animations that makes life-size moving "characters" for theme parks.

Both companies still appear to be around, but some bigger ones aren't. MyWebGrocer, which renovated Winooski's Champlain Mill, presented and hosted the Tech Jam in 2012. Six years later, MyWeb was acquired by Miami-based Mi9 Retail and eventually disappeared. Another Tech Jam presenting sponsor — Vermont Works — vanished with no forwarding address.

About 90 percent of startups fail, according to Forbes. But over the years, Vermont has done more to help tech entrepreneurs looking for funding, space, advice and a long, quiet runway to launch their products. That's in part due to 20 years of hard work by the Vermont Center for Emerging Technologies, which connects entrepreneurs with advisers and up to $6 million in seed capital. For decades, Shelburne-based FreshTracks Capital, which predates VCET by three years, was the sole venture capital firm in the state. Its annual Peak Pitch event at Sugarbush started a couple of years before the Tech Jam. The Lake Champlain Chamber's business accelerator, LaunchVT, has been around for a decade.

In 2017, some key pieces started to come together. Vermont-based companies such as IDX Systems, Dealer.com, MicroStrain and Ascension Technology had sold for huge sums and made a number of local people rich enough to be able to help others. They invested in the next generation of startups, including Beta Technologies. Also in 2017, Russ Scully bought the waterfront property formerly owned by Blodgett Oven in Burlington's Lakeside neighborhood and began to transform it into a state-of-the-art coworking space. It took longer to build than planned because of the pandemic, but the resulting campus, called Hula, is a tech- and rec-friendly community of entrepreneurs, small businesses and remote workers.

Former television weatherman Tom Messner is one of them. He gave up his weather gig in 2021 to spend more time with his hobby: early-stage investing. Now he works from an "air desk" at Hula and last year started a biweekly video series called "Vermont Startup News." "The vibe in that place is just unbelievable," he said of Hula, which has sponsored and hosted the Tech Jam since 2021. "If you have questions, if you need some help, it's all there — or can be found through there."

Hula has a venture capital firm, too, that invests in startups. In 2022, the Dudley Fund opened an office there. With FreshTracks, that adds up to more sources of capital for new Vermont-based enterprises. And they're working collaboratively, not competitively, according to Messner.

"Having more money so you can do some follow-on investment and keep people in town and keep things rolling in Vermont has, in my opinion, made just a huge difference," Messner said. "We certainly are able as a group to support these companies for a much longer time than had been the case in the past."

Another important development: Local leaders in the startup sector — FreshTracks' Cairn Cross, Hula's Rob Lair, longtime VCET president David Bradbury and VP Sam Roach-Gerber — are teaching at the University of Vermont, Champlain College and Middlebury College.

It might be premature to proclaim that Vermont has built the tech ecosystem it envisioned back in 2008. But there are certainly more "tentacles," as Messner calls them, than before. In our annual Tech Issue, Seven Days staffers profile seven startups in a roundup story called "What's Next?" It's noteworthy that many of the featured entrepreneurs either previously worked at another tech company in Vermont or went to school here.

The lead story, by food assignment editor Melissa Pasanen, revolves around Burlington Bio, a new company that grew out of research in professor Rachael Floreani's biomaterials engineering lab at the University of Vermont. Floreani and her funders aim to capitalize on her research team's innovation, a structural component of cell-cultivated meat. The company, which just opened an office at Hula, is the first in Vermont to embrace the rapidly evolving field of cellular agriculture.

Also in this issue: Anne Wallace Allen found a Vermont newsroom employing artificial intelligence, and it's not where you'd think! UVM professor Randall Harp waxed philosophical about AI in a conversation with Chelsea Edgar. Hannah Feuer tracked down the flight patterns of the Burlington area's Bird bikes.

There are two stories on tech training programs. Allen visited the new Advanced Manufacturing Center at Vermont State University's Randolph campus, which provides rapid prototyping services to local companies; at Champlain College, three students who are designing light shows for the Vermont Symphony Orchestra gave music editor Chris Farnsworth a sneak peek of their work.

On an even lighter note, Emily Hamilton reviewed a romance novel about a web developer who gets into paid sexting.

There's no putting the iPhone back in the box; tech is here to stay. It's not a solution but a tool that can be used for good or ill — a moral test of the humans who use it. Hopefully that's a case for responsible investing, journalistic inquiry and education: The more we know about the inventions that increasingly rule our lives, the more prepared we'll be to manipulate and manage them.