Wyoming has an enviable success rate of up to 77% for startup businesses that are still active after one year, state statistics show. But there is a significant donut hole hidden in that number.
High-impact, growth-oriented companies have a success rate that’s much lower than the overall statistic might suggest.
Figuring out why that is, and what to do about it, is key to driving the state’s economic diversity forward, particularly as Wyoming’s overall GDP has been in decline since 2008, according to the Wyoming Business Council.
That’s the mission of a new program, Startup Wyoming, headed by Blossom Ko Lumley.
Lumley told Cowboy State Daily her project is the result of a collaboration between the council and the successful nonprofit Silicon Couloir, which has been supporting entrepreneurs in the Teton region since 2012.
Her work won’t be a replica of that program. She is keeping it tailored to what people across all 23 of Wyoming’s counties have said they want, which includes attention to preserving the character of Wyoming as a state.
To develop a better game plan for new businesses in Wyoming, Lumley has talked to hundreds of startup founders and investors, as well as support organizations.
She’s also put together larger focus groups to ensure she’s pulling from the smallest rural communities on up to the largest metro areas.
Lumley didn’t stop at the Wyoming border in her quest to pinpoint everything missing from Wyoming’s startup ecosystem.
She’s also looked at what’s happening with incubators in neighboring states like Montana and North Dakota, and she’s tapped into communities across the nation that have demonstrated success in cultivating high-growth startups.
Old Problems Continue To Haunt Wyoming
Many of the pain points for high-growth startups are already known problems, Lumley said.
Affordable workforce housing is a longstanding problem in communities across the Cowboy State.
“Our startups are leaving at a certain inflection point because they just can’t find workforce,” Lumley recently told a group of business leaders at Central Wyoming College.
Workforce, meanwhile, is leaving in some cases because people can’t find housing they can afford.
Another limiting factor is youth “brain drain,” which has long been siphoning off high school and college graduates to other states, according to Wyoming Business Council Chief Strategy Officer Sarah Fitzgerald.
“We have the highest youth outmigration rate in the country,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “And that’s because we in Wyoming are ambitious people. We want to achieve those ambitions.”
It doesn’t take long into a job search for ambitious Wyoming graduates to realize that there just aren’t as many opportunities for knowledge-based sector work here, Fitzgerald said. Also, the opportunities they do see often lack sideways movement in case a particular job doesn’t work out.
“So, we see this sort of a vicious cycle where our youth leave because most of them are seeking those human potential sectors, and we just don’t have the infrastructure or the population to support that,” she said. “So that’s really a problem that we’re trying to solve.”
Transportation, health care and child care were also highlighted as longstanding problems in Lumley’s finished report, released last week.
Starting A Company Is Lonely
In her work, Lumley also found a surprising disconnect. Despite all the many resources, time and effort devoted to cultivating startups in Wyoming, founders feel incredibly isolated, Lumley said.
“They know that there are a lot of things out there that exist, a lot of resources throughout the state, but they have a hard time finding them, accessing them and knowing whether the information that’s online is up to date,” she said. “So, trying to figure out how to connect people with all these different resources that exist is like the first thing we’re trying to do.”
Lumley wants to see a startup roadmap that can help founders drive their companies along in Wyoming. It would walk founders through all the resources available at different stages of a company’s life, from idea generation to successful business on a growth track.
“People have also said they want to feel a greater sense of community across the state,” Lumley said.
For that, she envisions both in-person and virtual networking opportunities, connecting startup founders with each other, as well as those who can provide resources they might need. Rural communities, in particular, express a need for those kinds of opportunities.
A third key need are chances to celebrate progress and success, Lumley said.
“So, we’re looking at different types of events, including a summit, a capital connection and mentorship summit in 2026,” she said. “To kind of highlight success stories of startups and shine a bright spotlight on their work.”
Building A Foundation
Lumley is an interesting choice to lead Startup Wyoming because a startup is why she landed in the Cowboy State in the first place.
She came to Wyoming to co-found Airloom Energy with her family. She remembers how lonely it was.
“We were part of the WTBC (Wyoming Technology Business Center) before it was Impact307, and we had that sort of like regular check-in with our mentors and our startup coaches,” she told the Wyoming Business Council. “So, it would be very similar in some ways to where you’ve got somebody who is rooting for you, who’s in your corner, who really understands your business, who’s your champion outside and spreading the message and the excitement about your company.”
Mentorship also played a key role in helping Lumley and her family identify resources that could help them solve problems and continue growing.
“For me, that person was Fred Schmechel in Laramie,” she said. “And he still sends me emails about opportunities and things like that.”
From Schmechel, she learned about internship grants from Workforce Development Service and about Wyoming Energy Authority grants, as well as Wyoming Venture Capital Fund, a quasi-governmental entity to support growth of Wyoming entrepreneurs and startups.
But more than just money, the one-on-one coaching was essential, too. The regular check-ins where Schmechel simply asked, “Hey, how are you doing?” helped her keep the right mindset.
“Having somebody like that in your corner is really, really great,” she said. “Because it’s really hard and very isolating to be a startup founder.”
That leads into another key point Lumley makes about Startup Wyoming. Nurturing founders can have staying power, regardless of the ultimate fate of an individual company.
“That foundational information, that foundational knowledge, stick with a founder throughout their lifetime,” she said. “So, if they pivot, if the business goes away, and they decide to build a whole new business, like they had a successful exit, that founder has that knowledge to spin it out and spin it out and spin it out.”
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
