Micron Technology started in a Boise dentist’s office, backed by local investors including J.R. Simplot, and recently crossed a trillion-dollar valuation to become one of the ten most valuable public companies in the world. That story is central to how Travis Hawkes, founder and CEO of Capital Eleven, thinks about what Idaho’s innovation economy is and what it could become.
On the latest Ever Onward Podcast, Hawkes joined host Tommy Ahlquist for a wide-ranging conversation about Idaho’s emerging tech ecosystem, the mechanics of venture capital, what makes a founder worth betting on, and why a Stanford study recently ranked Idaho as the number one state in the country for unicorn potential. Along the way, they spent time on something that doesn’t come up often in business conversations: the legacy of Hawkes’ father, Bill, whose quiet life of service and relentless work ethic shaped the man who is now building the state’s most active venture capital firm.
The Case for Idaho’s Startup Economy
Hawkes started Capital Eleven in 2019 with a thesis grounded in a simple observation: he had watched what happened in Utah. Driving from Salt Lake to Provo, he saw building after building filled with companies most people had never heard of that turned out to be worth billions. He talked to the people who were there in the early days of that ecosystem and asked what the signs looked like before it took off. He concluded that many of the same conditions existed in Idaho, with one critical missing piece: local capital.
“There was investment happening,” he said, “but it was out-of-state money coming in to support these companies. And back then, a lot of times they would make companies move to follow the capital.”
That’s the dynamic Capital Eleven was designed to change. Over the past seven years, the firm has invested in more than 90 companies, roughly half of them in Idaho, and is currently raising its third venture fund targeting 40 new investments over the next four years. The companies Hawkes has backed include Pest Share, founded by three lifelong Idaho residents and now operating out of Ten Mile Crossing with 50 employees, and Contio, whose founder moved from California specifically to build his next company in Boise and has hired 12 to 15 engineers locally.
The Stanford data backs up what Hawkes has been saying for years. A study from the Stanford Graduate School of Business ranked Idaho first among all states for unicorn potential when normalizing for capital deployed and number of startups. On a separate measure looking only at western states, a dollar invested in Idaho is roughly 11 times more likely to produce a standout outcome than the average. Utah ranked second on both measures.
“When I get to that slide,” Hawkes said, “I just kind of sit back with a smile.”
The Flywheel Is Starting to Turn
One of the most important shifts Hawkes has observed since 2019 is not just the volume of deals but the quality of founders. The difference between what was available then and what he sees now, he said, is night and day. Part of that is the talent influx that accelerated during COVID, as remote work normalized and a wave of engineers, product managers, and technical founders from Seattle, the Bay Area, and other coastal markets moved to Boise for quality of life reasons. Part of it is policy: cities and states that once attracted tech workers have made themselves less attractive through taxes, public safety concerns, and regulatory environments that push entrepreneurs toward more hospitable places.
But part of it is simply that the flywheel of a startup ecosystem, once it starts moving, generates its own momentum. Capital Eleven has had founders come to them and say they started their companies in part because seeing a local venture capital firm gave them confidence that capital was accessible. Hawkes has met with founders he didn’t invest in and helped connect them to other investors, because rising tide lifts all boats.
“Once the flywheel starts going,” he said, “it just starts going faster. And that is what has happened here.”
What Makes a Founder Worth Betting On
Hawkes has now evaluated hundreds of founders across more than 90 investments, and his framework for what makes someone worth backing has been stress-tested across seven years of outcomes.
Grit and resilience are table stakes. A founder who isn’t all in, who is treating the company as an experiment rather than a commitment, isn’t someone Capital Eleven bets on. But beyond that baseline, two qualities stand out as genuinely underrated.
Financial literacy is the first. Most early-stage founders come from a sales or technical background and don’t have a deep intuitive sense of PLs, balance sheets, and the financial mechanics of building a company. The ones who develop that fluency, or who are honest about the gap and fill it, tend to navigate the hard moments more effectively.
Sales ability is the second, and in some ways the most important. A startup CEO has to sell simultaneously in three directions: to investors to raise capital, to talented people to get them to take a below-market salary in exchange for equity, and to customers to generate the revenue that validates everything else. A founder who can’t sell can’t do any of those things well.
“Are they gonna be able to walk into a different room a couple years from now and get someone to write them a $20 million check?” Hawkes asks himself. “They’ve got to be able to sell.”
The Near-Death Experiences Nobody Talks About
One of the more valuable insights in the conversation comes from a program Capital Eleven runs every other month called the Founder Series, which brings 175 or so founders together to hear from successful operators and investors. The origin of the program was a moment of candor at another event.
A group from Divi, a company that had a $2.5 billion exit to Build.com, came to speak to Capital Eleven’s founders and told a compressed, mostly positive version of their story. When they finished and took questions, one of the founders in the room raised her hand and asked: was there ever a hard day? They looked at her and said yes, every day was a hard day.
Hawkes built the Founder Series specifically to make space for those stories. Every guest, including founders of companies that became billion-dollar businesses, is asked to talk about the near-death experiences, the moments when they almost had to shut the doors, when everyone around them was telling them to quit, when they were laying in the street and weren’t sure they could stand back up.
“Whether they fail, or whether the company becomes a unicorn, the journey is the same,” Hawkes said. “Just excruciatingly hard, with many near-death experiences.”
The point is not to discourage anyone. It’s to strip away the false impression that success came easily for the people who achieved it, and to help founders recognize that what they’re going through is normal and survivable.
Bill Hawks: The Quiet Foundation
Before any of the business conversation, Ahlquist started where he felt the story really begins: with Travis’s father, Bill, who passed away eight years ago and whose influence on how his son operates is visible in everything Capital Eleven does.
Bill Hawks ran car dealerships and sports retail stores, worked Saturday mornings his whole life, and was the kind of man who restocked shelves at the Boise mall in the final years of his life, still outworking the high school kids around him, because he loved it. He served for years as an employment specialist at his church, helping people find jobs during the post-recession years when finding a job was genuinely hard, and he did it without announcing himself or seeking credit.
Ahlquist shared a story from that time: a man with two small kids, no furniture, no job, in a difficult situation. Ahlquist made one call to Bill on a Thursday. When he came back a day or two later, the man had already had two job interviews, a job lined up for the following week, and furniture in his apartment. When Ahlquist asked Bill how he had done all that, Bill said, “Oh, don’t worry about it.”
“He never wanted anyone to know what he was doing,” Ahlquist said. “It was never about public recognition.”
Bill passed away before seeing Capital Eleven become what it is today, before the fund’s growth, before the portfolio companies, before the Stanford ranking and the Founder Series and the third fund raise. Hawkes noted the particular ache of that.
“He would have been amazed by all of it,” he said. “And that part’s hard.”
Capital Eleven is actively raising its third venture fund and welcomes conversations with founders, potential investors, and anyone building in Idaho’s tech ecosystem. Learn more at capital11.com.
