Originally published in The Boulder Daily Camera

By Scott Laband

Colorado Impact Fund co-founder Ryan Heckman knows what it feels like to attend college – but not quite fit in.

A small-town guy from Granby, Heckman was a former Olympic skier, and a little older than most undergraduates, when he attended the University of Colorado, Boulder, in the mid-to- late 90s. Eager to learn, he was perplexed that few of his fellow students shared his hunger for higher education.

“For the first time in my life, I felt like a nerd,” Heckman told me recently. “I had more in common with the adult learners.”

Heckman, however, finally found his right educational environment when he participated in two internships with Boulder startups, one with a local technology storage company doing slide presentations in preparation for an I.P.O., the other with the CFO of a biotech researching artificial blood products.

“Until then, I didn’t really find education all that enriching,” he said. “Sure, I had some great professors and checked the box, but still … .”

Mature overachievers aren’t the only ones sometimes ill-suited to the classroom. “One shoe does not fit all,” Heckman said. “Some of the smartest people I know got horrible grades, and that precluded them from getting into college and even if they got into college, they dropped out. It’s sad. They wanted to learn but couldn’t in the traditional way.”

Heckman’s internship experiences laid the groundwork for his career. For the last 20 years, he has been a private equity investor and business owner. He also is a co-founder of the Colorado Impact Fund in Denver, which provides growth capital to emerging companies and entrepreneurs in the state.

The internships also showed him the importance of real-world learning, in particular for students, who, like him had an entrepreneurial mindset. “You can’t just have a bulletin board with jobs posted on it, either,” Heckman said. “Invite local companies to take on interns. They should feel a sense of purpose by doing so and celebrated for making an investment in our future workforce.

“How cool would it be if the private sector was pulling on talent, advising on curriculum and then hiring interns that could someday be employees or the next great business creator? I would have died for that opportunity when I was in college,” says Heckman.

Entrepreneurial education can help pre-college, even pre-high school, students, too.

Heckman, who is also president of ICON Eyecare, a Denver-based surgical eye care provider, cited the STEM Launch program in the Adams 12 school district. The K-8 program’s motto is “Fail fast and pivot.”

“Economist John Maynard Keynes once said, ‘It was better to be approximately right than precisely wrong,'” he said. “Learning how to fail really means learning how to pivot after an idea doesn’t work out.”

“Students need to know that success and failure are not the only possible results,” he added. “Learning to adapt is the best outcome.”

Another example in Adams 12 as well as in St. Vrain Valley is P-TECH, or Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools. This program expands opportunities in STEM education to prepare graduates for middle-skilled jobs, which generally require more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor’s degree.

“These kinds of programs allow students to tap into what they are excited about, what creates inspiration and a path,” Heckman said.

An important aspect of learning on-the- job from business leaders, as opposed to listening to instructors in the classroom, is that it teaches those difficult-to- quantify soft skills which are just as important as technical expertise. “Developing skills such as character, respect and resiliency are invaluable for an entrepreneur,” he added.

Heckman noted that some companies, such as Pairin, headquartered in Denver, are developing cloud-based systems for measuring these kinds of skills and others.

He also cited a company in which the Colorado Impact Fund recently made an investment, Galvanize, which has operations in Denver, Boulder, San Francisco, Austin and elsewhere. The company builds out technology workspaces for startups in places that also house learning areas for students taking coding and computer science courses.

“There is very cool cross-pollination that develops between businesses that need skilled labor and students that are learning in an environment that buzzes with the excitement of a start up.”

“But this is not just about scaling or seizing on a popular niche in ed-tech,”Heckman said. “It’s also a way to give educational opportunities to students who have traditionally been left behind and give them another chance.”

Galvanize spaces are cool, loft-like workspaces that provide inspiration for entrepreneurial dreams. “Some of the most dysfunctional human beings I’ve known were artists and entrepreneurs – they have a lot in common and are the ones that are actually creating our future,” Heckman said.

“But we shouldn’t be surprised, really,” he added. “After all, an entrepreneur looks at a business model the same way an artist looks at a canvass.”

Scott Laband is president of Colorado Succeeds, a Denver-based, non-profit think tank that focuses on education and business issues.