Back in person: Glacier Bank hosts MHTBA reception at Two Bear Capital Offices in Whitefish Sept. 8, 2021
The reception was held in Two Bear Capital’s new Whitefish office space and marked the venture firm’s second anniversary since its founding. Photo by Clint Ekern of Sky Vault.
Sept. 15, 2021
Nearly 50 tech leaders gathered in Whitefish on September 8, 2021 for the Montana High Tech Business Alliance’s first in-person statewide member reception since February of 2020. The event was held at Two Bear Capital’s new office space in Whitefish. Sponsor Glacier Bank partnered with the Alliance on our 6th member reception in the Flathead Valley since 2015. Attendees enjoyed drinks and hors d'oeuvres from Kalispell’s Desoto Grill.
The reception began with a fireside chat on cybersecurity with Elisity CEO James Winebrenner followed by remarks from Two Bear Capital’s Founder and Managing Partner Michael Goguen. Alliance Board Member and Two Bear Capital Head of Community Engagement Liz Marchi pointed out in her opening remarks that the event marked two years ago to the week that Goguen announced he would base a venture capital firm in northwest Montana.
CONNECT: A conversation about what’s next in network security with James Winebrenner of Elisity.
Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (center left) gave a fireside chat on network security technology. Photo by Clint Ekern of Sky Vault.
Two Bear Principal Ryan Castonia hosted a fireside chat on network security technology with James Winebrenner, CEO of Two Bear portfolio company Elisity. Winebrenner is an experienced go-to-market network and security infrastructure executive with a 20+ year track record building and scaling companies at Check Point Software, Cisco, Viptela, and Aviatrix. Elisity is based in Milpitas, California.
Winebrenner outlined the challenges of work-from-anywhere and hybrid remote models. Before COVID sent almost all tech workers home, networks were secured by location and protected by firewalls.
“Location based trust doesn't make any sense,” said Winebrenner. “Our view is that we shouldn't have any sort of underlying implicit trust—we need to move to a model where all of the enterprise's assets, whether that's a user, an application, a data store, or a device, all those need to have an explicit trust model in terms of what they should be allowed to communicate with. And we need to make it easier to manage those explicit trust models so that we can have assets communicating securely regardless of where they're located.”
PROMOTE: Startup Endpoint Utility Corp aims to simplify IT for small to mid-sized businesses
Co-founder of Endpoint Utility Corp. David Mayer. Endpoint, based in Kalispell, is launching this month. Photo by Clint Ekern of Sky Vault.
Endpoint Utility Corp. is a Kalispell startup launching this month that brings small and mid-size businesses enterprise-level end-user computing capabilities.
“All this stuff that these big folks spend millions and millions of dollars on, why can't we take that and make it available to a small and medium business? It is actually not impossible,” said co-founder David Mayer during his 5-minute lighting talk. “Endpoint is a managed service provider that is here to run end-user computing on behalf of our customers the correct way based on the best practices that are out there and deliver something that only the enterprises have had access to in the past.”
ACCELERATE: Two Bear Capital has invested $75M, garnered a profile of 14 companies in two years.
Glacier Bank Market President Mike Smith (left) and Founder and Managing Partner of Two Bear Capital Michael Goguen (right). Photo by Clint Ekern of Sky Vault.
Two Bear Capital Managing Partner Michael Goguen spent two decades at Silicon Valley’s Sequoia Capital—where he led 54 company investments to a total market value exceeding $64 billion—before founding Two Bear Capital in 2019.
Goguen is keen on backing biotech and bioinformatics technology. Since its founding, Two Bear has invested about $75 million between their seed fund and a soon-to-be-announced main fund with more pending. The firm has a total of 14 companies under their belt, including the Montana companies FYR Diagnostics (Missoula), Truwl (Whitefish), Inimmune (Missoula), and Verafī (Whitefish).
Despite COVID, we've come a long way in these two years,” said Goguen.
That's about $75 million invested so far in companies in San Diego, Boston, and Silicon Valley, with most of the rest around this neck of the woods. Those companies comprise this sort of exploding intersection of technology and life sciences."
The Montana High Tech Business Alliance’s annual meeting and member reception will be held on October 6 in Missoula hosted by First Interstate Bank—details to come.
About the Publisher: Launched in 2014, the Montana High Tech Business Alliance is a nonpartisan nonprofit association of highly-engaged high tech and manufacturing companies and affiliates creating high-paying jobs in Montana. For more information, visit MTHighTech.org or subscribe to our biweekly newsletter.
About the Author: Martina Pansze is the Communications Director for the Montana High Tech Business Alliance. She graduated from Whitman College in 2018 with a degree in Film and Media Studies.