Montana Instruments-Mfg1
Luke Mauritsen with Montana Instruments

I love mentoring Montana entrepreneurs.  Last month I completed my 240th session in the past year or so.  Mentoring allows me to live vicariously through these wild-eyed, passionate, never-say-die visionaries who want to create something of value for themselves and their communities.

As entrepreneurs succeed their businesses create high-wage Montana jobs and make our economic pie larger, so many get a bigger slice.

Let me tell you about a few of my heros:

Luke Mauritsen’s company Montana Instruments in Bozeman builds a machine that looks like a high end latte maker, but he sells it to physicists all over the world for more than $100,000 a pop.  What does it do?  It produces VERY VERY low temperatures for researchers.  He has a huge backlog of orders and is growing quickly. Go Luke!

Doug Warner’s company DropTrip is the world’s first crowdsourced shipping social network. Shippers get to save money sending and receiving their things through a network of vetted travelers, and travelers get to make money helping shippers get their stuff from point A to B.  People can save money shipping and make money traveling!

Chad Nybo’s company CrossTX is a cloud based coordination of care platform that offers a secure way for health care providers to coordinate their patient’s care across the healthcare continuum.  Unlike fax, phone, and sticky notes, CrossTX provides patient treatment coordination processes that improve outcomes while maintaining a complete record of a patient’s episode of care, all in real-time.  Basically, if an appendectomy is performed on you at your local hospital, and they use CrossTx, your appendix will be the only thing missing when you leave.

These are only a few examples – stay tuned for more inspiring examples of the great work Montana’s entrepreneurs are doing, building successful companies and creating a stronger economy for our state.