Adam Hammer, the co-founder and CEO of Albuquerque's Roadrunner Venture Studios, was walking through the halls of Los Alamos National Laboratory a few months ago when something caught his eye.
On a pinboard next to a water cooler in the lab was an old flier for the studio's technology showcase event, held in Albuquerque in late June. That event was the first time Roadrunner had introduced itself to the Albuquerque and wider New Mexico tech and startup community.
"I've never been here before, to this hallway. I didn't put it up there. We didn't have a highly orchestrated media strategy to get it into the inner hallways of [Los Alamos National Laboratory]," Hammer said. "It was put there because somebody cared. And because they said, 'This is important and it answers something to us in our community here at Los Alamos.' That to me meant a lot."
Roadrunner, formed earlier this year, has a goal to take frontier technologies being developed at national labs — like Los Alamos — and research universities throughout New Mexico and build them into startup companies. While June's technology showcase, which included poster presentations on dozens of such technologies, was the venture studio's introduction to the state, an upcoming forum is set to give an update on Roadrunner's progress in New Mexico.
That technology forum will take place on Tuesday, Dec. 5, at 12:30 p.m. at the Wool Warehouse Theater near Downtown Albuquerque, located at 516 1st St. NW. It's a chance, Hammer told New Mexico Inno, to show New Mexico's tech and startup community that Roadrunner is "here for the long haul."
The forum will bring venture capitalists, technologists and entrepreneurs from across the country to Albuquerque to hear announcements on the venture studio's work. It'll also be the first time Roadrunner shows off its physical studio space in Albuquerque's Innovation District, which has been in development since the summer.
Local firms like SMPC Architects and Five Ton Monkey have workedwith Roadrunner to build the space. It'll feature a public-facing event area, co-working offices and meeting rooms for startups and a workshopping section with technological tools.
Part of Roadrunner's work over the past several months, besides developing the studio space, has included vetting over 250 technologies, ideas, company concepts and intellectual property claims to identify which are the most promising to help develop, Hammer said. It's been an "extremely rigorous" process, he said, that's included reviewing the novelty of an idea, its defensibility and its market fit — if it can solve what Hammer called a "hard problem."
Another criteria, he added, is the caliber of the team behind the company concept or technological research. That's because, as Hammer put it, Roadrunner's process outside of technical analysis involves "betting on a person."
"Good ideas die on the vine without champions," he said. "So you have to find that champion, and what you're doing is betting on that champion. It doesn't matter how great the idea or the technology is, if it doesn't have the right visionary or the right operator, it will not have legs underneath it."
In narrowing down those more than 200 ideas, Hammer said Roadrunner uses a "multiple stage gate process" that involves technical reviews, investment reviews, commercial reviews and team reviews. There'll be an announcement in regards to those ideas and that vetting process at the upcoming technology forum event, he said.
Attracting leadership talent to New Mexico has been another focus of the venture studio, Hammer told New Mexico Inno in late June. Roadrunner recently hired Ashley Nowicki Hudson as its head of talent, who previously worked at First Round Capital and Prime Movers Lab, to help attract that talent to the state.
It's part of the venture studio's broader goal, Hammer said, to act as a "lighthouse" to draw more entrepreneurial leaders and venture capital into New Mexico.
"I feel like we've had a rich opportunity in a place where not enough people are paying attention," he said about New Mexico. "I hope to get them to pay more attention."
America's Frontier Fund (AFF), a national VC with a focus on investing in deep tech companies, backed Roadrunner with $10 million out of its first $500 million fund. New Mexico's State Investment Council, an institutional investment body that manages billions of dollars in permanent and governmental funds for the state, dedicated $100 million to AFF's first fund, called Frontier Fund I, in November 2022.
