In downtown Albuquerque, Adam Hammer is showing me around the building that houses his newly launched venture shop, Roadrunner Venture Studios—an old mattress factory turned open-plan office space where he hopes he can persuade scientists, engineers, and deep-tech founders to come and build companies.
Hammer walks me over to a wall to the left of the front door—pointing to a graphic of technologies or companies that had their roots right here in New Mexico, but then moved elsewhere once they started to scale. Microsoft is the prominent example: Bill Gates and Paul Allen started building their first microcomputer in Albuquerque before they moved the company to Bellevue, Wash., so they could be closer to the West Coast’s talent pool.
