NYC entrepreneur: so why not Boise?
Sometimes it really is love at first sight /
DUSTY PARNELL “I wasn’t supposed to be here.” Dan Berger was a lifelong New Yorker. He is a workaholic entrepreneur, and he founded an incredibly successful SaaS (software as a service) business in Washington, D.C., called Social Tables in 2011. It’s a hospitality company that creates a collaborative platform to help planners and properties pull off efficient and successful events — at the rate of about 1.5 million events a year. Then in 2018, his company was acquired by Cvent Inc. It reportedly sold for about $100 million. Nine months later, he said thank you, goodbye and see you down the road. … That turned out to be literally true. While waiting for COVID to pass in
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2020 before moving back to New York City from D.C., he did what probably a lot of us have done at one time or another:
ROAD TRIP! Although most of us didn’t do it in a Tesla, the rest was pretty normal. He grabbed a couple of friends and headed down to Florida to visit another friend. Then they headed west. New Orleans, Austin, Santa Fe, Scottsdale, Newport Beach, Las Vegas, even Bozeman, with more stops in Jackson and Boulder. But there was a twist. There was no big plan, no secret to his roadmap, it was just friends on the road. “We texted where we were going to go the night before we left,” he said. “I literally just wanted to pass the time, so I
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got in my car and started driving around. I was about to turn around and go back to the East Coast after four months on the road, and then I kind of stumbled onto Boise. “Someone in Salt Lake suggested Boise, so I made a left on my way to Bozeman.” They were here in June 2020 and hanging out with people in a bar who said they were going to have to move to Boise. There was a spike of people coming to Boise at that time. “Oftentimes as humans, we feel something in our stomach, and then we’re able to translate it to our brain, and that’s what it was,” Berger said. “It was a feeling in my stomach, and I said ‘I can move here,’ and I started joking around saying ‘I’m moving here’… and then I