Venture25

2024 marks a significant milestone for Venture. It’s our 25th anniversary of making snowboards. 25 YEARS! And these are not your run-of-the-mill, manufactured in some far-flung factory snowboards. Since Day 1, every Venture has been meticulously designed and handcrafted from scratch by us. No outsourcing. No pre-fab components. Just the highest-quality boards, built by awesome humans who share a passion for snowboarding.

To celebrate Venture’s 25 years in the board business, we’ll be sharing various installments of the company story throughout the season. We’ll begin with our scratch beginnings in a Denver garage, slide into our time in Bayfield, and land in Silverton, Colorado, where every board is built to this day. 

Stay tuned. Stay stoked. 

—Klem

Since I was a kid, I have always figured out a way to make whatever I was into. When I was around 12, I read about how to make your own skateboard in a book I got from the library. At that point I had never seen a skateboard before, and I don't know what attracted me to it. The directions were to cut a rollerskate in half and attach the halves to the ends of a piece of wood with screws. So I did. You couldn't really turn it, but at the time just going straight but sideways was enough.

A few years later, inspired by the snowboard scene in the James Bond movie “A View To A Kill,” I made my first snowboard. First, I drew the shape on a piece of graph paper. Then I traced the shape onto a piece of plywood and cut it out with a jigsaw. This was a trick I learned from my dad - he used the same method to turn cardboard boxes into costumes for us.

I poured boiling water onto the plywood “snowboard” to try bending the nose, and used rubber straps attached with screws for the bindings. It rode about as well as my first DIY skateboard - I couldn’t turn it, but standing sideways was enough to get me stoked.

Eventually I got my first production snowboard - a Burton Elite 150 - and have lived to ride ever since.

Stay tuned for more stories from the Venture Vault.

—Klem

In 1988, there were not a lot of ski areas that allowed snowboarders, and the ones that did were not exactly welcoming. Some made us take tests to prove that we could turn and stop. Skiers could just do whatever they wanted, whether they could turn or not, so that wasn’t cool. But if jumping through that hoop got me on the mountain, so be it. At that point most snowboards had metal edges and decent bindings, and we could stop and turn just fine, thank you very much.

The test was a joke and you could tell the poor skiers administering it felt bad about it. It seemed like the kind of policy cooked up by a bunch of corporate suits that had never even seen a snowboard. I got my boarding pass and was able to ride, but it also gave me a healthy sense of skepticism toward unjustified authority.

The upside was that because we were outsiders, we stuck together. There were not that many of us and we were all very passionate about it. When you got on a lift with another snowboarder you were instantly friends, exchanging notes on gear, technique, and where you were finding the best snow.

The smart ski area managers figured out pretty quickly that they were leaving money on the table by keeping us out, and things started changing. Before we knew it, skiers were wearing extra baggy clothes, and we were allowed to ride at enough mountains that it didn’t really matter. When you look around at the ski bikes, snowlerblades and other riff raff bombing down the mountain nowadays, it all seems laughable. But snowboarding wouldn’t have the same anti-establishment chip on its shoulder if riders didn’t (still) have to overcome the entitled, snooty attitudes of a certain segment of skiing. I’m not going to dignify the existence of the few ski areas left that still outlaw us by mentioning their names, but they do exist.

Part of me misses the tight sense of community from the early days. But I’m also stoked to have been there when it happened, and to still have snowboarding be part of my everyday life. It's still fun to make skiers vs snowboarders jokes, but at this point jokes are all that's really left to the rivalry. Well, that and who can make a better powder turn.

—Klem

I’ve got one more Venture25 origin story that will be relevant later. Back when I was a graduate student in engineering in 1996, Transworld Snowboarding published a story about Johan Olofsson‘s famous part in “TB-5.” I have watched it so many times, but I don’t know how I would do it justice describing it with words. If you haven’t seen it before, you should watch it as soon as you are done reading this.

The story included a math problem, and they said if you solved it correctly they might send you a copy of the movie, but they messed up the accompanying diagram. The assignment was to calculate how fast he was going, and the information they gave you was that he covered 3,000 vertical feet on a 50-degree slope in 35 seconds. Compared to my real homework (that I was probably procrastinating on), it was pretty simple, so I decided to do the Transworld assignment and send it in.

The following month they printed the names of all the people that got it right, and the ones that got it wrong. I bet most of the people who got it wrong just looked at the diagram, so that wasn’t very cool, but they did send me a VHS copy of the movie. I still have it. I have no way of playing it anymore, but you can watch Johan’s part on YouTube.

—Klem

We don’t have a lot of photos or other archival materials from the early days of Venture. Most of what we have is pulled from old floppy discs and foggy (or frosty) recollections. Like this installment of Venture25, which is when the board building begins.

I met my wife, Lisa, in college in New York. When we graduated we used grad school as an excuse to move west together. We got married a couple of years before I started Venture. In the beginning she was working a real job and supported me every way she could from day one. Years later, a friend in the biz who probably knows more about Venture than anyone except the two of us remarked that the real secret to Venture’s success was Lisa. He was absolutely right.

When I was a grad student I answered a call on the newsgroup (remember those?) rec.skiing.snowboard for test riders for Donek Snowboards. The owner, Sean Martin, and I were both mechanical engineers and hit it off immediately. I ended up helping out with production part time.

When I was in my last semester I was inspired to try to make a more environmentally-friendly snowboard. It was 1999 and nobody in the snowsports industry was even talking about sustainability. I started looking for more environmentally-friendly materials. The two things I settled on were FSC-certified wood (more on certifications later) for the cores, and hemp and organic cotton for the topsheets. 

Donek was focused on selling custom and carving boards direct to consumers. Sean and I decided to partner and start a new company, (initially called Seven Snowboards) that would eventually become Venture. Aside from the environmental angle, the idea for the new company was to focus on retailers and make regular resort boards. After a couple of months, Sean realized that two snowboard companies were more than he had bandwidth for. I can’t say I blamed him. He told me he’d let me use his equipment if I wanted to continue, but he needed to focus exclusively on Donek. At that point I had already borrowed money from my parents, and decided I’d just have to figure it out on my own.

Those first boards were the definition of “home made.” I set up the garage and a bedroom in the basement to cut bases, bend edges, and make core blocks. Then I’d load up my VW Golf with way too much weight and drive over to Sean’s to do everything else.

In hindsight the first boards were pretty generic, both in terms of shape and graphics. But, I had designed and built them from scratch. And then I got to go ride them. That was the coolest feeling ever. They could have ridden like lunch trays (they didn’t) and I would have probably still been pretty stoked. I was hooked. Figuring out how to balance all the design variables that make a board ride the way it does became an obsession, and it still is. 

The internet was starting to become a thing. I designed our first website by writing HTML in a text editor. The most important feature was a form where people could sign up for our mailing list. Lisa designed a brochure that we would send to the people who signed up for the mailing list.

We got our friend Dean, who we had met at CSU, on board to help with sales. He quickly landed us our first dealer: The Wright Life in Fort Collins. Then, via an old friend, he got us into D&E in Snowmass. That led to us meeting a couple of guys named Watson and Norm.

Watson and Norm were the first in a long line of Venture characters. Fun-loving, solid human beings who lived to snowboard. Norm ran the tune shop at D&E and Watson worked in a fancy restaurant. They worked in the evening so they could snowboard during the day. They had broken lots of snowboards over the years, but somehow they were not breaking ours. That gave me confidence that we were on the right track.

Our best snowboarding days back then were at Wolf Creek. We would keep an eye out for weekend storms and when the timing was right we would drive down on Friday night, sleep in the parking lot, ride Saturday and most of Sunday and drive back Sunday night. That place was (and still is) the real deal. 

I got kicked out of a few ski area parking lots in the middle of the night in college. At Wolf Creek they woke us up in the middle of the night too sometimes, but only to politely ask us to move over because they needed to plow.

-Klem

Eventually we had enough of living in the city and set our sights on southwestern Colorado, so we could be closer to Wolf Creek. We looked at Pagosa Springs, Bayfield, Durango, Mancos, and even Silverton. Silverton Mountain was just getting started back then and it sounded awesome, but at the time there was no way Lisa would be able to find a job in Silverton that would keep food on the table while we got Venture off the ground. We eventually found a house on a dirt road in Bayfield with no covenants and neighbors far enough away that we could run machines without bothering anyone.

Before we left Denver in 2002, we both got the first and only tattoos we have: matching Venture snowflakes. Lisa quit her day job. We moved in the fall and both got jobs at Purgatory for the winter. Lisa worked in the ski school office and I worked in the ski demo shop. I learned how to adjust DIN settings on ski bindings and none of the customers ever realized that I didn’t ski. During that first winter, we worked on setting up shop in the basement and garage of our new house. Some people thought we were nuts and some thought it was the coolest thing ever. They were both right. By spring, we had most of the equipment we needed except for the things you can’t buy off the shelf. I started building the smaller stuff while I was working on the CAD drawings for the press I had been designing in my head and on scraps of paper. 

Most of my time the following summer was spent building the press that we still use today. I had learned how to weld, but I knew I wasn’t good enough at it to make something that was as precise as I needed. And it also needed to be strong enough. Instead, I decided to use bolts which meant I needed to drill a lot of very precise holes in steel. It took forever, but I had Frank Zappa keeping me company and I eventually got it done. 

We had met a photographer the previous winter named Scott Smith. After I was done cutting and drilling all the steel for the press we invited him over for dinner. The look on his face when we showed him a pile of parts and told him that was going to be a snowboard press is something Lisa and I still laugh about. He was trying hard to be polite and hide his skepticism, but it wasn’t working. 

Once the press was done and we had pressed the first board, we invited Scott and some of the other people we had met at Purgatory the previous winter over to celebrate. Scott brought his friend Dave Thibodeau with him. Dave is co-founder of Ska Brewing and almost immediately asked us if we could make them snowboards with Ska graphics. Of course we could. That was the beginning of a great partnership that continues to this day.

The Bayfield garage and basement days were an exciting time. A lot of long days building boards and late nights doing everything else. We would send mini catalogs and postcards with our demo tour schedule to people who signed up for our mailing list on the website. Paying a direct mail company was not an option, so the skills Lisa had picked up working in non-profit fundraising came in handy. We got really good at putting labels on things and instead of licking the stamps we would cut up a dishwashing sponge, put it in a shot glass with water, and rub the stamps on the wet sponge. Simple, but very effective.

Once it started snowing we would load up the truck with our tent, demo boards and our dog and hit the road. We’d stay in whatever cheap motel allowed dogs along the way. Back then, most resorts were happy to let you come and offer their customers free demos. The postcards we were sending to people were working. They would show up mid week with the things in their hands and tell us they took off work to come out and try out a board. Venture was beginning to leave its mark, one turn at a time.

-Klem