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