MSU Students' Company Receives $2.26 Million in Investments

By Meaghan MacDonald-Pool

BOZEMAN — A group of former Montana State University students and their Bozeman-based streaming platform startup have found success in the business world, receiving millions of dollars in investments this year.Special Project Inc., formerly Triple Tree Software, captured $2.26 million in funding this year to help launch its business this fall. Special Project is the brainchild of Sam Lucas and Paul Burton, former MSU students who majored in marketing in the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship and computer science in the Norm Asbjornson College of Engineering, respectively.

The company is an independent streaming platform for video creators to launch subscription video services via an app that can be watched on mobile, web and smart TVs. Special Project received $1.25 million from Next Frontier Capital, a Bozeman-based venture capital fund, as well as investments from Next Coast Ventures in Austin, 30 West in Los Angeles, SpringTime Ventures in Houston, and Service Provider Capital in Boulder, Colorado among a series of national media angel investors.

“This is super exciting and humbling for us, but at the same time I would not expect anything less from this group,” said Lucas, who graduated from MSU in 2016 and is CEO of Special Project. “We’ve been working together for the last few years, pushing each other to be the best we can possibly be. This has always been our objective, and the first of many greater challenges ahead. We are all so competitive in trying to make something impactful and meaningful. These opportunities have been coming to us, and we are thankful for every one of them, a true testament to our team, their hard work and technical prowess.

”Entrepreneurship was always the path Lucas and Burton wanted to pursue. While at MSU, Lucas worked as a venture coach and marketing director at the Blackstone LaunchPad and founded the student organization LaunchCats, a club where students had opportunities to solve problems for local businesses. It was these two organizations that brought Lucas and Burton together and helped them start Triple Tree Software as students.

Triple Tree was a custom software engineering firm. From 2016 until 2020, the company built enterprise software products for clients around the U.S. The company was named a Montana Startup to Watch in 2018 and was one of four Montana companies that attended TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco later that year. And when Lucas and Burton began working full time on Triple Tree, they hired Waylon Roberts and Samuel Kern -- former MSU students, Blackstone LaunchPad coworkers and LaunchCat teammates -- as their employees.

Kregg Ayes, professor and former dean of the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship, worked with Lucas in the creation of LaunchCats, as well as with Roberts and Kern in the LaunchPad, and said he didn’t doubt that success was on the horizon for the team.

He said Lucas was generally helpful in the LaunchPad and it was great to have a super engaged student who was really interested in becoming an entrepreneur and was taking classes to aid in his own success, not just for a degree.

“Even though we spend a lot of time in the LaunchPad helping students become entrepreneurs, the number of 25-year-olds that are financially, emotionally, psychologically and technically prepared to start their own business is really small,” Aytes said. “The most successful entrepreneurs are people who bring a bunch of experience to the table. When you see someone do this at such a young age through hard work, perseverance and creativity, it’s heartwarming. I’m not surprised with the success they have because of the team Sam and Paul built. They have some impressive and bright young men working together.”

In 2018 and 2019, Triple Tree built two video-on-demand platforms for clients. Afterward, Lucas and Burton said they were flooded by requests for similar products, which gave them the idea for Special Project.In November 2019, Lucas and Burton pitched their business idea to Next Frontier Capital. Lucas said Next Frontier was aware Vickersof their business and wanted to invest because of the quality and expertise of their team and portfolio. With the funding secured, they eventually transitioned Triple Tree into Special Project.

“The Special Project team represents one of the most talented and accomplished seed stage companies Next Frontier Capital has seen in the Montana ecosystem since our firm’s inception,” said Les Craig, partner at Next Frontier Capital, which launched in 2015. “This team's grit, technical prowess and ambition is in the top 1% of founders you'll find anywhere, including the nation's hottest coastal technology ecosystems.

”Prior to becoming a partner at Next Frontier Capital, Craig was the director of the MSU Blackstone LaunchPad. Lucas considers Craig a great mentor and had a close relationship with him at MSU.

“Our first-ever client at Triple Tree was a startup Les founded in Baltimore, and that was the catalyst to get us up and running,” Lucas said.

“Les always referred work to us, helped us work through deals and negotiations and has been behind the scenes always paying attention to us and slowly connecting us to the next level,” added Burton, chief technology officer of Special Project. “It’s really cool to see how this has come full circle with him from the LaunchPad to Next Frontier.”

Special Project will launch its beta phase app in October. Lucas said the next step for his team is to interview creators, hire more team members — preferably from MSU — and work on scaling the company through 2021.

Along with Craig and Montana tech mentors, Lucas credited his time in the Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship and its professors with giving him the space needed to learn how to be an entrepreneur and navigate the real world of business. Instead of working on assignments with hypothetical problems, his professors allowed him to submit his real business projects, like Triple Tree and Ursa Outdoors, an e-commerce clothing brand. They also helped him focus on his future career, he said.

Burton added that MSU and its professors provided valuable resources for students to help advance them in their career pursuits, such as the Start UP Weekend event that the business college puts on every year.

“The Jake Jabs College of Business and Entrepreneurship has done a good job of dedicating themselves to student extracurricular access and providing an environment that encourages interdisciplinary networking among students and professors alike,” he said.