Andrew Miller has been named Director of Startup Success at the Beck Venture Center at Colorado School of Mines.
An experienced tech and venture capital attorney, most recently with San Francisco-based law firm Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, Miller will focus on building and scaling the founder experience for science-driven startups emerging from Mines and the broader Colorado innovation ecosystem. Miller started at Mines on June 1, 2026.
“In this new position, Andrew will be acting like the managing director of a top-tier startup accelerator embedded inside one of the world’s best engineering schools,” said Zack Bennett, director of the Beck Venture Center. “His background is perfect for this role. He has helped build startups from scratch, been intimately involved with venture capital, and has helped companies achieve the highest levels in business.”
Bennett noted that Miller was on the Orrick team representing Anthropic in several transactions, including its $30 billion Series G financing. “He helped lead some of the biggest venture deals in startup history, and he will be bringing all that amazing expertise to Mines and our startups,” Bennett said.
Miller said he’s excited by the opportunity to work with entrepreneurs at Mines, especially student entrepreneurs.
“I think one of the best times to start a company is when you’re a student or a recent graduate,” Miller said. “A clean slate is a real advantage - you haven't absorbed all the assumptions about how things 'have to' work, so you're free to reason from first principles and rethink the problem entirely.”
The Beck Venture Center has enjoyed a rapid emergence as a hub for entrepreneurship and commercialization at Mines. The center, which opened in 2024, includes more than 31,000 square feet of coworking, event and innovation space and supports startups in sectors ranging from energy and quantum technology to advanced materials and space resources.
As Director of Startup Success, Miller will design and lead the startup support ecosystem at Beck, including mentorship, investor engagement, accelerator-style programming and founder development. The Beck Venture Center is part of the broader entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystem at Mines, alongside the McNeil Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation and the Labriola Innovation Hub. Beck currently supports dozens of startups and has helped companies collectively raise tens of millions of dollars in funding.
In addition to his work with Anthropic, Miller has also represented venture funds and numerous startups from pre-seed to IPO and is an active angel investor (he has made over twenty startup investments). He was part of the first intern class at Thumbtack and was the second employee at Hero Bread where he managed the legal, finance/accounting and the HR functions for the company. Miller earned his law degree and MBA at Boston College, where he also completed his bachelor’s degree in economics and philosophy.
“The core lesson I've learned through operating, investing in and advising startups is simple to say and hard to do: isolate the real problem, decide whether it's worth solving, and then constantly work with your customers to test and iterate the solution,” Miller said. "The questions I'll keep pushing our founders to ask are the same - are we addressing a problem the market actually has? And, is our solution one the market genuinely values?"
About Mines
Colorado School of Mines is a public R1 research university focused on applied science and engineering, producing the talent, knowledge and innovations to serve industry and benefit society – all to create a more prosperous future.
