Promising startups in Silicon Valley

Editor’s Note: The original version of this post incorrectly stated Adam Fish founded Forge. In fact, Matt Winn, formerly with Chrysalis Ventures, founded the group.)

Louisville has lost yet another promising high-tech startup.

Roobiq, which is developing a Siri-like mobile digital assistant for businesses, has left Louisville for a Silicon Valley incubator. (Roobiq creators called their app “Siri’s business cousin.”)

The four-person team is at least the third major promising tech company in five years to leave Louisville including Backupify in 2007 and Impulcity last year.

Worse, we’re losing people who are irreplaceable contributors to Louisville’s fragile startup culture.

I’m not the most objective source on this because we at IL have known three of the four (Roobiq just added a new engineer) – Adam Fish, Chris Vermilion and John Receveur – for quite some time and like and admire them.

Moreover, this is such a small town when it comes to startups that earlier this year, Insider Louisville took Roobiq’s former NuLu offices after Roobiq moved to offices in Gill Holland’s The Green Building.

I first met Adam, Roobiq CEO and founder, back in 2011 when he addressed an Idea Mornings gathering about his entrepreneurial network Forge, then talked about the first glimmers of his concept that became Roobiq.

We’ve talked informally to Adam, John and Chris about their departure.

(All three are so personable and cool they have no trace of the stereotypical tech geek/scientist. My wife Cheryl jokes that if they don’t make it as entrepreneurs, they always have their modeling careers to fall back on.)

We agreed not to mention the incubator because they’ve not gotten permission to talk about their acceptance or the details of what we understand is a very competitive program. In fact, we’re waiting for more details so IL journo Melissa Chipman can do a full-fledged formal story.

Until then, let me tell you why this matters.

In a conversation just before he left Monday night, Chris was clear the group would all have preferred to stay in Louisville if Louisville had a comparable incubator or had sufficient tech talent and patient capital.

But this opportunity to go to the heart of the tech innovation world was too great to pass up. And Chris made it clear he wasn’t ruling out returning, but odds are heavily against it, because the guys are beginning to attract serious national investors.