Scott Burns had time to relax after he sold off his downtown St. Paul-based tech startup, GovDelivery, last year — for the second time.

The Merriam Park resident focused on volunteer pursuits, such as advising public officials on business issues and serving on the boards of the St. Paul Foundation and the Friends of the St. Paul Public Library.

But Burns, who is hardly ready to retire at 41, knew that he’d eventually get back into tech entrepreneurship. And he was pretty sure that would happen in downtown St. Paul.

Sure enough, he announced last week that a new tech venture, Structural, is launching in Lowertown’s CoCo coworking complex. It eventually will move into its own St. Paul offices, likely closer to the center of downtown, Burns said.

“St. Paul is an amazing place to live, work and do business,” he said. “And downtown is vibrant without being overcrowded and overly expensive. I am starting to see more and more startup activity.”

Burns has teamed with another Twin Citian, veteran marketer Chip House, to get the new venture off the ground. Burns is Structural’s CEO with House serving as chief marketing officer.

The company’s backing, however, is not local. Structural is being financed by Indianapolis-based venture-capital company High Alpha, which also developed the company’s tech product before Burns and House came into the picture. High Alpha has invested about $1 million in the startup so far.

Burns and House also have some skin in the game, but aren’t disclosing the details.

KNOWING YOUR EMPLOYEES

Structural’s pitch is Web-based software, Employee Success Management, which is designed to give the leaders at companies better insight into their employees — what skills they bring to bear, what working styles they prefer, and what factors make them feel fulfilled so they don’t look for another job prematurely.

Right now, employers looking to slot employees into the right places tend to rely on “word of mouth,” Burns noted. Which workers “are best at promoting themselves at the water cooler? But word of mouth isn’t good enough.”

Often, the employers are reduced to poring over workers’ LinkedIn profiles for clues, he said.

“To put something so critical in the arms of social media is not sustainable,” he said.

Burns said he ran smack into this problem at CEO of GovDelivery, which he founded in 2001.

GovDelivery’s niche was streamlining the way governments communicate with their constituents — generally via e-mail and other methods. It grew from emailing St. Paul snow emergency alerts to a $40 million revenue company with government clients at the local, state and federal levels and an office in the United Kingdom.

GovDelivery was sold off to San Francisco-based Vista Equity Partners in a $153 million deal last September, and Burns left in January. GovDelivery is now called Granicus and has offices in St. Paul, Denver and Washington, D.C.

Ironically, though communication was its forte, communication among the company’s 250 or so workers sometimes wasn’t what it should have been, Burns recalled. “We’d often play Sherlock Holmes, trying to find the right person at the right time,” he said.

When Burns first sold the company, in 2009 to Pennsylvania-based Actua Corp., he stayed on to run things.

CORALING THE YOUNG TECH WORKER

The structural issue Structural aims to fix, said House, becomes even more challenging at companies with offices in more than one city, and with young workers accustomed to working out of coffee shops and such while always keeping an eye out for their next gig in a society that values job hopping.

“As companies scale, the feel of a small organization is lost, and it’s harder to know everyone,” said House, who previously was chief marketing officer at Minneapolis business-software company Four51.

Structural itself is still pretty small, with just a handful of workers, who have set up shop among dozens of other budding companies and solo workers in CoCo’s shared space. It has only about 10 clients so far as it announces itself to the world this month.

Its product, though, has been in development for nearly two years. The software has been quietly incubating at High Alpha, which took its time bringing it to market, Burns said. High Alpha calls itself “a venture studio that conceives, launches and scales enterprise technology companies.”

All the while, Burns had been in quiet conversation with High Alpha for some time about possible collaborations. It did not hurt that Scott Dorsey, a High Alpha co-founder, has been the St. Paulite’s closest business adviser since 2012.

“He’s a friend, a coach, a mentor, and another Midwestern tech CEO who believes we can build great businesses here,” Burns said.

Though Structural will have Indianapolis offices to tap into tech talent there, it will be headquartered in St. Paul, he said.

This allows Burns to stay in his beloved city where he and his OB/GYN wife are raising a 10-year-old and 7-year-old twins.

“I plan to die here,” Burns said.