For Utah startups, affordable engineering talent and fresh snow have long been two assets the local tech scene has had in abundance. But in recent years, “Silicon Slopes” startups have started to close the gap with Silicon Valley in other critical areas, according to a discussion at Coins2Day’s Brainstorm Tech conference on Tuesday.
Rather than turning to the San Francisco Bay Area, Utah startups now have local options for funding and experienced managers, Entrata CEO Adam Edmunds said during the panel in Park City, Utah.
Twenty years ago, some of the most well-known Utah companies—like Qualtrics, Omniture and Pluralsight—started out as bootstrapped businesses. But this wasn’t a choice. “They were bootstrapped because you couldn’t really find [investors],” said Edmunds.
Utah startups have also had a hard time finding the right type of executives. Ten years ago, if a Utah company needed a CFO with experience taking a company public they would have to look outside of the state, Edmunds said. “You had to import them from the Bay Area. That’s changed quite a bit,” he said.
The change is a testament to the success of startups based around Salt Lake City in recent years. “What we’ve always had is really good go-to-market talent. We’ve always had really good engineering talent. It used to be like 50% to 60% of the cost of the Bay Area,” Edmunds said.
That success has helped open techies’ eyes to the area’s potential, particularly its world famous ski slopes and vistas that appear to be straight out of a movie.
“I don’t know of any other place where you can go and park and be in the mountains in seven minutes,” said David Wright, co-founder and CEO of Lehi, Utah-based Pattern, who said he loves to go outside and hike, fish, bike and run.
Salt Lake City has emerged as one of the most vibrant tech hubs in the nation. Last year, Salt Lake had the country’s hottest job market, according to the Wall Street Journal. For over a decade, white-collar workers have left the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles to take jobs in Salt Lake’s tech hub, which is known as “Silicon Slopes,” the story said. (Tech jobs in Utah remained flat in 2023 compared to 2022 but were expected to grow about 5% in 2024, according to CompTIA “State of the Tech Workforce 2024” report.)
Wright acknowledged that there was still a “stigma to Utah” for some people as a result of its deep ties to the Mormon church; some of the criticism, he said, was meritted. “I think there’s been a lot of history around that. And a lot of it’s a fair assessment of Utah,” Wright said.
At last year’s Brainstorm conference, Matthew Prince, the CEO of Cloudflare, said that the state of Utah “has the highest LGBT teen suicide rates in the country, has an incredible challenge around some still very misogynistic practices, and can be in a very exclusionary place.” Prince argued last year that Utah’s deep ties to the insular nature of Mormon culture poses a challenge to its ambitions to become the next Silicon Valley. To secure long-term growth and competitiveness, Prince said it was imperative to embrace a wider spectrum of perspectives, backgrounds, and skill sets.
During Monday’s discussion, Wright said that he wasn’t part of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), also known as the Mormon Church. “I think some things need to be looked at. But from running a company, the talent is there,” he said.
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