Start School Sessions

What does it actually take to survive long enough to build a great company? Silicon Slopes CEO Clint Betts sits down with Vivint co-founder and McColee Partners CEO Keith Nellesen for a Start School session about entrepreneurship, leadership, investing, resilience, and the lessons that come from decades of building businesses. Keith shares the unlikely story behind Vivint, from leaving a promising...

What does it take to build a company worth betting on? Silicon Slopes CEO Clint Betts sits down with Kickstart Founder and General Partner Gavin Christensen for a Start School session about venture capital, entrepreneurship, AI, leadership, and the next generation of Utah’s tech ecosystem. Gavin shares the story of launching Kickstart when seed-stage investing in Utah was still a non-consensus ide...

What does it take to build a company capable of transforming the way we produce, store, and distribute energy? Silicon Slopes CEO Clint Betts sits down with Torus CEO Nate Walkingshaw for a Start School session about entrepreneurship, leadership, energy infrastructure, and the future of one of Utah’s most ambitious companies. Nate shares his unconventional journey from working as an EMT to inventi...

What does it take to build a marketing strategy that actually drives growth? In this Start School session, Silicon Slopes CEO Clint Betts sits down with Jacob Baadsgaard, founder and CEO of Disruptive Advertising, to talk about building a business, understanding your customers, and creating marketing that delivers measurable results. Jacob shares how he grew Disruptive Advertising from a side gig...

Clarke Miyasaki has built a career around turning ordinary products into extraordinary brands. In this Start School session, Silicon Slopes CEO Clint Betts sits down with Clarke, Chief Growth Officer at Stance, to talk about his journey from venture capital to Skullcandy, Stance, and beyond. Clarke shares the lessons he learned building some of the biggest partnerships in consumer marketing, inclu...

In this Start School Session, Clint Betts sits down with Nate Quigley, co-founder and CEO of Chatbooks, to talk about entrepreneurship, product-market fit, leadership, family, and what it really takes to build a company that lasts. Nate shares the story behind Chatbooks, from spending years in the wilderness trying to build a family memory system to the moment his wife Vanessa told him to “just pr...

Carine Clark never planned to follow a conventional career. She started as a librarian, joined Novell during the early days of Utah's tech industry, helped build iconic technology companies, served on the boards of some of Utah's most influential organizations, and eventually became CEO of First Colony Mortgage, where she helped grow the company from roughly $1 billion to more than $7 billion in a...

Joseph Woodbury didn't set out to build another software company. He set out to solve a problem his co-founder experienced firsthand after struggling to find affordable storage. That simple idea grew into Neighbor, the largest self storage marketplace in the United States, connecting people with unused space in their homes, businesses, and storage facilities. In this Start School conversation, Nei...

Ryan Caldwell knows what it's like to build a company through uncertainty. As the Founder and CEO of MX, Ryan set out to solve a deeply personal problem after watching his single mother struggle financially while he received financial advice he didn't actually need. That experience inspired him to build a platform that helps financial institutions empower consumers to become financially stronger....

Curtis Anderson never planned to build a healthcare marketplace. He started by buying a traditional nurse staffing agency and quickly realized the business itself was the problem. Too many middlemen. Too much friction. Too many shifts going unfilled. Instead of optimizing the old system, Curtis decided to replace it. That decision became Nursa, a technology platform that directly connects healthca...

Ryan Gardner never planned to build one of the fastest-growing supplement brands in America. He and his twin brother started by helping other companies generate online traffic. Then they decided to stop building everyone else's business and build one of their own. What began with selling L-Arginine online eventually evolved into Bucked Up, a brand that transformed the supplement industry through t...

Arian Lewis was told in ninth grade that he probably shouldn't plan on going to college. He had ADHD, dyslexia, and struggled academically. Instead of letting that define him, he learned something that would shape the rest of his career. If he couldn't outsmart everyone, he could outwork them. That mindset took him from a scholarship at BYU to an MBA at Oxford, building one of the world's largest...

David Bradford has helped build some of Utah's most iconic technology companies. He joined Novell when it had just a few hundred employees and helped scale it into one of the most important software companies in the world. Along the way, he worked alongside industry legends like Ray Noorda and Eric Schmidt, recruited Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak to Fusion-io, and spent decades leading companies...

Dan Burton never planned to become a CEO. He thought he was going to medical school until one economics class changed everything. After spending a decade building businesses inside large technology companies, Dan joined a five-person healthcare startup called Health Catalyst. Fifteen years later, the company had grown into a publicly traded healthcare technology leader serving more than 1,100 heal...

Mary Crafts started her business with just $150. She was a former social worker, a mother of two young children, and living on welfare when she realized she needed a way to support her family. So she did what entrepreneurs do. She looked for a need and decided to solve it. Armed with a little red wagon full of homemade bread and cookies, she went door to door looking for customers. That small begi...

Brock Blake has started over more times than most entrepreneurs ever will. He launched his first company after winning $50,000 in a BYU entrepreneurship competition. That business grew to $10 million in revenue before he made one of the biggest mistakes of his career by choosing not to sell it. Instead, he used what he learned to launch Lendio, a company that has now helped more than 600,000 small...

John Koelliker didn't start Leland because he wanted to build another AI company. He started it because he believed one person could change another person's life. After building marketplaces at Uber, LinkedIn, and other startups, John realized the power of mentorship, coaching, and human expertise. He set out to build a platform that could scale those relationships and help people land jobs, get i...

David Neeleman has founded five airlines. Morris Air. WestJet. JetBlue. Azul. Breeze Airways. Along the way, he sold a company to Southwest Airlines, built one of the most successful airlines in Brazil's history, changed commercial aviation with innovations like ticketless travel, and returned to the United States to launch Breeze Airways, one of the fastest-growing airlines in the country. In thi...

Ryan Wedig didn't set out to build one of Utah's largest enterprise software companies. He started as a business process consultant without a college degree. A chance introduction led him to work with a small software company solving a niche printing problem. Years later, after building his career at Cisco and earning his MBA, a phone call brought him back to Utah to become a partner in what would...

Steve Daly changed his major six times in college. He started as a pre-med, hit organic chemistry, and decided that wasn't going to work. He went into psychology. Then mechanical engineering. Then got an MBA because he thought he wanted to start an engineering firm. Then decided he no longer wanted to be an engineer. Then spent seven interviews getting rejected before Intel finally hired him. Then...

Andrew Smith started his first company in 1998 because his roommate figured out how to put a Jaguar commercial on the internet. He called Jaguar 400 times until someone picked up. They said how much. He said $125,000. They said cool. He had no idea what an impression was. That was the beginning of a career that would take him from streaming media to wealth management software to construction tech...

Gail Miller was a stay-at-home mom for 44 years. She raised five children while her husband Larry worked 90-hour weeks building what would become one of the most consequential business empires in the history of Utah. She was on paper the co-owner and president of the company from the beginning. But she never worked in it. She lost her voice somewhere along the way. She saw a psychologist for her c...

Brandon Fugal grew up in Pleasant Grove, Utah, reading the Wall Street Journal and Business Week as a teenager. He started in commercial real estate one week out of high school at 18, making $500 his first year, working janitorial jobs at night to put gas in his car, and getting escorted out of office buildings for soliciting. He had his scholarship to BYU revoked because of a D- in algebra in nin...

Brian Beutler was a history major at BYU with a business minor, just in case teaching did not work out. In 1998, while serving a mission in Chile, he noticed that calling home cost him $3 a minute. His parents were paying less than three cents a minute to call him. Same call. Same two people. One hundred times more expensive going one direction than the other. That gap became the idea for Alianza....

Sandi Hendry did not set out to build a company. She set out to comfort her daughter. In 2009, her middle daughter was sick in the hospital. Sandi asked what she could do. Her daughter said she wanted a soft, cozy blanket. But make it cute. That was the beginning of Minky Couture. Sixteen and a half years later, Sandi operates six retail stores across Utah, employs hundreds of people, ships blanke...