Start School Sessions

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...

Derek White has seen the future four times. He helped build the first internet bank. He ran FinTech at Barclays across the UK, Dubai, and Spain. He led Galileo as CEO. Now he's in stealth mode, building what he believes is his most important company yet — one built entirely on AI. In this Start School conversation, Derek sits down with Clint Betts to discuss what he's learned over four decades of...

Will West is a Silicon Slopes legend. He's built multiple successful companies, most notably Control 4, a pioneer in home automation. In this session, Will got honest about what it actually takes to build something worth building. 00:00:00 - Introduction and Background 00:00:54 - Starting a Company in the Age of AI 00:01:25 - Why Be an Entrepreneur? 00:02:08 - Retirement and Starting Again 00:02:3...

John Pestana, co-founder of Omniture and co-founder and CEO of ObservePoint, joins Start School for a candid, wide-ranging conversation about building billion-dollar companies, surviving the AI shift, structuring founders correctly, and why most people fail simply because they never start. From buying 40 million dollars of servers per year in the early days of SaaS to today’s AI-powered one-person...