Technology entrepreneurs: roundtable.

• Position: Industry Outlook - Discussion

Our panel of technology executives agrees that the industry has come a long way in a short period of time, but many see fundamental issues--like support for mid-stage companies and a persistent talent shortage--that still need to be addressed.

Cody Broderick

inWhatLanguage

Justin Bott

Grow Utah

Manny Chavez

Impact Video Cards

Owen Fuller

Boombox

Bret Jepsen

Clearlink

Steve Kieffer

Big-D Construction

Robb Kunz

BoomStartup

Andrew Laver

GOED

Frank Maylett

RizePoint

Eric Montague

Executech

David Nixon

JLL

Mitch Torrie

ASI

Jason Wells

Convirza

Q A

Let's start with resources for entrepreneurs in the startup and tech community. What are we doing well? Where do we lack resources? How can we help solve that problem?

JEPSEN: Most of my experience has been in the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm kind of a newbie to Utah; I've been here for about three years. I feel like there are too many silos in Utah. And it also feels like there's kind of the haves and the have nots in the industry. There's really six companies that seem to capture the vast majority of the venture capital dollars. And for some reason, that gets--I wouldn't say legislators, but their advisors--comfortable with the status quo of I venture capital in Utah. Even though we have these companies that are doing well, we are still way behind where we could be given the amount of talent, given the universities.

Life science in particular is so far behind where it should be. Given the technology, given the wonderful universities we have here, the amount of dollars that flow here, it's pathetic. Even on the IT side of things, we're seeing some interesting companies emerging. But for the most part, it still doesn't feel like the San Francisco Bay Area, where you have a whole bunch of companies that are getting funding. And you don't have these entrepreneurs that have been slugging away at it for five or 10 years. Those guys get funded really quickly out in the Bay Area. Why doesn't that happen here?

KUNZ: A decade ago, we didn't have a lot of angel capital flowing in the early stages. We've done an excellent job bringing that new capital to the market. We've got a number of seed funds that have launched. So next, there was some capital here in Utah, but there wasn't a place for the startup entrepreneurs to go and connect and do peer-to-peer mentoring. Five years ago we didn't have any co-locations. Now I almost think we're going to become oversaturated in the co-location space. So I think we've nailed those pieces. There's been tons of stuff in the community to really address the startup ecosystem.

These are early-stage, first-time founders, maybe second-time founders, but they're all really starting to connect and grow and have capital available to them. So now the big gap is that next level of companies--it's really hard to hit a million, but once you hit a million, to take that company and make it go to 10 million in a very short period of time. That's our big gap now. That's our weakness. We need resources wrapped around helping our companies really grow from one million to 10. Because once we do that, then the next piece is going to be from 10 to 100 million. And then hopefully we can get those companies and entrepreneurs to go positive exit so that brain trust can come back into the community and start basically all over again with their original founding teams.

It's the other resources that these entrepreneurs need, which is more seasoned, mature people around them. "How do I scale and go national, if not global? How do I open up a market in Europe?" Those are some of the issues you have going from one to 10 million that you never think of when you're a startup. At BoomStartup, we're now focusing on that as one of our key initiatives around growth acceleration versus startup acceleration. We'll still do startup, we'll always do that, but we also acknowledge that this gap in the market needs to be addressed.

LAVER: When I started 15 years ago, there were a number of funds that were investing venture capital in life science companies. But, basically, all those firms have either gone away or have changed their focus from both IT and life science and to only doing the IT software sort of stuff. It is a huge problem. And that funding gap is almost practically the whole spectrum in life science, from seed to venture to later stage. I don't know that we can just wave a magic wand and have a bunch of funds here that start to invest in life sciences.

When I first started, Utah was a flyover state for investors. And now everybody, at least on the IT side, knows Utah. Most of the big venture funds have done a deal here or looked at a deal here. So I would like to see life sciences become a little bit more integrated into that and get some of those firms to just pay a...