Matthew Reinbold and I went down to the BYU campus in Provo, Utah for their eBusiness Day. Living in Utah now for about 18 months with no plans to move (hate moving, can’t stand the thought of doing that again) I certainly have an interest in seeing the tech community do well here. The schedule of events included to two keynotes and three panel discussions, focusing on Utah’s image as a tech center, training/education for a tech workforce and funding for companies.
The most interesting part of the event was listening to Josh James, CEO of Omniture. He had no problem bluntly talking about what things that he might do differently and convering what some would consider sensitive issues. The second keynote was from Matt Bowman of Novell, looking back at their history in Utah. This was hard to watch, because Novell’s glory days are long behind them.
The first panel was on “Does Utah’s image Limit Utah’s high-tech corridor?”. Lots of numbers thrown around, but little discussion about the question.
Next up was a panel about “Does Utah get a passing grade for high-tech workforce preparation?”. This one was more interesting because it has some specific give and take on ideas and techniques for educating the next generation of tech workers. Although none of them came out and said it, much of it danced around trade schools versus traditional college/universities.
The final panel covered “Show me the money! Is there enough capital to fund Utah’s high-tech industry?”. Both angel and traditional VC firms were represented on the panel, which helped give wider perspective of the current issues in getting and funding local Utah companies in the current economic conditions. This panel also did the best job in getting the audience questions involved early enough so that a real discussion could take place.
What I found interesting is that through out the whole event there was little (none?) discussion about the mass globalization that has been accelerating over the last 10 years. I can sympathize with the urge to only focus on things local, but there is so much more to the picture in todays world. For instance, I work from home and could live any where with a decent Internet connection. For a variety of reasons we now live in Utah. I didn’t hear a single person talk about attracting virtual office workers to the area. Perhaps that’s a harder section of the market to focus on.
In the end, it was good for me to hear what other people are thinking about; what they see as problems/challenges and how they’d like to solve them. Spending most days working out of my basement might make me a little too sheltered sometimes.
4 replies on “eBusiness Day”
As you know, travel has been the end of my sentences for too long. As I’ve lived around the world, I’ve always worked hard to seek out like minds and tech geeks. I’m always surprised at where I find the most enthusiasm and worldly view, often in unlikely places.
It’s also an ebb and flow process. Some areas are persistently techno joy-filled, while others get it for a short period of time and then the economy, trends, fads, and economic movement of business shift and bend the enthusiasm away from the area.
There are also a lot of people who tell me repeatedly that they are alone in their community when it comes to technological proficiency and capital. Yet they hold a WordPress Meetup and people come out of the walls. 😀
Thanks for the interesting perspective on your introduction to Utah tech. It’s going to be interesting to watch how you handle this new community, or invest more of your time on the virtual community, which many are doing, too.
Honestly, so much of Utah’s culture makes me want to LEAVE. Like you, I can work anywhere there is high speed Internet access, but the only thing keeping me here is that rent is half of what it would be if I moved. Oh yeah, and family.
If my sister moved out of state, I would have no qualms about following her, even if it were Idaho. I’m THAT embarrassed by Utah right now.
I’ve been able to find like minded folks in the more casual get events. From what I saw this event was clearly targeted at two groups of people, students and larger businesses (or those who want to start them). Nothing wrong with that and like I said, it was good to go out of my comfort zone to find out what people in other circles were seeing.
My disappointment and no mention of the whole virtual office trend was that one of the concerns brought up was being able to attract tech talent workforce to the area. Seems at least some percentage of the virtual office workforce could be tempted to move to Utah, there by growing the local tech talent in the area. This is especially true for Provo, which already has a city wide fiber to the home infrastructure, making high speed Internet access available to just about everyone in the city. Sadly, there’s no fiber to the home in Sandy 🙁
I don’t have any problem living in Utah and I don’t even ski 🙂
I can sympathize in this events efforts to focus on the local aspects of business, funding, talent, etc. Looking locally is a pretty natural instinct for most people. That said there are increasing trends like the virtual office employee that should get some recognition. With communication getting faster and the ability to travel being pretty easy we shouldn’t hesitate to talk about operating within a wide community.