She’s keeping Utah friendly for tech

Sunny Washington is founder and CEO of Utah Tech Leads, a nonprofit working with businesses to make sure state policies reflect the values of the rapidly growing tech community. By Paul Ust

Silicon Slopes is the hub of Utah's startup and tech community, and Sunny Washington (@sunnywash) wants to keep it that way. As the co-founder and CEO of Utah Tech Leads, a nonprofit that helps elect, through a PAC, Utah state legislative candidates who support entrepreneurship and business investment.

Growth is happening in spades in this small state of 3 million people. Sunny talks about how the local social dynamic has changed over the last decade, and how her organization is working to sustain growth with intention—with an eye on preserving the quality of life Utah’s residents desire.

Archie: You’ve been building tech companies in Utah for 20 years. What excites you most about Silicon Slopes?

Sunny: We’re building this amazing ecosystem, which means tech companies that are growing and doing well here are major contributors to the state’s economy. But then also, these companies have exits, and the founders either start new companies or they become investors here and we’re kind of seeing that waterfall effect.

Archie: How do you think Utah has been able to build  its reputation capital so quickly?

Sunny: I think with Utah, just culturally there is just a feeling of entrepreneurship that’s very common. We started to see a shift when we saw the type of venture capital being invested, especially outside capital coming in from Bay Area investors and East coast investors. We’re not trying to be the Bay Area. We try to distinguish ourselves, and some of the things we really love are the quality of life that we can have here; it’s a very family-oriented state. I remember working in San Francisco at one point and I was the only one out of 30 people who had kids and that’s pretty unusual in Utah, where most people start young families. We have a fairly young and educated population. 

Archie: What’s one of the biggest challenges of building a company in Utah?

Sunny: The reality is that because tech companies are growing so rapidly here, we don’t have enough of the tech talent pool that we need, so that does require companies to recruit out-of-state. We need more engineers, we need more product managers. So one of the biggest challenges is hiring quality talent. 

Archie: How does Utah contend with the notion that it’s a conservative state when trying to attract talent and companies? 

Sunny: We’re at times struggling to clarify our state brand. Utah is a conservative state, no doubt, but I would say the tech community is more socially progressive and fiscally conservative, so we’re kind of this weird hybrid group. Some of the cultural things like the Mormon missionaries have made this a state that likes immigration and appreciates different cultures, which is unusual for a conservative place. We’re always trying to explain Utah, and sometimes our legislators make us look pretty terrible. They’ll say something that makes headlines, and as companies we’re having to say, “No, no, listen…we are very welcoming, we do care about diversity, we do want different experiences of people who look differently and think differently here because it helps our companies.”

Archie: What sectors are distinguishing Utah’s tech landscape?

Sunny: We’ve got a lot of little industries involved, which is nice so we’re not so singularly focused. Fintech is quite large, and some of the leading companies here include Divvy, a spend management platform, Lendio, a business lending firm, and Finicity, an open banking platform.  We also have a lot of Biotech companies because we have the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, which is a Tier 1 research university. A lot of the growth we’re seeing now though is in B2B SaaS companies. Some of the other big growth sectors are EdTech, where a company called Instructure, a learning management system canvas, is making great strides. Also crypto and custodial services, Web3 and Dao. We see a really big opportunity with the growth of that market in this state. 

Archie: Can you give us a flavor of some newer companies that could emerge as stars?

Sunny: Sure, there's MarketDial, which allows companies to do A/B testing throughout the sales process. They have a really phenomenal CEO there, Morgan Davis. Lucid is a charting and collaboration application and I would suspect at some point there’s an IPO on the horizon. Scorpion is a company that was based in Southern California but moved to Utah; they help with marketing for SME businesses. There’s a great company called Dree that offers gig economy work for laundry. Their theme is, “we take laundry off your to-do list.” 

Archie: Why did you start Utah Tech Leads, and what are you trying to accomplish?

Sunny: Elizabeth Converse and I started it in November of last year. Even though tech represents one of seven jobs in Utah, we didn’t have much representation when it came to the Utah state legislature from a policy side or the representation side. So we wanted to change that and make sure we had a seat at the table for policies and representatives who understood what we would need to sustain the growth of the tech sector. 

Archie: What’s something that distinguishes Utah from other tech hubs?

Sunny: We’re intentional about growth. We don’t want to be San Francisco, where you see more inequality, and more billionaires per capita, but also more of the social problems that come with greater inequality. We want to look at how we grow here, how tech grows, and how the rest of the community grows with us.