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SALT LAKE CITY — Thousands gathered Thursday and Friday in Salt Lake City to be inspired, uplifted and informed by leaders of the tech and startup worlds as Silicon Slopes kicked off its inaugural tech conference.
Silicon Slopes Summit is the product of a merge between Silicon Slopes, an organization that seeks to provide resources for technology companies, people, investors and organizations associated with Utah, and Beehive Startups, an organization that helps empower entrepreneurs in Utah.
Clint Betts, director of Beehive Startups and the Silicon Slopes Summit event, noted his, and others’, desires to unite two fast-growing aspects of Utah’s demographic.
“We thought… how do we unite Utah’s startup and tech communities behind one compelling vision, one organization? How do we get all the major players behind one thing rather than having a splintered community with all these different organizations? And this is what we came up with,” Betts said.
Now, both Beehive Startups and Silicon Slopes will capitalize on the Silicon Slopes brand, but Betts hopes entrepreneurs and tech startups will come together to create something powerful enough to bring national and global recognition to the Beehive State.
Like the South by Southwest conference in Austin, TX, which celebrates the convergence of the interactive, film and music industries, Betts expects the Silicon Slopes Summit to help Utah and its economy receive international attention. The summit is planned the same week as Sundance so that Utah “really kind of has the national focus of the entire country and the world… for this week,” Betts said.
So far, Utah has been known more as a regional tech hub, but this event may begin to draw enough national and global attention to bring Silicon Slopes the attention its growth deserves.
“So how this will affect Utah is amazing from an economic development standpoint, from a recruiting standpoint, from a branding, not just of Silicon Slopes, but a branding of Utah standpoint,” Betts said.
“Getting people to come to this state and see how great it is, see the number of amazing entrepreneurs, amazing companies who are here is just unbelievable. So this event, I think, will be the cornerstone of our organization’s efforts to make us a global and national innovation hub because it will bring so many people from around the world to Utah this week,” he said.
Silicon Slopes announced the event on Dec. 6, and had 5,000 people register in the six weeks between the announcement and the conference. It also organized a line-up of speakers and presenters from Utah companies, like Qualtrics and Vivint, as well as musicians, including world-renowned DJ Kascade, and actor Michael Peña.
Silicon Slopes will now have a full year to plan and prepare for the next summit and Betts expects exponential growth. In fact, he promises some great things already in the works that will be announced at the conference Friday night.
“It really starts to grow and accentuate everything that’s great about Utah, everything that’s great about Utah entrepreneurs, Utah companies, Utah tech,” Betts said. “So I think from a Utah perspective it’s just amazing. Our challenge and our focus and the thing that we need to do in the years to come is make sure this is a world-class, can’t-miss event every single year.”
The organization’s motto relies on three pillars which sum up its goals and purpose: Learn, Connect and Serve. Betts says these pillars are the cornerstone of the organization and the efforts to build Utah into a global and national tech hub.
“What we care about (at the summit) is the content, the speakers,” Betts said. “They have to be phenomenal, you have to walk out of there after two days like, ‘Wow, I really learned something, I really connected with fellow entrepreneurs, fellow innovators, fellow creators and lastly, I really have this drive now to serve and give back.’”
Liesl is a web reporter at KSL.com, section editor of KSL's Tech and Science section and a student at Brigham Young University. You can email her at lnielsen@ksl.com.
