Clint Betts and the art of getting Utah in the room

Before there were conference stages, there was a cinder block garage in Spanish Fork, Utah. Clint Betts remembers throwing a baseball against its wall for hours. In his account of those days, the boy doing the throwing imagined getting away from the state and the circumstances in which he was growing up. The ball offered something satisfyingly straightforward: throw it, retrieve it, throw it again.

Years later, he saw the garage again. He was living only minutes away. Utah, the place he once intended to put behind him, had become the place around which he built his work. It is a modest geographical journey for someone whose calendar would eventually include conversations with Mark Zuckerberg. A few minutes can cover a considerable distance.

Betts is the co-founder and CEO of Silicon Slopes, the nonprofit serving Utah’s entrepreneurial community. He also leads CEO.com. His public work moves between writing, interviewing, convening, and making introductions. The recurring question is practical: how does someone outside a circle find a way into it? His career supplies several answers, beginning with the decidedly inexpensive technology of a sentence.

A blog becomes a meeting place

In 2013, Betts founded Beehive Startups to cover Utah’s entrepreneurs and companies. He had studied journalism and political science at Utah Valley University. Writing about the businesses around him gave those interests a local address. Before the summits and their speaker schedules, there were people building things who needed someone to explain what they were doing.

An early interview in 2014 catches his tone before the institutional titles grew longer. He described Utah founders as hard workers with something to prove and a distrust of the establishment. He also joked about the state’s alcohol culture. The pitch combined local pride with a willingness to tease the place he was promoting. Utah could withstand a joke; it might even benefit from one.

By January 2015, he was appearing as Beehive Startups’ editor on a panel about whether Silicon Slopes lived up to its marketing. The company included investor Gavin Christensen and Overstock chairman Jonathan Johnson. The subject was useful precisely because it allowed questions: where would talent come from, what should government do, and what infrastructure would growth require? A community needed somewhere to argue as well as applaud.

Beehive Startups joined forces with Silicon Slopes in a nonprofit entity in 2016. The Silicon Slopes name already had a history as a branding initiative associated with Domo founder Josh James. Keeping those histories distinct matters. Betts’s contribution grew from a publication into an organization that could put people together repeatedly, with a shared identity that extended beyond any one company.

The invitation had to travel

In a 2019 conversation with Pete Codella, Betts described Silicon Slopes as both a name for Utah’s technology community and an organization serving it. His geography ran from Logan to St. George, with chapters in places including Ogden and Price. He reported more than 200 events a year at that point. The summit was the conspicuous gathering; the smaller meetings supplied continuity.

He had also become a radio host and magazine publisher. A Sunday morning KSL program and a quarterly magazine gave the work different rhythms. An event ends when people leave the room. A broadcast travels with them. A written account can reach someone who never received an invitation. Together, those formats made the organization’s calendar something closer to an ongoing conversation.

There were material questions beneath the welcome. In May 2019, Betts appeared before the Salt Lake County Council as chair of the Salt Lake Chamber’s Housing Gap Coalition. He discussed housing as a central challenge accompanying technology growth. If a place attracts employers while becoming harder to afford, its success poses an awkward question for the people who already call it home.

His work has also taken that community argument outside Utah. He appeared among the speakers in the International Telecommunication Union’s 2024 Global Innovation Forum in Malta, in a discussion of partnerships and entrepreneurship. The local project had become something other places could examine. Its usefulness still depended on what happened back in Utah, between the big public occasions.

A microphone, without the velvet rope

In January 2020, Betts interviewed Mark Zuckerberg at the Silicon Slopes Tech Summit. The questions ranged across social media polarization, communication, future products, and the responsibilities of a founder. It was the kind of encounter that brings a regional conference national attention. Betts later singled it out as an experience he would remember.

The attraction of that stage is easy to see. A founder building far from the familiar centers of technology gets to hear a prominent executive explain decisions and mistakes in person. The interviewer’s task is to turn access into something useful for the audience. Celebrity gets people seated. A worthwhile question gives them a reason to keep listening.

CEO.com gave Betts another venue for those conversations. When its launch was covered in 2020, he emphasized building a community and working out the revenue model along the way. Its present-day interview catalog reaches across industries, from workwear and financial infrastructure to leadership and artificial intelligence. The recurring object is a person making decisions inside an organization, rather than a product announcement on its own.

He kept writing alongside the interviews. A personal website now presents a book project called Chance, with opening chapters available to read, as well as letters and short stories. There is a pleasing continuity here: after all the events, executives, and microphones, he still makes space for a page and the work of finding the next sentence.

Books belong in the count, too

One of Betts’s earlier community projects measured progress in books. In December 2015, Beehive Startups, United Way, and the Start Foundation launched Startup Santa, a drive for children in low-income neighborhoods. By an early January 2016 account, it had collected approximately 13,000 books. A startup community had been asked to assemble something that could fit on a child’s shelf.

The choice makes sense beside his attachment to writing. It also offers a useful scale for understanding the word service. An industry can celebrate itself through valuations and conference attendance. A book drive asks its companies to help with a need outside their own businesses. The result is countable, ordinary, and capable of being read at bedtime.

In 2024, Silicon Slopes partnered with the Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation. Betts publicly discussed school lunch debt as part of that effort. These projects sit alongside the business programming, giving the organization relationships with people whose immediate concerns do not involve a funding round. A statewide community has to recognize more than one kind of balance sheet.

A different finish line for founders

Betts’s interest in helping companies get started predates Silicon Slopes’ current programs. In June 2015, Beehive Startups announced StartStudio, offering accepted young technology companies product-development help, professional services, mentoring, and up to $100,000 in funding. He described a program whose duration could follow the work of building the company, rather than a rigid timetable. It was an early attempt to make starting less precarious.

By 2022, with startup financing slowing, his advice had a more austere sound: focus on productivity, revenue, and managing talent. That is a less glamorous agenda than celebrating a round of investment. It is also the agenda that remains when investment becomes harder to obtain. A business still needs customers and people able to serve them.

In February 2026, he unveiled Start School at the Silicon Slopes Summit. It was announced as free, without equity stakes, demo days, or pitch competitions. Applicants would be considered for their commitment rather than their connections or appeal to investors. The stated aim was sustainable, profitable businesses, including the many businesses that would never fit a venture-capital model.

“We’re building something for the other 99%,” he said. The number expressed his argument about whom conventional startup support leaves out; it was his framing, rather than a measure of the school’s results. Start School’s design gives that argument a practical test: can an entrepreneurial organization make itself useful to people whose ambitions have different sizes and speeds?

By March 31, Betts reported that Start School had received more than 1,000 applications, accepted more than 350 companies, and attracted more than 150 volunteer mentors. Those were his early participation counts. They showed interest in the invitation; the longer work would be helping those founders turn attendance and advice into businesses that could last.

“We’re building something for the other 99%.”

Clint Betts · On Start School, February 2026

The writer comes back to the neighborhood

His advice to students has remained unusually literary for a technology executive. “Learn how to read and learn how to write,” he told Utah Valley University. He sees communication as valuable even as artificial intelligence changes the work people do. Explaining an idea, persuading another person, and making a vision understandable remain central to his account of how companies get built.

In July 2026, he explained why he was building Utahn, a journalism project concerned with the state’s future. He named Orwell, Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson, and Wallace Stegner among his influences. The essay argued for scrutinizing leaders’ answers as Utah changes. After years spent helping a business community tell its story, he was making a case for asking that community and its leaders harder questions.

That adds an interesting obligation to the familiar work of gathering people. An organizer wants participation. A journalist needs room to question the participants. Betts has chosen work that puts both demands close together. How he handles that proximity will matter more than any tidy account of a blog becoming a nonprofit.

The route from the Spanish Fork garage now includes a book drive, a magazine, conference stages, founder programs, and another local publication. His LinkedIn biography manages the geographic part with one word: Utahn. It is an economical description for someone who has spent years explaining the place to other people. The boy once imagined leaving. The adult keeps finding another reason to write about home.