salt-lake-city
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Jeff Berkson and the bank between paydays
After nearly a decade leading risk at WebBank, Jeff Berkson joined Flex to help organize a bank around the awkward gap between payday and rent day. His proposed next job puts a career in analytics, technology and oversight in charge of a very ordinary monthly problem.
MasterControl's billion-dollar war on paper
A finished batch can still wait days for its paperwork. MasterControl built a business by moving quality checks into the work itself - and waited nearly 30 years to take outside investment.
Dave Smith and the Art of Reading a Room
He joined Penna Powers as an intern in 1993. Three decades later, its partner and CEO is still working out how to reach an audience - in an agency, at a public meeting and on a basketball court.
David Parkinson and the advantage of having been the client
Before he co-founded Method Communications, David Parkinson knew what it felt like to hire an agency and be disappointed. His answer began in Salt Lake City and grew through writing, relationships, and partnerships across borders.
NeoITO and the trouble with a successful prototype
The first version wins you customers. The next version has to survive them. NeoITO has made a business of helping software cross that awkward border.
Dallen Allred Bet the Future of Therapy on Removing the Friction
Two startups taught Dallen Allred the same lesson: access is rarely one big locked door. It is a corridor of small inconveniences - and his career has been spent trying to remove them.
Anne Armistead and the Quiet Art of Doing the Small Things
At Workstream, Anne Armistead works in the measured language of account development. Away from the sales floor, a guitar, a Utah ranch and a preference for overlooked work reveal the more interesting rhythm underneath.
Brandon Brock Has Been Recruiting People Into Rooms His Whole Career
Before he recruited teams for healthcare AI, Brandon Brock built apps, backed restaurants, produced a sailing film and opened a wine bar. The through-line is not an industry. It is his instinct for getting interesting people into the same room.
Menley Stewart and the Art of Listening for What Others Miss
Before software, Stewart helped measure launch noise, jet crackle and small explosions. Her route from acoustics labs to regulated enterprise systems is a study in finding signal inside difficult noise.
Jon Auxier and the Second Charter
He helped turn SoFi into a bank. Now Jon Auxier is doing the quieter, harder sequel at Mercury: translating software ambition into an institution regulators will allow to open its doors.
Ethan Noonan Learned to Hold the Blue Line. Now He Is Selling Speed.
Before he joined Corgi's founding go-to-market team, Ethan Noonan spent years reading pressure from the blue line. His route from youth hockey to startup insurance is a study in repetition, reinvention, and knowing when to make the pass.
The Agency That Put a Face on a Seat Belt
Penna Powers has spent four decades selling the least glamorous product in advertising: a better decision. Its trick is to make the sensible choice feel like the interesting one.
Jason Lyman Wants Martech to Earn Your Attention
The Customer.io CMO built his career on measurement, trade-offs, and customer evidence. Then he set out to make marketing software feel worth noticing again.
Rick Galán Built a Career Measuring What Matters. Now He Gets to Choose What Matters Next.
From search dashboards to fintech scale, Galán has spent two decades turning noisy systems into useful decisions. After six years across Divvy and BILL, his newest project is an unusually honest one: deciding what deserves his attention next.
Four IPOs, One Rhino, and a Better Case for an Accessible Web
After two decades measuring clicks, building products, and scaling digital businesses, Chad Sollis is applying an operator's eye to a stubborn problem: the web still turns away too many of the people it was built to serve.
John Vecchi Has Been Selling the Next Security Problem for 25 Years
From McAfee and Check Point to cloud, IoT and AI-era defense, the Salt Lake City executive has made a career of translating each new attack surface before the market learns its vocabulary.
Mindi Cox Built a Career by Looking Up From the Job
For nearly three decades at O.C. Tanner, she has treated culture less like a slogan and more like a daily operating system - built from open doors, specific gratitude, and the courage to let people do more than their job descriptions.
Parker Ence Wants AI to Take the Notes - So Advisors Can Stay in the Room
A guitar teacher turned four-time tech CEO found his next company hiding in the least glamorous hour of a financial advisor's day: the paperwork after a good conversation.
Leon Chaddock Kept Following the Customer Message
Before every brand wanted an AI assistant, Leon Chaddock was trying to make a tweet behave like a support ticket. His career is a lesson in staying with one stubborn problem while the channels, labels and technology around it keep changing.
Daryl Hancock Spent 25 Years Making Invisible Risks Visible
Before RMEC joined a global compliance group, it began with four partners, a handful of clients and one founder working full-time. Daryl Hancock turned that unglamorous beginning into a 25-year study in making risk legible.
Andy Yakulis Left an Army Pension to Put Yesterday’s Weapons on Notice
After 18 years in uniform, the special operations veteran chose a startup over a near-certain military retirement. At Vector, he is betting that drones, doctrine and training must learn on the same clock.
Rajeshkumar Ganesan Spent 25 Years Learning the Work - Then Built Software to Do It
After a career that ran from code to telecom architecture to RPA program management, the Automatiga founder packaged the entire automation lifecycle into one product. Its 2026 acquisition by qBotica turned a patient operator's accumulated lessons into the next chapter of an agent-first platform.
Morgan Davis Put the Store Floor on Trial
The former consultant and venture investor built MarketDial to give brick-and-mortar retailers a cheaper question: what if we tested the idea before betting every store on it?
Tom Boyden Is Building a Cybersecurity Company Around the People Behind the Screens
A former intelligence officer turned founder, Boyden has spent his career learning that security depends less on collecting more tools than on giving capable people the context to act.
Legato Security’s Bet: Your Cyber Stack Isn’t Broken - It’s Badly Conducted
For security teams buried under alerts and half-integrated tools, the Salt Lake City MSSP sells a practical reset: keep the stack, expose the blind spots, and put accountable humans on watch around the clock.
The Retail World Runs on Guesses. MarketDial Sells Proof.
A pair of Salt Lake City founders - one ex-VC, one ex-McKinsey - built software that lets chains like Kum & Go, Dick's, and Woolworths test a store idea in a few dozen locations before betting the whole business on it. Then they took the incumbent to court.
Vector Sells the Pentagon a Subscription to Modern Warfare
A 14-month-old drone maker out of Salt Lake City wants to sell the U.S. military warfare the way Adobe sells Photoshop - as a service, updated constantly, billed like a subscription.
The Fund That Bet on Utah Before Utah Was a Thing
Kickstart wrote the Mountain West's first seed checks in the middle of a recession. Sixteen years and roughly $500 million later, it is still the region's most active early-stage investor - and still betting the frontier is wide open.
Cafe Rio Fresh Modern Mexican
The Utah chain that refuses to own a freezer built a burrito empire on slow-braised pork and tortillas pressed while you wait. Here is how a chef's side project became a 160-restaurant test of whether "made from scratch" can scale.
Dayna Hathaway
She started at Extra Space Storage buying Yellow Pages ads. Twenty-six years later she runs marketing for the biggest self-storage company in the country.