Utah tech grew up on Silicon Valley’s playbook. Silicon Slopes wants to move on.

A decade after Silicon Slopes got its start, the Utah tech-advocacy group is asking itself an existential question, said co-founder Clint Betts: “What does it mean to be an entrepreneur in 2026?”

Utah tech, he says, has “great companies, great founders, a culture that values building things.” But it has relied on the traditional way of doing business: “Raise money, grow fast, hope for an exit. ... We’ve imported Silicon Valley’s model without asking if it actually works for most of the entrepreneurs in this state.”

The nonprofit’s Summit conference this week attracted around 10,000 people to Salt Lake City, according to Visit Salt Lake CEO and President Kaitlin Eskelson. They came amid a fundamental shift in tech, one characterized by nimbler, AI-fueled businesses that hire fewer employees.

Amid economic uncertainty and slowing tech-job growth, speakers asked the crowds to seek inspiration from outside the industry, in music, sports and culture. And Betts announced a new effort called Start School that will pair budding entrepreneurs in Utah with experienced executives to learn to eschew the old playbook and instead “build something real, profitable and sustainable.”

This year’s conference also featured far more women panelists than in past years, said Silicon Slopes board member Ryan Westwood.

When the conference began in 2016, it was focused on nurturing Utah’s burgeoning tech community, which had made a name for itself with a handful of “unicorn” companies, like Qualtrics, Domo and Pluralsight. Betts said the event hit a peak in 2020, when it brought in Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“​​Then COVID hit two months later, and once that changed, the whole world changed,” Betts said. “And now we’re at a point where we get to look and say, ‘Hey, what do we do now?’”

One idea, Eskelson said, is to transform the conference into an event that could help fill the void left as one of the state’s largest cultural draws, Sundance Film Festival, departs to Colorado.

Eskelson and Betts have visions of creating Salt Lake City’s version of South by Southwest, an Austin, Texas, conference focused on innovation and community that brings in speakers from sports, entertainment, arts and culture — all anchored by technology.

“However that shakes out, we’re sort of in the infancy, so we’re not really sure, but I think that we just need a place to be able to navigate through life with like-minded individuals,” she said.

More than a tech conference

Much of the Summit’s metamorphosis has already begun.

On Wednesday, Lavanya Mahate, the founder of the Salt Lake City-based RISE Culinary Institute, led a session teaching business leaders to find balance in their lives. Earlier in the day, Imagine Dragons frontman Dan Reynolds and his brother Mac, the founder of Night Street Games, talked about creativity and the connection between music and gaming.

Later, Bronson Kaufusi, the Utah native who played football at Brigham Young University before being drafted by the Baltimore Ravens, discussed investing and entrepreneurship with current and former NFL players.

In one session, an all-female panel discussed the value of motherhood and volunteerism; they encouraged audience members to showcase that experience when preparing their resumes.

Susan Madsen, who teaches leadership at Utah State University, told attendees that mothers learn a lot from their children, like how to accept that “everything can’t be perfect,” as well as “how to comprehend human and organizational systems” and deal with bad attitudes. “Those,” she said, “are all leadership skills.”

Titania Arimbi, who works at the Indonesian consulate in Los Angeles, said she’d seen a lot that impressed her at the conference. She drew inspiration, for instance, from a speech by mountaineer Jenn Drummond, the first woman to scale the seven second-highest mountains on each continent. Drummond has seven kids.

“I was like, ‘Wow. And she can still do that?’,” Arimbi said. “I think everyone, if they try, they can do that as well.”

She got another important insight about Utah while walking down the street with her colleagues. A stranger stopped them to say her friend’s shoe was untied. “That gives me an idea of how you guys are going to do business,” Arimbi said. “If something is wrong, you guys are going to tell.”

On the conference floor, Anuj Gupta, co-founder of the Florida-based IT and cybersecurity company Fortellar, took a business call between sessions while sitting in a circle of Adirondack chairs near the entrance.

After he put down the phone, he said that the Summit had been on his radar for years, but this was his first chance to attend. He wondered how Silicon Slopes “created this movement.”

He keyed in on Utah’s “ecosystem,” how business, government and culture “lean on each other to drive ideas.” Gupta said he’d already connected with a local company that he thinks that relationship could turn into a partnership.

Who gets to build

With Start School, Betts, the Silicon Slopes CEO, is looking to democratize Utah’s tech scene — and teach new tech founders how to succeed in a world changed by AI.

The traditional formula, Betts said, tended to lead Utah entrepreneurs down one path. They sought to raise bundles of venture capital and hire big teams that worked in or near Lehi. The goal was to become a unicorn — a startup with a valuation of more than $1 billion.

Such opportunities were mostly open to people who already had connections. Women and Black entrepreneurs, he said, have received only a small portion of the available venture capital.

Start School, Betts said, can change that.

“We talk about community here, we talk about lifting each other up,” he said. “But if access to the best resources requires knowing someone who’s already in, then we’re not actually extending opportunity to everyone.”

The program will pair new entrepreneurs with some of Silicon Slopes’ most successful founders — those who have built companies valued at $100 million or more. There will also be a heavy emphasis on using AI to keep costs down and bolster sales.

“We can produce more $10 million companies owned entirely by the people who built them than $1 billion companies owned mostly by investors,” Betts said. He hopes to show that “growing slowly and thoughtfully is a legitimate strategy.”

Beyond the unicorn

Near the back of a cordoned-off section of the conference floor, in an area called “Startup Alley,” Julian Jerzerick set up a test station for his Heber City-based company, ag3nt.homes.

His software uses AI to analyze photos of home listings to find characteristics beyond the usual metrics, like price range and number of bedrooms, to provide home-buyers a map showing homes that fit their needs.

That can save users time and aggravation as they try to figure out which houses are closest to their workplace, or have access to their preferred schools. They can also cite phrases like “Cape Cod style with built-ins” or “older homes with wood floors,” to further dial in their search.

The company formed late last year, and it is still “pre-seed,” meaning Jerzerick and his team of mostly family members are still developing the product. That’s why he said he wanted to be at this conference — to get feedback that can make his product better.

He learned a lot as users fiddled with his site. Most of them liked it, he said, while others were more critical. He found out, for example, that AI was having a hard time sussing out characteristics like arched doorways.

The feedback “gives me a lot of confidence,” he said, as he hopes to make his site available in Utah, Arizona and Florida this spring.

One thing he isn’t seeking: outside investors.

“If we concentrate on the end user experience, make it so good that they don’t want to leave, the investment money will come eventually.”

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