A roundtable with Utah’s tech leaders
This month, Utah Business partnered with Dentons Durham Jones Pinegar to host a roundtable event featuring Utah’s tech industry leaders. Moderated by Wendy Steinle, CMO at Domo, they discussed recent layoffs, company resilience, the role of AI and more. Here are a few highlights from the event.
How are recent layoffs impacting your employees and your internal culture? What are you doing to reassure employees?
Amelia Wilcox | Founder & CEO | Nivati
We’ve had to be more intentional with our communications and provide more transparency. Even if you say, “Here are our revenue numbers. We’re doing great,” [after the Silicon Valley Bank crash], I had to sit down with my team and say, “This is our bank account balance and here’s our financial plan. Everything is still going as planned. We’re OK.” Because we’re a remote team, we have to be even more intentional and transparent and repeat things to employees more often to make them feel calm and secure in their jobs.
Scott Johnson | Founder & CEO | Motivosity
We have this mantra internally: “Play your own game.” Oftentimes in the tech community, you feel this pressure to raise a lot of money, grow fast, buy a big office and do all the external indicators of success. We haven’t done any of that. In times like this, you get to point back to that and say, “We’ve been real all along.” We’re not in a situation where we need to worry that we’ve gotten out over our skis because we haven’t.
What are you doing in your companies to stay resilient in this economy?
Tom Compagno | Co-founder & CTO | Dónde
At Dónde, we have customers that are laying off people. That impacts us as an employee-based benefit program, but at the same time, they’re now spending more money on the employees that they still have and upping those costs. The spend among our existing customers is increasing. Dónde’s small, so we’re not necessarily pivoting, but we’re taking advantage of those opportunities when we see them.
Grant Gordon | Co-founder, Artemis | Head of Special Projects, Nomi Health
At Nomi, they’ve been doing a good job of actually taking the profit from their Covid business and buying businesses that are resilient in a down economy. At Artemis, which is still a big piece of Nomi, we had to get a jumpstart on this. When the pandemic hit, we were one of the businesses where demand in our whole industry basically went to zero. We started formatting our whole business model to something much more resilient—going out and partnering with advisers for benefits in a much more fundamental way. We had to reimagine the whole company, and we’re pretty much done with that pivot after two years now.
Amelia Wilcox | Founder & CEO | Nivati
You would think the numbers of people experiencing anxiety and depression would start to subside now that the pandemic is starting to disappear, but what we’ve seen is a collective building of chronic stress on people’s shoulders. People are actually doing worse now than they were in 2020 from a mental health standpoint. We are doing a lot more around educating our clients on how to help their employees. Internally, we are doing meditations with our team every week. They get mental health days. We have three designated mental health days in the month of May, which is mental health month, where our office will be closed so our team can take those days. There’s more of “practicing what we preach” and ensuring our employees have those same resources.
Tom Compagno | Co-founder & CTO | Dónde
We’re a small startup, and most of our employees have no startup experience. As we’ve grown, we’ve been more transparent with our employees about how we are doing, saying, “This is how much money we have in the bank; this is how you can affect that top line and bottom line,” suddenly, everybody feels much more ownership. They take the hits with us. I definitely feel like the team has more resilience and jumps into things much more than they used to.
Scott Johnson | Founder & CEO | Motivosity
Employees need regular and frequent recognition multiple times per week. They need a constructive relationship with their boss or manager, and then they need a social fabric in the place they work where they feel like they’re more than just part of the team. Put these things together, and there’s a high correlation between not just retention but how well they take care of their customers, how well they solve problems for the company and how well they represent the brand of the company. Our values are, “Stay young, serve always and love what you do.” Lastly, it’s important to have a very, very clear mission. When everybody knows the mission of the company, we can rally around it with common values and appreciate each other for what we’re doing.
"You would think the numbers of people experiencing anxiety and depression would start to subside now that the pandemic is starting to disappear, but what we've seen is a collective building of chronic stress on people's shoulders. People are actually doing worse now than they were in 2020 from a mental health standpoint."
What are your company’s plans for hybrid work? How are you creating culture in the workplace?
Sarah Matthews | Shareholder & Registered Patent Attorney | Dentons Durham Jones Pinegar
What we’re finding is that hybrid and remote positions can also affect diversity in the office, too. Statistically, if you have college graduates among men and women, women will choose to work from home more often than men will choose it. We’re carefully crafting in-person meetings and requiring everyone to attend those. We just had a retreat last week in Puerto Vallarta for the entire firm. We serve clients globally, and if attorneys find that they can do that best remotely, they can still do that. We provide opportunities to build culture but then allow the attorneys to do the work that they know how to do best.
Grant Gordon | Co-founder, Artemis | Head of Special Projects, Nomi Health
At Artemis, we give teams the autonomy to set up their own in-person schedules. We also get everybody together at least once a year. We encourage teams to get together as frequently as they feel makes sense. Everyone will fly in if they’re remote or come into the office if they’re local. When we do that, we try to block it off so there’s time not only to do work, but hang out, go to dinner and build in some unstructured social time. Culture was so big for us prior to the pandemic. As a founder, I realized that’s really the only lever I have—besides hiring executives—to influence anyone.
What AI tools are you using? How can we get the most out of AI and ensure we are transcending its inherent bias?
Grant Gordon | Co-founder, Artemis | Head of Special Projects, Nomi Health
From a marketing perspective, I think calling this technology “AI” is the biggest mistake that the engineers ever made. There’s no artificial intelligence here. “Garbage in, garbage out”—it’s about the engineers and the data scientists who train those models. ChatGPT is just taking huge swaths of text on the internet and training models on it. What we’re looking at is a mirror of what we fed it. There’s a tremendous responsibility on the people building those things, and they have a lot of decisions to make about their values.
Amelia Wilcox | Founder & CEO | Nivati
Research shows that certain populations of people feel more comfortable disclosing their mental health challenges to a bot than they do to a person. So we’re watching AI and its applications in the mental health space really closely. How do we make sure we have something for everyone, whether it’s talking to a therapist, watching a video on breathing techniques or talking to a robot? The biggest challenge we hear in the mental health space is people can’t get in to see someone fast enough. If mental health issues continue to expand and there are limited resources, [we’re looking at] leveraging other resources for the people who could benefit from those.
Saul Leal | CEO | OneMeta AI
Back in November, we got access to an early edition of ChatGPT. I told my kids, “You have to use it at least once a week to do homework”…[My son] went in and said, “Write an essay in a 13-year-old vocabulary,” and it did. I tell the machine, “What are the sources? Give me all the sources for every sentence,” and it will give it to you. But why are those not given to you in the first place? That’s one of the things that’s concerning.
The interesting thing is that these models, and the acceleration of how these models get better, is really, really fast. Economics will change dramatically within the next year and a half. Staffing agencies, for instance—a lot of that work will be done by bots. Then what are humans doing? We have to think about how the bar is being raised and how managing these tools can elevate us all. AI isn’t taking human jobs—it’s more about AI increasing the capacity of humans at a larger level. That capacity may displace other people in the organization because one person can do more than they could before.
How can we attract more women in Utah to the benefits of careers in SaaS, and how can we increase the industry’s appeal to working parents?
Saul Leal | CEO | OneMeta AI
Andrea, my oldest girl, loves to code. The boys, not that much. I think it has to do with giving those opportunities early so they can choose what they want. Utah has its values pretty straight at its core: “I want to help the next generation.” Ultimately, that’s why I love this question. How do we align those needs and ultimately fulfill our greatest job, which is mentoring the next generation? As companies, I think that’s what we need to look at.
Scott Johnson | Founder & CEO | Motivosity
Utah leads the nation by more than double the national average of the percentage of children that are 18 years old or younger who have a full-time parent at home. And I think that’s a success, not a failure. I think we still need to play our own game and not feel bad as long as we look at our stats through the right lens.
Amelia Wilcox | Founder & CEO | Nivati
I think it starts with education. There are multiple organizations, even just here in Utah, that help women gain basic SaaS skills. Step one is, how do we expose them at a young age and paint that picture? You can’t be what you can’t see. Providing flexible education opportunities [is important] because there are a lot of young mothers in Utah. How can they get some of those skills and training while staying at home? The third level of that would be inviting them to the table.
What being a stay-at-home mom meant 15 or 20 years ago is a little bit different than now. I’ve raised all three of my kids as a stay-at-home mom. There are so many women whose family is their first priority, but they want to also contribute to the economy and to the community. I don’t think we need 50/50 gender parity across everything because that’s not representative of what the community wants. At the same time, for parents that do want to work and contribute, we can be better about providing opportunities for people to contribute at whatever levels they’re at in their life through flexible working opportunities. 
