By William R. Adams
Almost a decade has passed since Josh James christened the area connecting Salt Lake and Utah Counties as Silicon Slopes. James, the founder of Omniture and Domo, originally chose the nickname as a nod to the technology metropolis of Northern California and as a bit of a marketing ploy to garner attention for Utah’s own nascent tech scene.1
Since that time, Silicon Slopes has kept Utah’s press corps busy and propelled its business community to lead the nation in economic growth.2 The few original acres surrounding Thanksgiving Point have expanded to include most of the Wasatch Front, comprising dozens of startups and even spawning four unicorns.3 As the proliferation of tech companies has continued, businesses have turned to local universities to fuel their growth. For Brigham Young University, the response to such explosive growth is the formation of what some have called “the newest, hottest club on campus”: the BYU Tech Club.
The story of BYU’s Tech Club begins in late 2014. John Koelliker was a sophomore on an investment banking recruiting trip in San Francisco. Amidst the stops to different financial institutions, the group paid a visit to Facebook’s corporate headquarters. A light bulb went on in John’s head: “We should be placing more top students at tech companies in Silicon Valley!”
Returning to school, John couldn’t find an organization specifically designed to help students from every major learn more about tech and get connected to opportunities at companies like Google or Apple. “There were several niche clubs trying to get a toe hold,” he recalls, “but nothing substantial was happening because none of them had as their driving purpose placement in elite tech companies.” Continuing to research, John found that most of the top universities across the nation had a technology club with just that purpose. If BYU was going to capitalize on Utah’s tech boom, it needed to take deliberate action.
The following schoolyear (2015) John tried to get his idea off the ground, but without a network—and no experience in the industry—the logistics proved to be too much. “So I went back to the drawing board. I spent hours and hours calling alumni, sending emails to anyone in tech. I flew out to Silicon Valley. I applied for every position I could find online.” The hustle paid off; John landed an internship the following summer on Uber’s strategy team. (And for the record, those hours mastering how to connect with professionals paid off too: John has accepted a full-time offer with LinkedIn. Feel free to endorse him for “networking” next time you view his profile.)
Back at school the following semester, John swapped notes with his friend Landon Eyre. Landon had spent the summer interning with Google. “My boss told me he had tried to open the pipeline with BYU, but the Marriott School said it would have to put Google through the verification process before the company could post any job openings on the school’s recruiting website,” Landon explains. “It wasn’t a lack of interest; the school simply didn’t have the infrastructure to take on the daunting task of getting business students without technical skills into technology giants like Google and Facebook.”
The two assembled a team with a few other interested students and agreed upon a threefold purpose:
- Create awareness for students about opportunities in tech.
- Build the necessary skills to be successful in various roles within tech.
- Help students of all majors receive internships and full-time offers from the tech companies of their dreams.4
With the help of a few enthusiastic information systems professors to help the team navigate to paperwork, the club was officially formed.
Now in its first semester as an official BYU organization, the Tech Club has seen growth mirroring that of the surrounding startups within the valley. From the original team of five students, the club has exploded with 170 students attending the club’s kickoff and over 100 participating in its SQL training night.5 But the club’s aim is higher than good turnout to its meetings. “While it’s exciting to see so many students get involved for our activities, our real measure of success will be how many students within our club actually get internships and job offers as a result of our events,” says Erika Mahterian, the club’s VP of Member Experience.
The club is starting to see success in its placement efforts. One student, for example, came to the club’s kickoff with a casual curiosity in technology. After meeting with a club member who had worked at Amazon, the student applied to the company and ultimately accepted a summer internship.
The leadership team sees a bright future for the club, and central to that vision is the continued growth of Silicon Slopes. As Lauren Todd, VP of Communications, puts it, “Through the Tech Club, BYU has the potential to become for Silicon Slopes what Stanford is for the Bay Area—a pipeline for the university’s best students to work in their same geographic area and build camaraderie between businesses and the school.” Such a symbiotic relationship is already underway, given that many of the companies trace their roots to BYU, yet Lauren wants to further streamline the connection.6 “I see the relationship becoming stronger between the two as the club grows and places more students at companies in Silicon Slopes. I see great relationships budding from the events we will hold with the businesses in Utah Valley, and a lot of job opportunities for students in the BYU Tech Club.”
Local companies have also taken note of the gap the Tech Club has filled. “Tech is one of the great opportunities for students coming out of BYU, and yet it’s been underrepresented in certain ways,” says COO of Lucid Software, Dave Grow. “As a result, it has at times been hard [for companies] to connect with the students who are definitively interested in pursuing a career in tech (as opposed to other careers like private equity, consulting, etc.)” because there hasn’t been one centralized point of contact. He anticipates the club providing real value. “It can help prepare students to understand what to expect in a career in tech and specifically what are the common positions and opportunities that are not typically discussed in curriculum. . . . It’s exciting to see useful skills—like SQL—being taught, since these can make students immediately more valuable in their first job.”
John Mayfield, who previously worked at Qualtrics and Instructure before stepping into his current role at Peak Ventures, shares Grow’s perspective. “The BYU Tech Club could be a phenomenal resource to our portfolio companies through internships and full-time employment opportunities.” The club has already taken steps in this direction. In March the club organized a local tech career fair, hosting over twenty technology companies, many of them startups based in Utah.
While local companies offer exciting opportunities, focusing on the Utah tech community may result in a lack of traction with placement outside the state. On the other hand, devoting most of the Tech Club’s resources towards developing pipelines at tech giants has the potential risk of hindering relationships with firms where natural connections already exist. When asked about the potential for conflicting priorities between catering to Silicon Slopes and Silicon Valley, Koelliker doesn’t foresee a problem. “Even if many of our students leave Utah after graduation, they still carry the BYU brand—a brand intrinsically associated with Silicon Slopes—and will build relationships with people who might eventually be drawn to Utah as well.” To build relationships with companies in both tech hubs, the Tech Club is organizing recruiting trips for the fall of 2017 to San Francisco and along the Wasatch Front, with the possibility of a third trip to Seattle in the future.
As the club continues to expand, its leadership wants the organization to play the role of collaborator, not cannibal. Unlike many clubs that are more role-based, the Tech Club is industry-oriented, giving it a unique position among other student organization. “The Tech Club is the one spot where any student from any major can get access to top tech companies,” Koelliker says. “There are plenty of clubs with other purposes that have placed some students at tech companies, but their main focus isn’t just tech and their membership base is limited to students with the skill set the club targets.” To this end, the club has already launched an exhaustive effort to partner with student associations and majors across campus, with the goal of promoting one another’s events and coordinating wherever the organizations’ missions overlap. “We’re working with other groups to build strong recruiting pipelines into various companies both locally and around the nation. These companies will know that if they want talent, they can reach out to the BYU Tech Club, and we will give them an audience of highly qualified, hardworking students with diverse backgrounds.”
For more information on the BYU Tech Club, visit its website: http://www.techclub.byu.edu/.
Notes
- Andrew Zaleski, “A high-tech mecca rises to rival Silicon Valley,” CNBC, July 13, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/13/a-high-tech-mecca-rises-to-rival-siliconvalley.html, accessed February 2017.
- A search for “Silicon Slopes” on the websites of Utah’s major local news media returns nearly 500 results from within the last decade. Kurt Badenhausen, “The Best States For Business And Careers 2015,” October 21, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/kurtbadenhausen/2015/10/21/thebest-states-for-business-and-careers-2015/#7231e71d53b9, accessed February 2017.
- Scott Cohn, “Utah is America’s Top State for Business in 2016,” CNBC, July 12, 2016, http://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/12/utah-is-americas-top-state-forbusiness-in-2016.html, accessed February 2017.
- For a definition and examples of unicorns, see Buzzwords to Know.
- BYU Tech Club Mission Statement, working draft.
- Internal club data. The SQL night was sponsored by a local training company, SQL Prep, and highlights the club’s ambition to partner closely with top companies.