A recent article in fast company discusses the advantages of developing your startup company in Salt Lake City. The first advantage that the article talks about is cost effectiveness. Simply put, the rent is lower in Salt Lake City than it is in most developing startup ecosystems.

A large portion of the population is comprised of Latter Day Saints and the Mormon Church, and this has its advantages for the workplace. The population is generally healthy and hardworking making for stable work conditions. Many citizens are sent out on missionaries to different countries around the world. This makes it so that they can speak another language, and hopefully they picked up some good sales skills while in a hostile environment. The area is known for their legacy startups. Novell, Altiris, and WordPerfect have all started in Salt Lake City and encountered great success within the state. Loyalty is big within the community, so that is a big plus for emerging startups looking to keep long time employees. Since there is a large religious community, many family members leave the area, accumulate wealth, and return to invest in their family and home state.

The University of Utah and BUY are ranked number one in various aspects of commercialization and technology, so an emerging tech startup environment is almost natural in Salt Lake City. One thing that Utah can do better with in the labor market are software engineers. Utah does not have the right number of software engineers for their tech startup environment, and not many software engineers are relocating to Salt Lake City. Relocating c-level executives to take startups one-step further is tough in Salt Lake City and this is an area of improvement for the state.

Overall, there are multiple billion-dollar enterprises that have started in Salt Lake City, which citizens hope to cause a snowball effect that opens up doors for other tech startups to join in on previous success.

This article is based off of this article from fast company.