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The Right Climate for Startups
Salt Lake City, UT Images: Get t yImages.com
How a move across state lines changed everything for the founder of Banjo
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Park City, Utah
Photo cour tesy of VisitUtah
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by R O N S T A R N E R
amien Patton, the founder and CEO of Banjo, gave his tech startup a simple mission: “save lives and reduce human suffering by getting everyone live, validated information so they can make better decisions faster.” Born from Patton winning an engineering hackathon at Google in 2010, Banjo is the world’s first live-time intelligence platform that gives decisionmakers the ability to understand what is happening now anytime, anywhere. Banjo’s first patents were focused on protecting user privacy by delivering information without any personally identifiable data. A military veteran of Desert Storm and former crime scene investigator, Patton puts this experience to use by harnessing the power of big data to improve the lives of people. In the realm of using information to make decisions, however, he admits that he wasn’t always sold on doing business in Utah. “My wife wanted to move to Utah,” he says. “I had nothing to do with it. We were living in Silicon Valley at
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the time. She asked to move to Utah. I wasn’t very fond of that idea at first, but we have been here two years now. It turned out to be the best decision we ever could have made both personally and for our company.” The corporate relocation began about two years ago when Patton moved five people from Banjo’s offices in northern California to Park City just outside of Salt Lake City. “We had no plans to move the company here at that time, but I started to quickly see how business-friendly the climate was and how much access to government we could have here,” Patton says of Utah. “That’s how it started. Our staff in Utah grew to 10 and then to 50. We will move our headquarters here from California by the end of this year, and we are committed to hiring at least 100 people in Utah. We made that announcement at the governor’s Utah Economic Summit earlier this year, and the new people are already being hired.” What changed Patton’s mind? “I found out that the business climate in Utah is extremely friendly,” he says. “So is the climate for startups. Utah is very
