Judd Bagley

This story appears in the June 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe. Most people, if challenged to name the largest employer of software engineers in Utah, would visualize the trip through the Sandy to Provo tech corridor, ticking off the familiar names along the way: Lucid, BambooHR, Entrata, Adobe, Weave, Domo, Qualtrics and many more. Not only would most people be wrong, they wouldn’t even be in the right county.

This story appears in the May 2026 issue of Utah Business. Subscribe. In the modern era of global commerce, it’s difficult to imagine a worse year than 2020 to launch a company supporting travel and tourism. Historically, events disrupting life and travel were common enough, but usually in local and temporary patterns that made it easy to forecast the conclusion.

The technology that originally enabled the automated delivery of niche audio content to MP3 players was invented in 2004 — podcasting, as it came to be known. And it quickly gained a small but dedicated audience. By 2005, content creators began to wonder whether their passion projects could actually make money. The answer came in 2006, when Georgia-Pacific’s Dixie brand became the first corporate sponsor of an independent podcast by offering MommyCast an unsolicited six-figure deal.