Who would have thought that Ogden would become such a cool place? Until recently, I never thought much of Ogden. I never thought of it as a hub for so much business activity. Here’s some great news that I’m sure Ogden is proud to report:

-Grow Utah Ventures e-Station located in downtown Ogden has been the entrepreneurial highlight of the last year. Alan Hall renovated the old greyhound bus station to accommodate high tech start ups in the Ogden area. The project has been a resounding success. Grow Utah Ventures just launched another e-Station in Kaysville, which is sure to see the same success as the Ogden facility. Grow Utah Ventures represents Ogden’s best opportunity for moving high tech focus out of Utah Valley to Ogden.

-Adam aircraft recently announced the construction of a 96,000 square foot manufacturing facility located at the Ogden airport. Adam aircraft is designing the next generation of light aircraft that will revolutionize the small aircraft industry. Their planes cost and operate at about 25% of what the nearest competitor’s airplane can do. Some even think their planes will revolutionize the way you and I fly from city to city. You’ll be hearing a lot about this company in the coming years.

-Amer Sports recently anounced the consolidation of their Solomon, Atomic and Suunto brands into one division that will be headquartered in Ogden. Decente and Scott USA already call Ogden home. The new Amer Winter Sports Division will bring 230 new jobs to Ogden that will pay an average of 316% above the medium Weber County salary. That’s fantastic! Congratulations to Mayor Matt Godfrey who is seeing his goal of making Ogden the winter sports industry hub become a reality. Utah in general is also seeing a lot of success in the outdoors industry. In addition to what’s happening in Ogden, Black Diamond calls Salt Lake home and Rossignol recently moved operations to Park City. Backcountry.com is now the largest online retailer of outdoors products. They got their start in humble Heber but are now headquartered in Park City.

Congratulations to everybody in Ogden! I look forward to continuing to watch your success!

I just finished reading Matt Asay’s column in this month’s issue of Connect Magazine.  Frankly, I think its pure crap. I am sick and tired of Bay Area transplants riding into Utah on their high horses and knocking the state. Its time Matt was called out. I guess I’m the guy who is going to do it.

It seems that Matt spent the better part of 2003 preaching to us in Connect on how to be great like him and other masters of business who reside(d) in the Bay Area. The condescending garbage put out by Matt in his Connect column this month almost sent me into a rage. Let me summarize the article for you so you don’t waste your time reading it: “I told you poor morons years ago what to do and you still haven’t done it. Shame on you for not listening to me!  You’re all a bunch of fools except for Josh Coates since he came from the Bay Area like me.”

As many of you who read my blog know, I have been very critical of Utah’s business environment. I know we have a long way to go. However, we have made an incredible amount of progress. I co-founded an Internet start up in 2000 and I can tell you (from experience) that the difference in Utah’s entrepreneurial environment in the last six years is like night and day. I have seen drastic improvements across the board. For Matt to say, in general, that we have made basically no improvement is simply an asinine position. 

Matt states the following: “The ideas behind most Utah companies are small, offering little innovation and even less risk.” What an insult to so many smart, hard working Utah entrepreneurs! Doba, Overstock, MediaForge, Podango, Logoworks, Omniture and a boat load of other technology businesses in this state do more than just innovate - they create solutions to real market problems. I wonder if Matt was thinking of his own company, Alfresco Software, when he penned that line?

Again: “For every Josh Coates we have a slew of failures to attract seasoned or new management from outside the state, and a curious lack of ambition from within the state.” Utah isn’t the only state that has a problem attracting top technology talent.  Matt seems to be calling this a “Utah only” problem and that is just plain ignorant. Anyone who understands basic economics understands why this is a problem and also understands that we’re not the only ones who have this problem. Solutions? It would be nice if Matt offered a few.

Matt may be right about “base hits” but I wouldn’t call that a “curious lack of ambition”. I’d call it a focus problem. Most humans aren’t ambitious enough to even go for a base hit. At least we’ve got that to build on.

Here’s a real gem: “There are very few Will Wests and Eric Smiths who can start and end successful careers in Utah. Even these two don’t get the credit outside the state they deserve, because they are ‘Utah properties’.” What a load of crap! You mean to tell me that a guy who raises a quarter of a billion dollars won’t get full respect in the Bay Area because he’s from Utah? Matt, this is ridiculous AND YOU KNOW IT. If what Matt says is really true then I’ll take Utah over the Bay Area any day of the week and twice on Sunday!

And again: “Come back (to Utah) when you have built a name for yourself, risen to a responsible position within a Google or a Microsoft, or in some way proven your value.” I guess its impossible to prove your value in Utah? I guess you can’t show value unless you’ve worked for some big tech brand name? I guess Matt thinks Larry and Sergey should have done time at Microsoft before starting Google? Perhaps Bill should have finished out Harvard, gone to IBM and “risen to a responsible position” before starting Microsoft? This is bad advice. By the time most people work up to a ”responsible position” in one of these companies they often exclude themselves from entrepreneurial opportunities. Most of these guys can’t and won’t run a start up - their experience is too corporate. Entrepreneurs start companies and most corporate managers are not entrepreneurs. Matt, didn’t Greg Warnock school you on this idea after you attempted to knock Junto Partners in Connect last year? Maybe I’m mistaken?

I wonder why Matt didn’t include Novell among the esteemed names of Microsoft and Google? Wasn’t Matt a big wig in the open source movement at Novell? Isn’t Novell where Matt made a name for himself? Isn’t Novell largely based in Utah??? Maybe Matt should take his own advice.

Finally: “The best thing a young entrepreneur can do for Utah is leave Utah.” Matt, you may be right on this point. How may I help you leave Utah…forever?

Note to Bay Area transplants: Welcome to Utah - glad to have you here. Please leave the Bay Area attitude in the bay. We do things a little different here and for that we offer no apology.

Word on the street has it that the LDS Church is in the process of building a completely free service that will “bury” Ancestry.com and MyFamily.com. I’ve heard the board at MyFamily.com is “freaked” because people inside the LDS Church working on the project have dubbed it the “Ancestry Killer”. I’d be a little nervous too.

According to my source, the LDS Church has put an incredible amount of resources toward the project. Apparently they have brought in top talent from Microsoft and Oracle to build the service.  They have been working on it for sometime and are in the process of testing and transferring data to the new service from existing records. I don’t think this will bode well for any genealogy service charging a subscription fee including the newly minted worldvitalrecords.com.  That would make the new service more than just an Ancestry killer. It would make it a category killer and that is one huge online category.

This from a source of mine inside of MyFamily: “It’s definitely a threat. In the end, God is going to win. I’ve already conceded that.”

Wow!

Can anyone else shed light on this issue? Phil, can you weigh in?

Today I turn 33. Its a nice age. I’m very comfortable in my career and personal life and I feel like I’m making progress and I’m on my way to achieving my goals. The reason I feel that way is that I had mentors who helped me change my life for the better. It happened when I was 30.

In MBA school I was selected to join a group called Master Track. These were top students in the MBA program who excelled academically, showed leadership skills and had good previous management experience. Somehow I made the cut.  In this program I was paired with two mentors. One was Chuck Coonradt, the famous author and business consultant. The other was serial entrepreneur and executive consultant, Dick Fontaine. Both men changed my life.

I sat down with Dick and we talked in great depth about my personality and the way I dealt with conflict. Dick really took on my sharp edges. I spent many nights up thinking about the things we discussed together. He began for me what has been a long personality change. Slowly, I have begun to smooth out the sharp edges that Dick helped me identify in my personality. Some of those edges are still there but I’m smoothing them out more and more over time. I am amazed at the progress I have made over the last couple of years.

Here’s a story that Dick told me. Maybe you can relate:

Sometime after the end of World War II, an American patrol boat in the South Pacific came under fire from a remote island. After some fighting the sailors from the boat captured several Japanese soldiers. Perplexed by the attack, the sailors asked the Japanese soldiers why they had attacked them. Their response was that the American’s were the enemy and they were simply protecting their outpost. The Japanese soldiers had never been notified that the war was over. They had been forgotten and abandoned on the island.  So they sat there waiting to fight a war that had long since ended.

How many times do we go to “war” for no reason? How often do we jump defensively into situations that don’t warrant a defensive position? Sometimes we just need to take a deep breath and realize there is no war so there is no reason to fight.

Chuck dared me to dream and then showed me how to make those dreams a reality. The lessons he taught me in goal setting have been life changing. He related this story to me:

Every Friday night a young man would sit at the dinner table and listen to his father converse with various prominent men from their community. The men would often talk of their failures and missed opportunities. One night, after listening to this weekly conversation, the young man retired to his room frustrated by the night’s conversation. He took out a piece of paper and began to write down all the things he wanted to accomplish in his life. The list of over 100 goals included visiting numerous counties, meeting the pope, riding a horse in the Rose Parade and many other dreams that the boy had.

By the time this man had turned 80 he had accomplished most of the goals that he had written down as a young boy. He dared to make his dreams a reality. How many times have you looked back on your life with regret? Have you ever heard an elderly person talk about how they had wasted their life and not accomplished anything? I have and I don’t want to be that person.

I thank Chuck for giving me the tools and showing me the way live out my dreams.

Having confidants and mentors is invaluable. If you ever get the opportunity to be mentored by one who has many more years of experience than you do, take the opportunity and learn everything you can from it. I did and it has made all the difference in the world.

I’m scheduled to make a live appearance on Grapevine Radio on October 10th. If you’d like to tune in and listen go to grapevine radio and click on the microphone at 1 pm tomorrow. I’ll be discussing issues covered in my recent article in Connect Magazine. The show has 129,000 listeners so I’m a little nervous but I’ll get over it.

Thanks for listening!

Rumor has it YouTube is in buyout talks with Google. I like it. But for $1.7 BILLION?!?! Yes, billion with a “B”!

Trip Chowdhry with some Bay Area equity research firm thinks YouTube has the same brand identity as Google and Coke. Is she smoking crack? If that’s the case then Google would be getting one helluva deal at $1.7 BILLION. Personally, I think some people need to get out of the bay area more often. Don’t get me wrong, I love YouTube but that’s the craziest claim I have ever heard in my entire life!

The first night of my class at Westminster College I asked how many of my students have heard of YouTube. Thirty percent had heard of YouTube. These are students in a private college - YouTube’s exact demographic. Of the thirty percent, I asked how many watched YouTube videos on a regular basis. The answer?  None.  I bet if I asked my students how many of them knew of Google and Coke; I would get a 100% response rate.

What a Trip…

I had a great time at the RMV/PodTech meet up last tonight. What a great event. Congratulations to the RMV team for pulling off such as great show.

I love to hear stories from successful entrepreneurs like John Furrier. He has done an amazing job with PodTech. Just the fact that he was able to get Scoble over to PodTech speaks volumes about his business and about John. I will continue to watch PodTech with great interest over the next couple of years.

RMV is exciting as well. Their partnership with PodTech has the potential to help take small Utah podcasters and put them on the international podcasting map. This is very exciting and I look forward to watching this group grow as well.

So to all, congratulations. Let’s keep doing positive things that help put Utah on the right maps.

John Furrier, CEO of PodTech.net will be headlining the Rocky Mountain Voices meet up tonight in Salt Lake City. Lots of great people will be there mixing and mingling. Check out the details at Rocky Mountain Voice. You need to RSVP to get in.

Best of luck to the RMV team on this event. I’m sure its going to be great. Look forward to seeing you there.

I’ll post a wrap up on the event tomorrow as well.

I blogged last week about jobs growth in the US and where we seem to be going as a society. As a follow up to that, take a look at these facts pulled together by a friend, Brett Zabel, at Wasatch High School. It really puts a lot into perspective…

• If you are one in a million in China, there are 1,300 people just like you.
• The smartest top 25% of people in China represents a population greater than all of North America.
• China will soon have more english speakers in their population than any other country in the world.
• In the next eight minutes, 60 babies will be born in America. 351 will be born in India.
• By the age of 38 you will have had between 10 and 14 jobs.
• 1 in 4 Americans are working in the first year of their current job.
• The U.S. ranks 20th in the world for broadband penetration
• In 2002 Nintendo invested more in R&D than the federal government (excludes military R&D)
• 1 in 8 married U.S. couples met online.
• There are 2.7 billion searches on Google each month. Where were these questions addressed to before Google?
• There are more than 6 billion sms messages sent everyday
• There are 540,000 words in the english language. Five times more than there were in 1800.
• 3,000 books are published daily.
• More knowledge exists in one week of the New York Times than a person was able to access in their entire lifetime in the 1800’s
• 1.5 exabytes of information will be created this year. That’s more than was created in the previous 5,000 years
• What a college freshman learns this year will be outdated by his junior year of college.
• Fiber optics capacity is tripling every six months
• The $100 laptop project will ship 50 to 100 million laptops per year to people in underdeveloped countries. There were 47 million laptops shipped world wide last year.
• Bt 2023 a $1000 computer will exceed the capacity of the human brain
• By 2047 a $1000 computer will exceed the capacity of the human race

One similar note, check out this story on how the baby boomers are about to suck the life out of the economy as they begin to retire in droves. Fed Chief Bernanke calls America’s entitlement programs “unsustainable”.

The world is changing. The playing field is leveling. Are you prepared?

Check out Robert Scoble’s blog post on the Podango unconference.

Awesome!