Ecosystems Aren't Built. They're Seeded.

EC ' T T. ' R E . | Entrepreneurship, Startups

# One Company Away: What WordPerfect's Utah Can Teach New Orleans Nobody in 1979 looked at Orem, Utah and saw a technology hub. They saw Geneva Steel. They saw farmland. They saw a college town whose brightest graduates left for the coasts, because that's where the opportunity was. Then a BYU computer science professor named Alan Ashton convinced a music master's student named Bruce Bastian to switch fields, and the two of them started building a word processor. That company became WordPerfect — the dominant word processing application on the PC for nearly a decade, Microsoft's biggest rival in the category, and for stretches of the 1980s, more popular than Microsoft Word itself. A new documentary, In the Beginning, tells that story, and the filmmakers make a claim worth sitting with: WordPerfect and Novell didn't just build software. They converted Utah Valley from a steel-and-agriculture economy into a high-tech one. They started the groundswell that, decades later, the world now calls Silicon Slopes — one of the fastest- growing tech corridors in America. Nobody thinks of Salt Lake City as a thriving technology ecosystem. But it is. And the reason it is comes down to something New Orleans should study closely. ## Ecosystems aren't built. They're seeded.

Here's the mechanism, and it's simpler than the economic development brochures make it sound. One company wins big. Not a lifestyle business, not a services firm — a product company that competes globally and wins. That company does three things no government program can replicate. First, it becomes a magnet. WordPerfect pulled thousands of engineers, product people, marketers, and operators into Utah Valley — people who never would have moved there otherwise. Talent follows opportunity, not quality-of-life rankings. Second, it becomes a school. Every one of those employees learned how a world-class software company actually operates from the inside. How you ship. How you support customers at scale. How you fight a giant like Microsoft and hold your ground for years. You cannot teach that in a workshop. It only transfers through payroll. Third — and this is the part that matters most — it becomes a launchpad. When WordPerfect's run ended, those thousands of trained builders didn't leave Utah. They fanned out. They started companies, joined startups, funded each other, hired each other. Novell ran the same play in parallel. Two companies, one generation of talent under one roof, and then a diaspora that compounded for thirty years. Omniture, Qualtrics, Domo, Pluralsight — the family tree traces back. That's the whole formula. One roof, then a fan-out. ## New Orleans keeps trying to skip the first step Everyone wants an ecosystem. We want the coworking spaces, the accelerators, the pitch nights, the venture funds, the conference. And we have versions of all of it — I host some of it myself through Startup Grind New Orleans, and I believe in that work deeply. But community infrastructure is the soil, not the seed. Utah didn't get Silicon Slopes because someone founded a nonprofit and printed lanyards. The nonprofit came decades after the companies. The order of operations matters, and we keep running it backwards — building the celebration apparatus for an anchor success that hasn't happened yet. The honest question for New Orleans isn't "how do we build an ecosystem?" It's "who's building the company that makes the ecosystem inevitable?"

Why it can happen here The skeptic's case writes itself: no anchor tech employer, capital scarcity, brain drain to Austin and Atlanta. Fine. Now consider what Orem had in 1979: a steel mill, some farms, and a university. That's it. Utah's advantage wasn't infrastructure — it was two people who decided to build something world-class without asking permission or relocating first. New Orleans in 2026 has strictly more raw material than Utah Valley did then. We have universities producing engineers. We have industries — energy, logistics, maritime, hospitality, disaster resilience — with real, expensive problems that founders elsewhere don't understand and can't see. We have a culture that people move across the world to be near, which is the single hardest thing for any city to manufacture. Lehi, Utah cannot throw a second line. What we're missing is the one roof. The company that pulls a generation of Gulf South builders into the same building, trains them on winning, and then — win or lose — releases them into the wild as founders and funders themselves. ## What that means for the rest of us If you're building in New Orleans right now, your company might be that seed. Statistically it probably isn't — but WordPerfect statistically wasn't either. A marching band director and a professor took on IBM-era giants from a town nobody could find on a map, and they held the number one position in their market for the better part of a decade. So the assignment is uncomfortable but clear. Stop building companies designed to be respectable locally and start building companies designed to win globally from here. Hire ambitiously, even when it's scary. When you get an exit offer that relocates the team out of state, understand what you're actually selling — not just your cap table, but the city's shot at its own groundswell. And when a fellow founder here starts pulling ahead, don't compete for the same small pond. Help them win bigger. Every person they hire and train is a future founder in our ecosystem, not theirs. Utah's transformation took one generation. It started with two people in a town everyone underestimated, building something the coasts didn't see coming. Sound like anywhere you know? ---

Rob Gaudet is the founder of Victora and Trustlight Advisory, and Director of Startup Grind New Orleans. Read the wordperfect story here.