$10 Billion or Bust: Scale STG's Audacious Mission "Inject $10 Billion Into Our Local Community Through Scaleable Startups" by 2035

A small but determined group of founders in St. George has launched one of the most ambitious economic development initiatives in Southern Utah’s history. Their goal: $10 billion in scalable companies by 2035. Their motivation: keeping the next generation from having to leave.

It started with pizza.

Not a boardroom. Not a venture capital pitch. Not a government grant or a ribbon-cutting ceremony with a mayor and a pair of oversized scissors. Just pizza, a borrowed event space, and a handful of tech people in St. George, Utah, who were hungry for something more than a good meal — they were hungry for community.

Joshua Aikens, who works in community affairs at St. George-based software company Zonos, remembers how the early gatherings took shape. A colleague wanted to start a tech meetup, even before she had all the details worked out. She brought the pizza. Aikens brought the people. And slowly, founders from Vasion, busybusy, and Zonos — the small but growing cluster of scalable tech companies beginning to take root in Southern Utah — became the core attendees. (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

“These events, aimed at bringing people together to talk, came and went, but they kept the community connected,” Aikens said. (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

From those informal gatherings, something larger was being born. Those early meetups eventually gave way to more structured events — Code Camp, the Cairn Symposium, Startup Grind, Start STG — and a shared realization among the founders involved that connection alone wasn’t enough. What Southern Utah needed wasn’t just a community of entrepreneurs. It needed an ecosystem capable of producing companies that could compete and scale on a national level. Companies that could create high-paying jobs — enough of them, and good enough ones, to fundamentally change the economic trajectory of a region that had been hemorrhaging talent for decades.

That realization became Scale STG.

The Problem That Built the Mission

Before you can understand what Scale STG is trying to do, you have to understand the problem it was built to solve.

Southern Utah is, by almost any measure, a beautiful place to live. The red rock landscapes, the proximity to national parks, the sunshine, the community — it’s the kind of place people dream about. And increasingly, people of means from across the country have discovered it, driving up property values and the cost of living in communities like St. George, Washington City, and Cedar City.

But the economy hasn’t kept pace.

“It’s heartbreaking to watch our friends, family, and children leave Southern Utah because our job market doesn’t match our cost of living,” Scale STG states plainly on its website. “This not only drains our community of talent but also strains our relationships.” (Scale STG, scalestg.com)

Brad Plothow, Chief Growth Officer at Intergalactic — the St. George-based aerospace startup that is one of Scale STG’s founding partners — put it more bluntly: “We won’t get enough wage growth by relying exclusively on legacy industries.” (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

Plothow knows this firsthand. He recalled writing an article as an editorial intern at The Spectrum newspaper back in 2003 about “power commuters” — people who lived in St. George but drove insane distances to places like Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, or even Los Angeles for work, because Southern Utah simply didn’t have enough professional opportunities in their fields. More than two decades later, the problem hasn’t disappeared. It’s just gotten more expensive. (Intergalactic, ig.space)

Peter Fuller, one of Scale STG’s co-founders, identified the same pattern from the perspective of a local entrepreneur trying to build something here. “I consistently hear from the residents of St. George that these employers alone are not enough to keep up with rising cost of living,” Fuller said. “We need all local founders to come in and grow a community where we’re sharing info, resources, help, mentorship, and to try and grow a new generation of founders to rise and build these companies.” (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

The math, Fuller explained, is actually straightforward. For every single high-growth innovation job you create in Southern Utah — think a customer success role at Zonos — you create between three and five additional jobs in the surrounding community. Firefighters. Hair stylists. Bookshop owners. Restaurant employees. When high-salary positions come to St. George, the ripple effect through the local economy is substantial. (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

The inverse is also true. When those jobs don’t exist, and young people leave to find them elsewhere, the ripple runs the other way.

What Scale STG Actually Is

Scale STG is a 501(c)(6) nonprofit organization — the same legal structure used by trade associations and chambers of commerce — with a single-sentence mission: help entrepreneurs build $10 billion in scalable startups in Southern Utah by 2035. (Scale STG, scalestg.com)

It was founded by a coalition of six St. George-based companies, including Intergalactic, Vasion, Zonos, busybusy, Tech Ridge, and others, all of whom pooled resources and committed money to get it off the ground. The decision to formalize the organization came after Aikens and Fuller, working through an earlier Silicon Slopes St. George chapter they had helped lead, realized that their efforts needed a sharper, more independent identity. They consulted with community figures including Rick Atkin, CEO and founder of Trula, who encouraged them to conduct a brand study to define their mission, vision, and values clearly. The result was the Scale STG brand — and a focused commitment to one goal. (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

“Our mission is to create or relocate $10 billion worth of high-growth, scalable companies by 2035,” Fuller said. “Honestly, it is the purpose of the entire organization.” (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

The organization is free to join. There’s an optional $1,200 annual membership fee for those who have found success and want to give back financially, but participation requires no financial commitment. Scale STG’s programming revolves around three pillars: education, capital access, and talent development. Monthly Startup Fridays events — held at Kiln, a co-working space in St. George — bring together founders, investors, and entrepreneurs for presentations, networking, and community-building. Recent editions have featured local founders who’ve built e-commerce brands serving over a million customers and generating significant traffic right here from Southern Utah. (Scale STG Meetup, March 2026)

Atkin put it simply: “Scale STG will be a big part of helping startups validate, fund, and grow.” (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

The Silicon Slopes Parallel

The ambition behind Scale STG isn’t without precedent in Utah. It mirrors, quite deliberately, what happened in Salt Lake City and Provo more than a decade ago — the formation of Silicon Slopes, the nonprofit that helped crystallize the identity of Utah’s booming tech corridor and gave its companies a shared brand and community infrastructure to grow within.

Aikens draws the parallel directly. He points to how early Utah tech founders — Aaron Skonnard of Pluralsight, Josh James of Omniture and Domo, Dave Elkington of InsideSales, Ryan Smith of Qualtrics — pooled resources, backed Silicon Slopes chief Clint Betts, and built an organization that helped Utah’s tech sector develop a coherent identity and the support structure to sustain it. Those companies eventually sold for hundreds of millions, some for billions. The ecosystem they helped build became self-reinforcing.

“That’s how it got started,” Aikens said of Silicon Slopes. (TechBuzz News, September 2024) And that’s the model Scale STG is explicitly trying to replicate in Southern Utah — not copy, but adapt for a region with its own character, its own strengths, and its own particular version of the talent problem.

The analogy, Aikens acknowledged, comes with humility. Silicon Slopes didn’t happen overnight. It took years of grinding, failed companies, near misses, and accumulated credibility before Utah’s tech ecosystem became the national story it is today. Scale STG is at the beginning of that journey — not the middle or the end.

The Companies Behind the Bet

What makes Scale STG credible — and what distinguishes it from a feel-good community initiative — is the quality of the companies standing behind it.

Vasion, one of the founding partners, is a global software company headquartered on Tech Ridge in St. George. Its Chief Marketing Officer Jennifer Black-Janke has been direct about the company’s motivations. “By partnering with Scale STG, we’re not only working to drive job growth and development but also contributing to the broader improvement of our community. Our goal is to create high-paying jobs and expand opportunities across the region. This partnership is vital for addressing the talent gap and supporting local economic progress,” she said. (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

Zonos, another founding partner and perhaps St. George’s most recognizable tech brand outside the region, is a cross-border e-commerce platform that has built a global customer base while remaining headquartered in an old airplane hangar on Tech Ridge. Its growth has been a proof of concept for the entire Scale STG thesis: that you can build a world-class company in Southern Utah without relocating to a bigger city.

Intergalactic, a St. George-based aerospace startup focused on advanced thermal management technologies for space, aviation, and defense applications, rounds out the picture in a different direction — showing that Southern Utah’s ambitions aren’t limited to software. “Washington County today is a lot like Utah County a decade or so ago,” Plothow said, drawing a direct comparison to the early days of what became Silicon Slopes. (Intergalactic, Issuu)

busybusy, a workforce management software company whose CEO Isaac Barlow is also the managing partner of Tech Ridge, and TrulaCampus and The Workflow Academy round out the founding partner group.

Together, these companies represent something important: founders who had the option to leave — who could have relocated to Salt Lake City or beyond when their companies started growing — and chose to stay. And who are now actively investing in making it possible for the next generation of founders to do the same.

“They’re willing to pitch in and give back,” Aikens said. “Then, the secret last ingredient is that we all live here. Our children are all growing up here. Nobody can afford to buy a house right now without an insanely good job, which we don’t have enough of. So I think we have a lot of alignment towards reaching our goal.” (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

The Honest Reckoning

Scale STG’s founders are not naive about the challenge they’ve taken on. Reaching $10 billion in scalable company value by 2035 is an extraordinary goal for a region that, a decade ago, had essentially no tech ecosystem to speak of. The talent pipeline is improving but still thin. Access to venture capital, while growing, remains a friction point for founders who need to raise serious outside investment. And the cultural infrastructure — the mentors, the visible success stories, the sense that building something significant here is genuinely possible — is still being assembled in real time.

The organization itself is explicit about this. Scale STG, Aikens said, “isn’t about growth at all costs — rather, the group wants to level the economic playing field and ensure southern Utah can remain the community we all want to live in.” (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

That framing matters. This isn’t Silicon Valley evangelism being transplanted to the desert. It’s a community of people who love where they live and are trying to solve a specific, painful problem: that the place they love keeps asking its most talented people to leave.

Rick Atkin summed up the underlying ethos well. Scale STG, he said, is about giving founders the tools to validate, fund, and grow — right here, without having to make the trade-off between ambition and home. (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

What Comes Next

The $10 billion number was always meant to be provocative — a stake in the ground that forces people to take the mission seriously rather than treat it as a nice community initiative. Whether Southern Utah reaches exactly that figure by exactly 2035 is, in some ways, beside the point. What matters is whether the ecosystem being built today produces enough high-growth companies, enough high-paying jobs, and enough visible success stories to keep the next generation of founders here.

The early signs are encouraging. St. George has been named the number one small city in America to start a business. (WalletHub, 2025) Tech Ridge is filling up. Utah’s venture ecosystem raised billions in 2025, and Southern Utah companies are increasingly part of that conversation. (Utah Business, December 2025) Startup Fridays keep selling out. And every month, a few more people decide to build their company in the red rocks rather than somewhere else.

“The most interesting thing we have to communicate is identifying the problem,” Fuller said. “Brain drain and the lack of good jobs to keep up with the rising cost of living. Our mission is to create or relocate $10 billion worth of high-growth, scalable companies by 2035.” (TechBuzz News, September 2024)

It’s a simple mission. It’s an audacious one. And in Southern Utah — a place with a long history of doing difficult things through sheer collective will — it might just be exactly the kind of bet that pays off.