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BANKING
• Zions Bancorporation, Salt Lake City, has elected Barbara A. Yastine to its board of directors. Yastine has worked in the financial services industry for 30 years. She served as chair, president and chief executive officer of Ally Bank from 2011-15, following her work as chief administrative officer of Ally Financial where she had oversight for risk, compliance, information technology and legal. Prior to Ally, she held key roles at several financial services firms, including partner at Southgate Alternative Investments, chief financial officer of Credit Suisse First Boston, and in several roles at Primerica Corp. Yastine also serves on the boards of directors of Primerica Inc. and First Data Corp and has served as a member and chair of the audit committee of each company.
CONSTRUCTION
• WSP/Parsons Brinckerhoff has hired Tim Rose as a senior supervising transportation engineering in his Murray office. Rose will manage project staff in the transportation design/civil engineering group in the office. He will provide technical leadership in project management, program management and design on a wide range of transportation projects involving rural and urban streets and interstate highways. Rose joined the company after 28 years with the Utah Department of Transportation (UDOT), most recently serving as UDOT’s project director for the I-15 “The Point” design-build project. Rose received a B.S. in civil engineering from the University of Utah.
• Honnen Equipment has promoted Erin Bower to director of human resources. Bower oversees all human resource initiatives for Honnen, including recruitment, compensation, benefits, training and employee relations. She started working at Honnen in 2010.
FINANCE
• Onset Financial, South Jordan, has hired Bruce Brandon as a vice president of sales. Brandon has three decades of leasing experience. Prior to joining Onset, he served in vice president capacities, from publicly traded and private banks to rapidly expanding independent leasing firms.
HEALTHCARE
• Health Catalyst, Salt Lake City, has hired Dr. Carolyn Wong Simpkins as chief medical informatics officer and Stanley Pestotnik as vice president of patient safety products. Simpkins will lead the development of medical content for the company’s next-generation suite of products and help shape machine learning algorithms so they can best be used to influence important care decisions. Simpkins is a physician, health information executive and health system transformation leader. She previously was North American clinical director and global lead for patient-centered outcomes at the British Medical Journal and served as founding medical director for the Barrier Islands Free Medical Clinic in South Carolina. Pestotnik is a clinical pharmacist and medical informaticist with more than 25 years’ experience in health IT focused on patient safety and infectious diseases. He is the founding CEO of TheraDoc Inc. and was the director of the LDS Hospital Drug Surveillance and Safety Program for Intermountain Health Care’s Infectious Diseases Informatics Group.
INVESTMENT
• Qualtrics, Provo, has closed on a $180 million funding round at a $2.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Insight Venture Partners and Accel, with participation from Sequoia Capital. Qualtrics also announced the appointment of Murray Demo to its board of directors and as chair of its audit committee. Demo is chief financial officer of Atlassian and previously was CFO for Adobe Systems and Dolby Laboratories.
• Bevel Brands, with funding from Sachs Capital, has made a $15 million investment in Squatty Potty LLC, a St. George-based personal care company. Proceeds from the investment will be used primarily to provide liquidity to existing shareholders. Beveal investment will provide it with an equity position and a seat on the Squatty Potty board. Stifel acted as the exclusive financial advisor to Squatty Potty on the transaction, and Jones Waldo LLP served as legal counsel to the company. Founded in 2011, Squatty Potty LLC offers a product line consisting of toilet stools, sprays and other bathroom accessories.
PHILANTHROPY
• The Utah Jazz and several corporate partners teamed up to provide charitable donations of cash or services worth more than $262,000 through outreach programs to schools and nonprofit organizations along the Wasatch Front during the current season. Through the team’s player ticket donation program, several Jazz players and executives purchased $115,920 worth of tickets to home games, enabling fans, who might not otherwise have the opportunity or resources, to attend a Jazz game.
CenturyLink presented the Utah STEM Action Center with a $10,000 donation to support STEM’s efforts to promote the best educational practices in math and science studies that align with industry needs and support Utah’s long-term economic prosperity. The Jazz and CenturyLink also continued to recognize K-12 students through the STEM Excellence Award program. Six students were selected based on their excellence or significant improvement in science, technology, engineering or math and each received two tickets to a Jazz home game, a personalized jersey and on-court recognition at Vivint Smart Home Arena.
Cyprus Credit Union pledged $50 to the Community Recreation Association for every blocked shot registered by the Jazz. A donation of $20,500 was given to the nonprofit organization for the purchase of sporting equipment. The Jazz and Mountain America Credit Union’s “Pass It Along” program provided a total of $25,000 to five local charitable organizations ($5,000 each): Edison Elementary, GiGi’s Playhouse Layton, Head Start, Paiute Tribe of Utah Native Youth Program and RTI-Utah Wheelin’ Wildcats.
For the eighth consecutive year, the Jazz and Mountain America Credit Union partnered with the Huntsman Cancer Foundation to help fight cancer. The credit union donated $50 to the Huntsman Cancer Foundation for every three-point shot made by a Jazz player during the 2016-17 season. The Foundation was presented with $42,000. For every board the Jazz’s top rebounder pulled down this season, Safelite AutoGlass pledged $5 to the Utah Food Bank to help feed the hungry. A total of $4,615 was donated.
The Utah Jazz and Western Governors University again teamed up to grant one year of free tuition, valued at $6,000 each, to four students. Your Local Ford Stores donated $50 to the Utah Food Bank for every successful dunk a Utah Jazz player made during the regular season, for a contribution of $20,800.
• Customers at 43 Associated Retail Operations stores (Macey’s, Lin’s, Dan’s, Dick’s Market and Fresh Market) across Utah raised $78,772 to help children and adults with muscular dystrophy, ALS and related life-threatening diseases that limit strength and mobility. The funds were raised during the 35th annual “MDA Shamrocks” program to benefit the Muscular Dystrophy Association (MDA). Funds raised during the drive will be used to send children to MDA summer camp later this year.
• Invisible Fence, Salt Lake City, recently donated a pet oxygen mask kit to the Uintah Fire Department. The donation is part of Invisible Fence brand’s “Project Breathe” program, which was established with the goal of equipping every fire station in America and Canada with pet oxygen masks used to give oxygen to pets who are suffering from smoke inhalation when they are rescued from fires. The brand has donated a total of more than 12,400 pet oxygen masks through the program.
REAL ESTATE
• Coldwell Banker Commercial Advisors (CBC Advisors) has hired Frank Matheson as senior vice president in the firm’s downtown Salt Lake City office. Matheson has more than 30 years of experience working in the Salt Lake City commercial real estate industry and previously served as executive director of Cushman & Wakefield/Commerce.
RECOGNITIONS
• Big-D Construction, Salt Lake City, was the inaugural recipient of the “ABC Champion of the Year” honor presented recently by the Utah Chapter of the Associated Builders and Contractors.
• Weber State University has announced that two professors have been named its 2017 Brady Presidential Distinguished Professors. Stacy Palen is a physics professor and director of the Ott Planetarium. Michael Stevens is chair of the Department of Business Administration. They will be recognized during WSU’s commencement April 28 at the Dee Events Center. The honor was established in 2006 as a way to recognize WSU faculty members who have demonstrated the highest quality teaching, scholarship, research and community service. Palen has been at WSU for nearly 15 years. Stevens has been at the university for nine years.
• Rubi Life, a startup developing a wearable fetal activity tracker, won first place and the $40,000 grand prize at the 2017 Utah Entrepreneur Challenge. The event featured the best collegiate entrepreneurs in Utah competing for $100,000 in cash and prizes. The statewide business model competition is open to all university students in the state and is managed by the Lassonde Entrepreneur Institute, an interdisciplinary division of the David Eccles School of Business, and sponsored by Zions Bank. Other big winners included Xlynk Surgical with Best Presentation ($5,000) and Best Design ($2,000 in-kind), Cedar Sports with the online voting People’s Choice Award ($2,500) and Best Tabling Award ($1,000), Portal Power with Best Speed Pitch ($1,000), and Dentium Club and EMJ Medical for Emerging Entrepreneur Awards ($1,000).
• Utah’s top high school entrepreneurs won $30,000 in cash and prizes at the 2017 High School Utah Entrepreneur Challenge awards and showcase event at the University of Utah’s Lassonde Studios. The program is managed by the Lassonde Entrepeneur Institute, a division of the David Eccles School of Business, and sponsored by Zions Bank. The competition received nearly 150 student business idea submissions from high school students throughout the state, with the top 24 teams advancing to the final round. Three teams won grand prize awards of $5,000 each: StraightShot (Kearns High School), adaptive apparel/clothing company to provide ease in accessing areas to administer medications by injection, port, feeding tube or other ways; Colo Clean (Rowland Hall, Park City), an alternative colonoscopy preparation kit; and Puzzle Panel (Academy for Math, Engineering & Science, Salt Lake City), portable solar panels that would eventually be able to be sent to emergency sites and set up very quickly. The $1,000 People’s Choice Award of $1,000 was Health For All (Park City High School), for a line of clothing and accessories that use a type of subwoofer to be used for healing.
• Penelope Lorenzana, with LifeThyme Tool Co., earned first place in the second round of the Sandy Area Chamber of Commerce’s Young Entrepreneurs Academy Shark Tank Investor Panel for the Granite cohort. Thirteen businesses presented plans to a panel of eight judges, with $12,500 disbursed to the winners. Second place went to Graydon Gasik, Flip2o, and finishing third was Louis McCracken, Write Out.
RURAL UTAH
• The Governor’s Office of Economic Development (GOED) board, at its April meeting, endorsed a pair of Rural Fast Track grants. Rollins Construction & Trucking LLC of Beaver was endorsed for a $50,000 grant to help the company buy an excavator. The $285,857 project is expected to result in three new full-time positions. Crockett Gear, based near Tremonton, was endorsed for a $50,000 grant to help the company buy a static table cutting machine. The $150,000 project is expected to result in the creation of at least one full-time position.
SERVICES
• MOJO Marketplace, a Salt Lake City-based Endurance International Group company, has launched a new brand identity in “a move to refine the brand and better align with MOJO's current user base,” the company said. MOJO is also expanding its professional services offerings to include design, development and digital marketing services provided by third-party contributors in response to growing market trends. The company recently relocated from Draper to downtown Salt Lake City. It now has 17,353 square feet of Class A space.
• Stiry, a video storytelling company, has opened a new corporate office at 415 N. Redwood Road, North Salt Lake. The 3,000-square-foot office features an open floor plan to encourage employee collaboration and to accommodate the company’s rapid growth.
TECHNOLOGY/LIFE SCIENCES
• Pluralsight, Farmington, has appointed James Budge as chief financial officer. Budge has more than 20 years of finance and operations experience in technology, cloud and enterprise software. He most recently served as CFO of Anaplan and, prior to that, was CFO and COO at both Genesys and TiVo.