Good morning. This is Michal Lev-Ram, writing from Utah, where Fortune will be holding its Brainstorm Tech conference later this year.
Landing in Salt Lake City early last week was a beautiful sight. A fresh sprinkling of snow made the surrounding Wasatch Mountains appear even more spectacular than usual, their white peaks glistening in the sun. “Before, my largest concern was water,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox told me during a sit-down interview later in the week. “But we’ve gotten so much snow.” The Governor’s new concern? Population growth has been on a tear in the Beehive State—partly the result of an influx of pandemic-era tech transplants—and so, in turn, has the cost of living.
I met Gov. Cox at X4, the customer conference put on by Utah-based software company Qualtrics, which was attended by about 10,000 people. “I remember trying to recruit to Utah 10 years ago, and it was hard,” Ryan Smith, Qualtrics co-founder and executive chairman, told me. “We used to be scared to relocate people here. We’d, like, make sure their kids were okay at their new school.”
